This gulf oil spill has been more traumatic than I thought, but I’m a Cajun. I love clear blue skies, fertile productive soil, and pure seas full of God’s unsullied bounty. I even love the challenge of a gathering hurricane, the test of ingenuity and resolve it carries in wind and fury. They’re all essential in my life…part of my being, really. Somehow, my lady knew it from the beginning and tried to shield me, a little desperately as the news got steadily worse. I love her for that…even though she failed.
She knows I can’t escape the world I was born into…except in my mind. When I’m troubled like this, I tend to look for happier places, and sometimes I find them in the past. The other night while I watched it on TV for the hundredth time, I found myself unconsciously clicking my reading light on and off. When it was on I was bathed in Edison’s garish light, but when it was off…when it was off, I sat there wishing there were candles, maybe lanterns in the room, friendlier light…like our ancestors had.
Looking to forebears can be tricky. Some of them did horrific things…but not mine. Not one of my ancestors exploited the land, stole from people…or owned slaves. After they were kicked out of Nova Scotia, they mostly worked their asses off right next to those pitiable Africans, only a hair’s breadth away from their lot. It was only by luck and God’s good grace that they weren’t whipped back to their quarters at night…and they knew it.
Cajuns are a friendly lot, even to black slaves, and they shared things, mostly recipes…for gumbo, grilled ribs, backbone stew…all the stuff massa wouldn’t eat…and most importantly perhaps, the secret of slow cooking on a dying fire. In the morning before leaving for the fields, they all lit roaring fires and put everything they needed into a covered pot, leaving it enveloped in flame. When they returned after a day’s drudgery, the food was cooked and waiting for them…and it was delicious. I know; I’ve done it that way.
Once when we were camping, I was preparing to cook a gumbo when a history professor wandered by and told me that story. It seems historians are everywhere…it’s weird…but it happens. He almost begged me to try it, but at first I considered the whole idea a little too off-the-wall. Still, he was so impassioned I thought I’d at least give it a try one time…and by far, it was the best gumbo I’ve ever eaten. Build a big fire, throw everything you need into a covered pot, put it on the blaze, and forget about it until the fire is only ashes. It’s amazing!
Like the charm of candlelight, that technique has been lost in history…like a lot of things, I suspect, but candlelight brings up a good question. What the hell do we want to see with such clarity after the sun goes down? That part of the day is for peace, and it should be a little indistinct, shadowy….and beautiful. Work is done, and sleep will come soon enough. Evening is for good food, relaxation and intimacy…and nothing says intimacy quite like firelight.
I’m a romatic at heart. I know that…hell, EVERYBODY who knows me knows that. They know I’d prefer to live in soft light, gentle company, peace, and a kinder world with my lady next to me and my dog at my feet. The question stuck in my mind is why we had to get rid of EVERYTHING after that horrible war, necessary though it was. Even bad people sometimes have good ideas. Maybe we should learn from them…while winnowing out the nightmare they clung to so tenaciously.
We gotta think of something; we’ll be running out of oil soon enough…and we’ve all seen the damage it can do. Nuclear power? France likes it, and it sounds good at first…but what do we do with all those radioactive leftovers? They’ll be lethal for hundreds of thousands of years, and they’ll accumulate a lot faster if we abandon oil…as perhaps we should. We could always bury it, I guess, but stuff we plant in Mother Earth has a funny way of popping back up to bite us in the ass.
If you really want to see things so precisely at night, if you insist on MURDERING the delight of evening, I vote for solar power, maybe with water-driven generators augmenting it. They’re free and clean, and the planet is overflowing with sunlight and liquid water. Actually, having watched waves crashing in many times, I’ve always wondered why we haven’t worked harder to harness the power of the open sea. It’s free, too…and clean until recently.
Huge banks of silicon cells might screw up the view in places. Those people in California won’t like it…you know how they are, but I suppose we could hide them if we were really serious. I’ll leave those decisions to people who think they know better than the rest of us…while I dream of soft nights, gentle breezes, good suppers, comfortable fatigue, feather beds, and those I love lying next to me in the dark. My requirements for happiness aren’t complex, or even difficult to achieve, but they always include love, warmth, shadows, and candles. I can’t help it…there’s just something wonderful about candlelight.

The gusher in the gulf has been stopped, but it doesn’t feel like it around here…or on the beaches of the gulf coast. People are avoiding our seafood and refusing to swim in the surf, and I understand. I’m not eating seafood either…even though I love it. Actually, I’m lucky in a way because I’m allergic to shrimp…and calamari, but I can devour crabs and oysters in complete safety.
Think about it for a second. What I can eat are BOTTOM DWELLERS…living way down there where all the oil is settling. Louisiana oysters are particularly wonderful, but they’re filter-feeders, and they’re immobile, unable to escape. They stay alive by taking in everything floating by, including microscopic oil droplets and whatever toxic chemicals were in all those tons of dispersant they used when they bombed the gulf. It was bad enough when we had to worry about viruses, but this…this is an abomination.
Crabs live down there, too, luscious, fat, delicious blue-point crabs. They’re scurrying around in the muck, and at least in their case, it isn’t theoretical any more. Crab larvae have already been shown to be attached to microscopic oil droplets. True, they’re little bitty droplets, but we have no idea what harm they might cause, even in those tiny amounts…not to mention stuff you can’t see, potentially dangerous stuff like those chemicals.
A few years back, there was a lot of concern about toxic bacteria and viruses in the oyster population. One guy, a really prominent, media-savvy guy, decided to PROVE oysters were safe to eat, and he ate several dozen, raw on the half shell. He died about a week later. The ever-spinning media machine kept saying there were other reasons for it, but we knew. Those oysters had killed him.
Nobody ate raw oysters for a long time after that. I still don’t…well, that isn’t completely true. About a year ago, my lady and I were at a seafood restaurant, and at the table next to us diners were noisily and enthusiastically enjoying platters of raw oysters. You gotta understand…I LOVE raw oysters…with a little hot sauce, horseradish, and a drop or two of ketchup. I ate a dozen.
They were wonderful, just like the oysters I enjoyed out in the gulf when I was a boy, sweet, salty, and delicious…eaten with bland crackers not to blunt their taste. That meal awakened long dormant memories for me, and the next week when my lady suggested we dine out again, I knew where I wanted to go…back to those raw oysters. When the waitress came, I ordered them, but she answered, “I’m sorry. We can’t serve them any more. Last week, they made a lot of people sick.”
Last week? LAST WEEK? I was THERE last week…and ate raw oysters! Great God, I had dodged a bullet I didn’t even know was looking for me! Since then, I’ve only eaten cooked oysters…and I even worry about those a little. Things are changing so fast I can’t help it, and I sure as hell don’t blame the rest of the country for worrying at this particular point in time.
Oysters and crabs remain fairly localized, but fish and shrimp go all over the place. They can be swimming through oil one day and in clear, unpolluted water the next. The only way to be completely sure they’re uncontaminated is to test each and every one…and there are millions of them. It’s impossible. The only way around it is to argue that the oil is all gone, and that’s why there’s such a big argument between academics and politicians. Professors tell us there’s a lot of oil still in the gulf, as much as seventy-five percent, but our elected officials tell us it’s all gone…magically, like a miracle.
It’s interesting, even kind of amusing in a macabre sort of way, to watch government people on TV assure us everything’s SAFE. Really? What crystal ball did they get that from? That guy who ate those raw oysters thought so, too, but we’ve learned to be a bit more cautious. You can’t believe everything you hear…especially from government people. I mean, what does a death or two mean to them? It’s collateral damage; they’re trying to kick-start an economy, and while I appreciate it, I wonder about their judgment.
Maybe there’s no judgment involved. Maybe it’s all SPIN, and that’s the painful crux of it all. WHO’S TELLING US THE TRUTH? To me it seems like it’s nobody, and I think a lot of people are beginning to feel the same. We aren’t blaming you, guys; we just want an honest answer, but we’re beginning to understand we won’t get anything even close from carefully parsed, precisely worded statements…mostly designed to protect politicians in their next election.
Truth is a funny thing…IT’S REAL. You can lie if you like, but if you buck truth, it will come back and bite you in the ass…like I said, it’s unusual. That’s something I don’t think politicians will ever learn…but the rest of us live by it. You guys in Washington and Baton Rouge may spin it, distort it, even try to dispel it, but if you only said it like it is, we’d respect you. You might lose an election now and then, but we’d RESPECT you!
Respect? What the hell am I thinking? They don’t want respect…they want POWER. We’re screwed.

It’s sad and incredibly discouraging, but a lot of authors don’t achieve recognition until they’re cold stone dead. Take Jane Austen for example. She worked her ass off on her stuff to very little acclaim, but now that she’s dead, she’s highly respected…and I agree; her work is wonderful. It seems Emma Thompson does, too. I can’t wait to see how she interprets the next Austen novel they make into a movie. Maybe someday she’ll play Jane herself, but they’re going to have to jazz her life up a little to make it intesting.
Emily Dickinson is another one, but I can’t decide whether she saw through the bullshit from the start or was just being a New England lady who was proper for the time. Like Jane, her life was kind of dull, one of unrelenting sameness it seems, but there was fire inside, a soul screaming to escape. Her poetry smolders with it, even when she writes about the most mundane and commonplace things imaginable. Emily is one of my favorites, suffering in rhyme and beauty.
We writers are like ants at a picnic, uninvited, intrusive, often resented, and best squashed when discovered. People know ants don’t really matter all that much, and they seem to feel about the same when it comes to authors. They don’t usually kill them. They let them wither on the vine, relinquishing all judgment until history…or critics, those awful people…decide which ant was worthwhile and which was only an ant.
I’m not a patient soul like Jane and Emily…or even ants, but there is urgency in what I’ve been writing about…and endlessly talking and blogging about. It’s happening RIGHT NOW…and right here. I wonder how long it will take before people realize things are changing…in a lot of ways…and mostly for the worst. One cold winter does not erase the possibility of a dangerously warming world. Look at the average temperatures for the past few months and tell me honestly it hasn’t crossed your mind once or twice. Walk outside and tell me everything’s like it always has been…I dare you.
Jules Verne would tell you to pay attention. Attuned to what was going on in his world, like I try to be, he turned out to be prophetic. Like Jules, I don’t enjoy writing about the unimaginably distant future, even though I did that…a little…in Kukulkan, the sequel to Dawn on Earth. I had to; one guy lived a thousand years, but as a writer, I much prefer the dramatic possibilities imbedded in looking back from the near future to the recent past…to what’s happening now…with regret.
Old Jules knew the future was hopelessly vague, unpredictable, and not a little scary, but he dared to take a shot anyway. I know, I know…he made a couple of dumb guesses, but we writers forgive him. Maybe an agent was pressing him a little too much, or more likely, maybe he was frustrated and pushed a bit too hard trying to get attention. A writer, any writer, has to do everything he can to get his ideas out…even Jules. We ants understand that sort of thing all too well.
He will remain my guidestar, Jules…whatever happens. For me, things set in the unimaginably distant future are impossibly unrealistic. Who knows what our world will be like millenia from now? Not me, for sure. When I try to go too far into the future, I usually find myself describing a beautiful watery planet, lush with vegetation and myriads of new creatures…but no people. I try to keep the vision of Earth as a dead, dry world like Venus away from my thoughts, but sometimes that creeps in, too.
How about that, Jules? Pretty heavy, huh? I know you lived in a different time, one we now consider naively simple, but you did your best to tell the future it wasn’t really like that. Deep down, I hope you understand what I’m trying to say…and maybe approve. I like to think you do, but we’ll never know, will we? You’re dead, too…like all those other important writers. Sometimes, it’s kind of hard to play the hand you’ve been dealt, but what else can a body do?
Jules, someday I hope to meet you, and I’ll show you all the respect and admiration I can muster…if that’s possible where you are. Maybe Jane and Emily will come by in the afternoon…if there are afternoons wherever you are. People from their era were like that….I expect they still are. I’d love it…and pay them the homage they’ve earned, too, but in the end, more than any of you could possibly imagine, I hope you’d be welcoming to the latest, tiredest, most frustrated ant you’ve ever met.

Dawn on Indian Creek Lake

I fell in love with astronomy when I was only a kid, about ten or eleven I think, and I saved my money from odd jobs until I had enough to buy a five-inch reflector telescope. It wasn’t much by modern standards, with a brittle bakelite body and a small starfinder scope that never really worked, but I loved it…and the hours of enjoyment it provided. Because I never had enough money to buy a sidereal mount, I had to search for stellar objects in an enlarging spiral then try to track them while they tried equally hard to glide away from my telescope’s little mirror.
I remember so many nights up there on an unused outdoor stairway, the highest place I could find, breathlessly discovering, endlessly asking myself questions I’ve carried with me ever since. I remember the first time I saw the Andromeda Galaxy…billions of stars, and not all that far away, but when I turned the telescope to a field of galaxies, I was stunned. There were billions of those, too! That’s heavy stuff for an eleven-year-old.
One night, a friend joined me at the top of the stairs. He seemed really interested, and while I was trying to find something to show him, the sky suddenly glowed brilliant bluish-white. I even heard a sizzling sound coming from above. “It’s a nuclear attack!” he yelled. “No! It’s a meteor…a HUGE METEOR!” I answered. We watched it streak across the sky, finally breaking up and tumbling as glowing orange embers into the gulf far to the south.
Living in town, constantly fighting unwanted light, I tried hard to get into the darkest corners I could find, but there was always a sort of fuzzy haze in the air. It made the soft glow of the Milky Way majestic and friendly, but once when I was visiting in rural Texas, it showed a very different side. On an exceptionally clear, moonless night, I went outside to see my old friend and was startled by what I saw. The Milky Way seemed closer there, almost threatening.
I could see brilliant stars, but instead of soft, bright clouds, hard-edged masses…millions of small points of light. It seemed as if my hand would be burned by nuclear furnaces if I reached up even a few feet, poised as the sky was that night, ready to crash down and envelop me. It was too immediate, too detailed…too immense. I was seeing it the way the ancients had, and it was a little scary…small wonder they found gods clothed in those masses of dust, gas, and unchanging light.
In that moment of epiphany I learned our real address, not on Earth but in the company of stars…near the edge of a gigantic galaxy. A lovely place to be, it allows us to see almost the entire sweep we’re part of, even if it is a little lonely. Closer in, say where the stars are tightly clustered together, we’d have a better chance of discovering we’re not alone, but we’d lose a lot, like the beauty of the Milky Way as we see it and our black nights…not to mention the fact that we’d be a lot closer to an immense black hole.
The one celestial phenomenon I could never spot was a comet. I poured over pictures and drawings of them, with their fuzzy, bright tails, some visible across the entire night sky, but I wanted to see the real thing. Sometimes, comets were described on the news, but I could never find them. I went to the darkest places I knew, but they were never far enough from security lighting and street lamps. It turned out comets were kind of hard to see in the modern world…but then Hale-Bopp came along.
I went camping just to see it…and took my canoe. For a week, every night I slid into Indian Creek Lake and paddled out to the middle to see the marvel in the western sky, photographing it, contemplating, trying to imagine myself in space only a few thousand miles from it. I thought it was pretty, but I wasn’t as impressed as I expected…I guess that humongus meteor had jaded me a little. A fuzzy glowing object in almost the same place night after night was no match for the sizzling, massively glowing, beastly thing my friend thought was a Russian attack.
These days I don’t do as much stargazing. I’ve seen just about everything any telescope I could afford would show, and now we have the West Nile Virus to worry about. I tried once, smothered in repellent, but mosquitoes joyfully attacked me in droves. I kept waiting for the headache and blurred vision, but they never came. Now, I only pop out on clear, moonless winter nights. If I’m lucky, I see the Milky Way almost like I did that night in Texas, and once again its power, extent, and immediacy comes flooding to me in an uneasy tingle.
It’s almost pointless to argue where it all came from. Either way, you come up with an imponderable. If God made it, He is eternal, without beginning or end, as described in the Bible, but we can’t understand that. If He didn’t, it has always been, maybe contracting periodically and Big Banging out again, but eternal. We can’t understand that either. Of course, there’s always the possibility that everything we see and know came into existence out of nothing…with no causal event. Some people actually say that, but to me at least, that one is too silly to try and understand.
As regular readers probably know…or anyone who’s read my book, I vote for God, but I realize every person has to work it out for himself…and in the end, I’ve come to think understanding isn’t really important. Maybe our confusion should only bring us closer to our ancient brothers who studied the night sky…a little fearfully, I suspect, and tried their best to make sense of it just like us, and I hope the gods they saw up there gave them comfort.
Maybe we’re only supposed to look in awe, feel wonder and a little discomfort about how tiny and insignificant we really are. Flying around on a watery rock tethered to a dim yellow star, the middle-aged son of an ancient supernova, and out almost at the end of one arm of a massive, starry spiral, we gain perspective only when we look into the night sky…and if you do it right, it’s astonishing. I’m not eleven any more and not nearly as innocent, but it doesn’t matter. I still feel the tingle…I think I always will.

The Temple of the Inscriptions

The History Channel got my attention this week, running almost constant stories about ancient alien astronauts…a lot of it centered on the Mayan culture. How could I NOT be attracted to aliens, ancient space travel, and the Maya? In earlier days, I spent a lot of time hiking through ruins and hacking through jungles while dodging snakes…and monkeys. Actually, monkeys are worse than snakes in a way. If you make one of them mad, they ALL gather above and urinate on you. NOBODY messes with monkeys.
I even visited Palenque, an impressive and beautifully restored Mayan site situated at the base of a small mountain with temples peeking through foliage almost all the way to the top…except for one spot. About halfway up, one of them was truncated, only a flat platform. When I asked my guide, an archaeology student from Mexico City, why he thought they had left it that way, he answered very softly, almost whispering, “That’s where they landed.”
When I asked him what the hell he meant, he told me about a man who was exploring the ruins at the time. He usually met with the guides at night and told them stories about ancient astronauts, aliens visiting the area in space craft. Now…this was the first time I had ever heard such stories, and Palenque is way out in the middle of jungle and nowhere, a perfect spot for nuts and screwballs to accumulate.

Small Temples at Palenque

A little wild, the settlement is tiny, mostly populated by indians and occasional TV crews and archaeologists. The two-room hotel’s phone number was three, and when I asked my guide who were one and two, he said the mayor was two but the one guy had died. In a place like that I wasn’t about to get dragged into a conversation with somebody who saw aliens visiting that isolated spot, so I told him it was complete nonsense and he should stop listening to that guy, whoever he was.
He took that kind of badly and was clearly upset when we went to see Pacal’s tomb in the base of the Temple of the Inscriptions. Actually, it was just below ground level, but to get to it you had to climb all the way up the damned thing then back down on a dark, dank, slippery stairway…with a flashlight. When we got to the tomb, he instructed me to shine my light with his on the tomb cover…and there it was, a carving of an ancient astronaut.
There’s no other way to describe it. Seated in a capsule with all sorts of knobs and instruments around him, a typical Mayan figure was moving something with his hand, one foot on some sort of pedal. There were even flames coming out of the back of the vehicle…completely different from all the other Mayan carvings I had ever seen, completely strange and very unsettling.
Two other events at Palenque are lodged in my memory. One was personal, but it’s one of my favorite stories. After we had hiked around for a couple of hours, much of it up the mountainside, I was beginning to suffer from the heat and oppressive humidity. The guide took me to a large, raised bowl-like pool at the base of the mountain and told me it was the queen’s bath, cooled by a waterfall and wonderfully clear and pure…most likely snowmelt from peaks in the distance.
When he told me I should have a swim, I told him I hadn’t brought a swimsuit, but he assured me the only people likely to be around were Mayan indians and they ran around nearly naked most of the time anyway. They wouldn’t mind…so I stripped and climbed in. He told me I should join him at the main camp when I had cooled off…and the pool was wonderful, about twenty feet across, a good five feet deep at the center, and overflowing with refreshingly cool water raining in above.
I was having a spectacular time when I heard a voice from the jungle. “Excuse me, young man, do you speak English?” I had been discovered by five ladies from the Southern Baptist Convention…viewing ruins after visiting missionaries. Somehow, they’d been separated from their guide and were quite lost. “Hang on, Ladies, I can help you, but you gotta go back in the jungle a little way for a minute or two.”
I could hear their conversation while I dressed. “Emma, he was NAKED!” “I know, Bess, but he’s all we have. We’re LOST! Just stick close together.” I took them to the main camp and found their lost guide while the church ladies shuffled in a tight, pastel little circle far behind…constantly keeping their eyes on me. At camp they were given water and some food, which they relished…but they stayed as far away from me as possible. The whole episode amused my guide no end.
He kept giggling when I joined him for further exploration of those magnificent ruins, and toward evening, a man up on a temple platform waved to us. “That’s him!” he said, “the guy I was telling you about. I told him what you said and he wants to meet you.” By that time, I wasn’t interested in further adventure. I was tired and the church ladies already thought I was crazy. Talking to that nut would only prove it, so I said no.
Despite my feelings about ancient astronauts, my guide and I parted friends. I never saw him again, but I DID see that other guy one day…actually, not the guy himself but a life-size cardboard cutout. I was walking past a bookstore on Canal Street in New Orleans and there he was, Erich Von Daniken, the author Chariots of the Gods. I had actually SNUBBED the famous writer…and he wasn’t a nut. He was crazy like a fox…and very successful.
Of course, I bought his book; I kind of had to, but it took me a long time to change my way of thinking. These days I find I agree with much more than I did that day in the ruins when I first heard his ideas. Maybe that WAS a landing platform and aliens HAD visited Palenque in the ancient past. Maybe they even swam in that wonderful pool. I’m writing my own books now…and keeping an open mind; I have to. Too much has happened to me since then…and there’s still that tomb cover I can’t explain away.

I watched the evening news tonight: drenching rains, failing dams, floods, scorching heat advisories in umpteen states, a fizzled tropical storm with another one in the wings, and the hottest June and July in history. Almost the entire country has had some sort of disturbing problem lately…amazing stuff…and all weather-related.
You think something’s going on? I do. When you live in the crosshairs like we do, you tend to be more sensitive to changing weather patterns, and we’ve been diligent, checking out our supply of batteries, disaster food–both human and canine, drinking water containers, storm lamps, battery-powered fans, and dynamo-capable radios. Everything’s ready.
We’re used to it, but yesterday when I went to the supermarket to buy a turkey breast, I ran into a woman puffing behind a cart piled about a foot over the brim. “There’s a hurricane coming,” she declared breathlessly. A newbie! I didn’t have the heart to tell her Bonnie had died an unlamented death…and anyway, the stuff she was hauling around would be completely useless when her power went. Almost all of it would spoil.
I bet she doesn’t even have a generator…or a camp stove, probably doesn’t even know what they are. Camp stoves are neat little gadgets you use when nothing in your kitchen works. Our house has a gas stove; usually we can heat things up after a storm, but she looked like the all-electric-kitchen type to me. I bet she hasn’t even had her trees trimmed. Anyway, hysteria seems like more fun than preparing…at least to her.
Another newbie down the street had all his trees cut down, not trimmed, CUT DOWN…every last one! He had a lovely home on a beautifully shaded lot, but now it looks kind of sad…and very naked. He’s going to doubt his wisdom on those scorching August days when you can fry an egg on the sidewalk and his air conditioning is running full blast 24-7. I can just see the little pointers on his electric meter spinning.
They’ll learn pretty quickly, because we’re going to have a lot more storms and hot weather…and it’s going to get worse. Global temperature has risen eight-tenths of one degree and already things are changing dramatically. I understand a rise of two degrees would result in world-wide disaster, with horrific, sea-spawned weather roaring inland and rising water reclaming costal land…but some people are in for a HUGE surprise.
A lot of people who don’t consider themselves costal really are…like New York City. It pumps millions of gallons of seeping water out of its subways every day, and few there realize how easily the system could be overwhelmed. I hope they’ve bought their own camp stoves and a lot of dehydrated meals because they’re gonna need ‘em! EVERYTHING’S underground up there, sewer systems, fresh water, electricity, communication, transportation…you name it.
Lafayette’s high. When most of south Louisiana flooded in 1927, we were a refugee center, and I think we’d make a creditable seaside town. Cajuns are cagey opportunists…we’ve had to be, and I can see sand trucked in, beach cabanas dotting the shoreline, and little huts selling boudin, dirty rice, and crawfish etouffee in the shadow of spiffy new resort hotels.
By my GPS estimate, our house should be pretty close to the beach, and I’ll be able to take my dog for a walk in the surf. I know Angel. She’ll be zooming around, romping, barking, and snapping at incoming waves, but I’ll have to teach her to avoid the messy oil globs. It will be wonderful…but only for a while. Dogs don’t live very long compared to humans; Angel probably won’t be here, but I can see a day when even my lady and I have to pack up and head north.
They say if you put a frog into hot water, it’ll jump out quickly, but if you put it into cool water and slowly raise the temperature, it’ll stay there until it boils to death. Human beings are a lot like that. We respond almost instantly to sudden crises but let slowly developing ones slide right past us. Our instinctive response to sudden threat is chemical, adrenaline-based, but we have only our brains to protect us from creeping danger.

Beautiful Earth

It’s hot as hell out there. Everybody I know is calling it the hottest July in history, and you can just bet August and September are going to top the charts, too. People on TV keep saying el nino kicked the jet stream north, but that tells us what’s going on, not why. They bend over backwards saying it’s not a big deal, but I think they know.
Either something new is happening or it’s not. I like binary decision trees, and I gotta tell you…on this one I’m on the something new side. A couple of years ago, I stacked a cord for the fireplace, but it rotted away unused. Now, I buy four or five logs at a time. That’s plenty, because the next day it’s usually too hot. Once I even went water skiing on Christmas afternoon, great fun, but the sun was merciless. Still, the water was nice and cool.
I’m sorry. I know it’s unpopular, but I’m going to risk it. A lot of people don’t even think it exists, but I chalk all this up to global warming. I used it in my novel, Dawn on Earth, the effect of rising world temperatures on our lives. Days were consistently in the mid ninties, but that wasn’t what made my characters miserable. It never really cooled off, even at night…sounds a lot like what’s been going on around here.
Of course, I had to write in a little conflict. Some people, the ELITE, were comfortably air-conditioned and avoided going outside as a life’s mantra, but you know me. I was all wrapped up in what was happening to the non-elite…the rest of us, and it was devastating to take my reasoning out that far.
With the entire planet challenged by something nobody could really control, I thought we’d probably unite as a single government, and in my novel it worked, providing everyone water and some sort of food, though it was usually only grain. I know, I know…maybe I was overly optomistic, considering how pitifully governments respond these days, but that’s the way I wrote it. It’s FICTION, for God’s sake!
The fun part of letting my imagination roam was describing topographic changes in my hot new world. Of course, sea levels rose tremendously, forcing people to migrate ever farther inland, but rising waters also restored the ancient, shallow sea over what is now the great plains, greatly reducing our food larder. It wasn’t hard to imagine; I was describing the world of the dinosaurs…almost exactly.
Global warming is peculiar territory. Costal storms become more severe, weather inland ferociously erratic, and some places actually get cold, but in the end relentless heat wins…a little like what happened on Venus. It began a lot like Earth, but a runaway greenhouse effect took it all the way to a surface temperature of eight hundred degrees. Water has boiled away completely, and the carbon dioxide atmosphere is heavy enough to crush a human being like a slug.
The arrow points only one way. Polar caps melt, reflecting less heat, fresh water dilutes the sea, killing well-established dynamic currents, and from that point on, everything accellerates. You know, we could be on the first step of a long slide. Nobody has said the words RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EFFECT yet, but it happened on Venus. Why not here?
Look up at the evening star. It’s beautiful in the growing night, that disaster between us and the sun, but the view from a distance is notoriously deceptive. Some call her our pitiful “Sister Planet,” but I sure hope it doesn’t run in the family, that head-long dash to self-destruction.
Even if it were hell-bent on sharing the fate of its evil twin, our Earth would probably stay beautiful in space for a long time before slowly morphing to a brown and gray thing. Eventually, bright clouds would no longer fill our skies, aggregating instead into a hideous, dirty helmet, but it would still rain…not water, but corrosive acid. Don’t fret; we’d all be dead by then.
Stuff on this subject usually ends saying, “There’s still time,” but I didn’t…too trite and not really my style. I had the naive idea that by showing what could happen, I might change the way people look at things. Truth is, it has…for some, but there’s one significant diffenence they should remember. Venus’ destruction was natural, but what’s happening to us is self-inflicted…kind of a planetary suicide.
In my darker moments, I picture alien archaeologists shuffling around in cooled environmental suits, finding a torn copy of my book that hasn’t burst into flame, and reading it for their report. I can hear one of them saying, “He was right, that poor, dead son-of-a-bitch.” I guess I’ll have to live with that image. I can’t seem to get it out of my mind this summer.

Angel, when she came to us

We live on a wet rock orbiting an aging, yellow star way out on a thin, wispy arm of our galaxy, and even though our planet is positively BULGING with life, we tend to feel lonely when we look at the night sky. Scientists are working tirelessly to find out if we’re really alone, but don’t let that fool you. We’re not; all you have to do is look around.
But I understand what those guys are talking about. The Drake equation assures us there are gobs of planets like ours…well, maybe not EXACTLY like ours…some form of world capable of producing life, but we can’t talk to ooze or slime, or bacteria, or weird other-worldly plants. We need BEINGS, intelligent life forms with feelings and ideas we can share, maybe even discuss.
Some people say we’ve already met them…in a way. Funny-looking things streak through our skies. I know…I’ve seen them, but I haven’t the foggiest what they really are…nobody does. It’s fun to watch stuff on the History Channel, or the Science Channel, or even the SyFy Channel, but they don’t have a clue either.
Let’s see. Some of them think they’re beings from other worlds, but Einstein tells us that’s not likely. Others say they might be us…from the future. Really? Time travel? Hawking seems to think that’s impossible, too. The stolid, clear-thinking group tell us it’s all hallucination…or fanciful witnesses.
Hold it right there, Guys! When I saw whatever they were, I wasn’t under the influence of any mind-altering drug…and I sure as hell didn’t WANT to see them. They scared the crap out of me. At the time, I’d have been far happier if I’d never seen anything like that, but now it’s sort of useful. There’s nothing like incorporating something mysterious, unknown, and completely unexplainable into things you’re writing.
I don’t know what I saw really was, but to tell you the truth, it’s not all that important. Like I said, look around…at things crawling beneath your feet, foraging in forests, soaring through the air, things we take for granted…absolute WONDERS. We have the NOW…and we should make the best of it. The later is for other people.
If we’re wise, we’ll cherish all life. It seems to be pretty rare by cosmologists’ calculations, so welcome dawn when our tired old star comes up, thrill when flights glide below clouds in mid-day air, relish crickets and rain frogs singing in the dark. They’re joyful, noisy, and prolific kinsmen on our ancient, soggy rock…and in our lives.
We live on the thin edge of a cosmic knife, something the dinosaurs leaned the hard way. Out there where we can’t see, gigantic lumps of rock and dirty ice are circling, and eventually, one of them is going to find us. It’s going to be unadulterated hell, but some of us will probably survive…even if most of us don’t. That’s the price of living in an evolving star system, but we’re stuck here. There’s nothing else.
When you look at our big, bright moon, think about it for a second. That’s part of OUR WORLD way up there, so far out it took us thousands of years to visit, the aftermath of a gigantic collision with a rogue planet. That beautiful thing in the night sky is evidence of the most terrifyingly destructive event anyone could possibly imagine.
Then look at what surrounds us down here, trees, flowers, insects, earthworms, fish, cows, snakes, billions of other people…LIFE…everywhere! Birds flock, animals herd, but people think. Don’t let all that thinking get in the way. Even though we live on the sharp edge of a knife, it’s a beautiful edge, a wondrous edge, an edge to savor.
We can’t do anything about whatever the cosmos has planned for us, but we can and should appreciate what we have right here, right now. It waits for us…patiently…until we come to our senses. Do you really think there’s something more wonderful around the bend, something better? How could it possibly top what we already have…and ignore most of the time?
You know, I find that thought immensely comforting, so I think I’m going to take Angel for a walk. We have such a good time sharing the fading brightness, the emerging stars, the birds coming in…the glory of it all. Tail high, running, exploring in the dimming light, sniffing everywhere, coming back to me happy as all getout, she knows the secret. It’s obvious, and we could learn from her. She doesn’t worry about things she can’t control. She just LOVES being alive.

The Second Hole at Girard Park

I play disc golf…OKAY? It’s fun and really good exercise…but for God’s sake, don’t call it FRISBEE GOLF! That’s not cool, and it identifies you as the most hopelessly misinformed person ever. A frisbee is TOY designed to float and be easily…and safely caught. If you try to catch one of our discs, you could lose a finger…maybe two. They have sharp edges and fly like hell at amazing speeds.
We have three beautiful courses in Lafayette, but I most enjoy the one in Girard Park. It’s in the middle of town, beautifully landscaped and challenging, with holes built right into the earthworks dug during the Civil War battle at Vermilionville, Lafayette’s nineteenth century incarnation. They’ve filled in a lot since the 1860’s, but that’s not the point. It’s SAFE…no poison ivy, no poison oak, and most importantly to me, no cottonmouth moccasins.
Discs go everywhere, and sometimes you’d need a herpetologist to retrieve them on the other courses. Girard Park is civilized. We like it that way, even enjoy the walkers huffing along the hiking trail, though sometimes we have to wait before throwing. They wouldn’t appreciate a disc slicing into them, and I bet they have lawyers. A lot of them look like the type.
But remember…they’re discs…not frisbees! I was getting ready to leave one day when a church pastor asked me to show his group how we throw our discs, but when I tried with their frisbees, I couldn’t get them to go anywhere…at least nowhere near the goal. I offered to go and get my REAL discs, but by then they had decided I was incompetent. Just as well.
The principle is the same as what we derisively call “ball golf”, but with some very important differences. For one thing, you use different disks for different shots, driving, approaching, and putting, and some disks tend to veer left, others right, and still others go straight ahead…if you throw them right. Of course, you vary shots in ball golf by using different clubs…but that left/right stuff is impossible.
There are a lot of advantages to disc golf, particularly compared to that other golf people play so intently…no tee times, no memberships, only grassy courses between you and that tiny little basket with its chains…and of course, trees. Our fairways aren’t open like the other golf, and trees seem to grab disks right out of the air. I could have sworn I saw a pecan tree jump to catch mine some time back.
The Professional Disc Golf Asociation…yes, there is one…constantly tells anyone who’ll listen it’s the fastest growing sport in the country, but we never meet a lot of other people playing. Maybe it’s not all that bad, those empty courses. People really should play; it’s fantastic exercise, but if it were more popular, there might actually be tee times, memberships, and all that other crap. When we stand with friends in a morning breeze, throw well, and enjoy the sky and the mossy oaks, we think it’s perfect as it is…but it could still catch on.
No problem…new people tend to think it’s childishly easy…and THAT’S our edge. It isn’t. Most of them give up when they discover just how difficult and technical it really is. The only ones who keep coming back are those willing to make complete fools of themselves, and to tell the truth, it happens to all of us from time to time. We may blame the wind or the air, but the sad fact is…this sport is so damned unpredicatable!
When I first got interested in playing, I went to a course early one morning and asked a group if they’d mind my tagging along. One guy walked up and announced that he didn’t mind at all. He was the Gulf South Champion, had been for three years running, and I watched him wind up and cut loose with what I expected to be a beautiful thing. Instead, it flew about fifteen feet, slammed into a tree dead-on, and bounced back to where he was standing. At that point, I knew…I COULD DO THIS!
There is one mystery about disc golf I’ve yet to unravel…and that’s women players. We men wind up, engage every muscle, grunt, and throw with everything we have, and it generally goes pretty far. Women kind of tiptoe to the tee, straighten their hair, take a half turn, and casually flick the disk out…and it goes a tremendous distance like a bat out of hell. I think it’s something about the way they’re built. They seem to have a lot more momentum when they wheel around, kind of a gyroscopic effect we can’t achieve. It’s humiliating.
There are tournaments and pros in our sport…and yes, women players, more and more lately. Maybe someday there’ll be people all over the course, but right now, it’s really great, standing at the tee on a quiet morning, checking the wind, maybe glancing at that thunderstorm coming in from the south before letting the disc rip. It was a lot like that today.
The good news is the thunderstorm broke up before it reached us…and I finally, FINALLY sank a thirty foot putt. I bet I could have given that champion guy who hit the tree a run for his money this morning, but some other day he might clean my clock. That’s the way it is with disc golf. It’s part of the reason we love it.
You may ask what all this has to do with writing novels…and it’s a fair question. You’d be ASTOUNDED by the stuff I dream up when I’m playing…particularly when I’m losing. If I’m working on a chapter involving somebody really despicable and I’m way behind in the game, he comes to me full-blown, practically writes himself. It’s almost magical. God, I love disc golf!

Stewart Beach, Galveston

Oil has arrived in Galveston, but they said it was only tar washing off skimmer vessels. Come on, Guys, don’t play dumb; haven’t you noticed a pattern? We have. First, tar balls wash in, then a sheen, but that hasn’t been the end of it anywhere. The next thing we’ve seen from here to Florida is huge gobs of sticky orange oil, and we’ve sort of been expecting it in Texas anyway. Ten days ago a friend of mine spotted it off Cheniere Au Tigre, and that’s just a long spitting distance from Galveston.
Talking heads keep saying they’re going to clean it all up, like that’s even REMOTELY possible. Don’t they know that stuff is damned near permanent? I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. Go up to the Valdez spill site and kick over a rock. You’ll see just how easy it is to clean up. Oil floats, but it also descends below the surface, even down to the ocean floor…and it’s thrown every which way by wind and currents. I don’t have the same happy glasses they seem to be wearing. Before it’s done, I think we’re going to find oil EVERYWHERE in the gulf…in the water, on beaches, under rocks, and in costal marshes all the way to Mexico.
Gulf water will stink, and birds will no longer dot the sky looking for bugs or a bread handout from tourists. Nights on shore will be silent, and you’ll choke if you stand in the evening breeze. EXACTLY how much oil did you think the gulf could absorb before it was destoryed? But don’t worry; it’ll be back to normal in a couple of hundred thousand years. Geologically speaking, it’s not all that long, but from our three score and ten perspective, it’s forever.
And a part of me will probably be sad from now on. Galveston! My God, I’ve been going there since I was a little kid! I remember catching an angel fish from a pier one day. Everybody over there was fascinated; they had never seen one caught on a line before. Of course, we let it go…not that good to eat, dad said, but I wanted it to live for another reason. It had fought the good fight, and as a boy, I respected that. It was beautiful…and scrappy, and I loved it…just as much as I’ve always loved Galveston itself.
The water isn’t clear in Galveston, like it is off Florida’s beaches; scores of rivers and the great Mississippi see to that. It’s mostly murky but not so much that you can’t see fish trapped inside incoming waves…and dolphins folicking a few yards behind them where they gave up the chase. I was swimming in Galveston not so long ago when two dolphins rolled up out of the water right next to me. I thought one of them looked pregnant. Some idiot woman screamed SHARKS, and people started scrambling out of the water, but I stayed and savored the majesty of it all.
They seemed to be having fun, chirping and clicking as they swam around me only a few feet away in a playful circle. They knew I wasn’t a threat; they thought I was a friend…and I am. I always will be, but I wish I could click and chirp too…and warn them. They’ve got to find a way to shepherd their child away from the malevolence growing in the gulf…even farther when oil reaches the Caribbean…and it will.
Galveston brings funny memories back into my head. I remember one day my dad decided to ride the roller-coaster across Seawall Boulevard from the beach. He told us to watch carefully because he was going to wave to us from the highest point on the ride, but when he came into view, all we saw was a blanched face and bloodless hands hanging onto the coaster bar for dear life. We teased him for weeks afterward.
Galveston…what else do I think about when I hear that name? The 1900 hurricane for sure, and those nuns roped to children when they were dug out of the sand. They loved those children and proved it…with their lives…and those ropes. My lady’s mother actually grew up in that orphanage twenty-five years after the storm. She always told us how much she loved gulf seafood, but she was lying. She only liked shrimp. You could chase her all the way to Oklahoma with an oyster.
Galveston, wonderful Galveston…we’ve been there so many times, my lady and me…my dog Angel, too. We always stayed in the same apartment, just off the beach with a clear view of the surf and a constant, salty breeze. The ocean’s roar lulled us to sleep at night while the smell of the sea blew in through open windows. It was wonderful. Even Angel seemed to think so, but she’s not very picky. She’s happy when we’re happy.
Soon, it might only be a memory…like New Orleans, but Galveston’s tough. While it’s weathered many a storm before, I’m afraid it could lose this particular battle, and I wouldn’t want to go back only to smell oil on that wind sweeping in off the water. I prefer memories, but even they are getting dim. Since this began, I’ve had to learn to compartmentalize some of my memories…hide them down deep where they’re not likely to jump out and remind me what’s been lost, but I find myself having to bury more and more of my past every day.
It’s incredibly sad…upheaval, geologic change on this scale, the death of an ocean that has afforded me and my family so much joy. I guess that’s what monumental really means, what irretrievable loss really feels like. My father’s roller-coaster disappeared long ago, and my life seems intent on following it lately. I know he’d have some wisdom to share, find some way to make sense out of it, but he’s gone, too. Dad, I hope you can’t see this up there wherever you are. I know it would hurt you almost as much as it’s hurting me right now.