Home on the Range

01. February 2014 · Comments Off on Home on the Range · Categories: Domestic

A house, as Dave Barry once cogently remarked, is a square hole in the ground, into which you pour money. Well, after all – it is the place that you live in, and which has all your stuff in it. How much one counts on that sort of thing – well, my parents were reminded of that, when their retirement house burned to the ground in 2003, in one of the catastrophic brush fires that Southern California is so famous for. My parents, having a liking for living away out in the country and preferably at the end of at least half a mile of dirt road, were accustomed to the risk and indeed, the possibility. Still, it was a wrench when the house went up in flames. They had half an hour to get out some of the most valuable stuff, but not many other things; Mom’s wedding dress, the family heirloom christening dress, a huge box of photographs that my daughter had intended to sort out, all of Mom and Dad’s books, the motley assortment of Christmas ornaments – to include the Christmas stockings that my grandmother had knitted in wool, with all our names worked into the top – all of the Danish Christmas plates from the AAFES catalog that I had sent Mom over the time I was stationed overseas – the letters that my uncle had written to his family during WWII. All gone – as Mom said, “They burned up real good.” Everything – and I still think about the things lost in the fire, although some of them I did not miss. The Danish Moderne teakwood dining table and chairs, for example – the chairs hit the back of your knee like a karate chop. (Mom bought them for cheap in the early Sixties, and it turned out they were valued at much, much more than what she had paid originally. In that particular case, I’d have rather had the insurance money.)
Whenever the house seems to get too crowded, the bookshelves crammed and overflowing with books and trinkets, and I think about how nice it would be not to have so many things, and to move into a tiny little cottage in the Hill Country … then I remember Mom and Dad and all the precious, accustomed bits and pieces that they had to let go of, all on a Sunday afternoon in the space of an hour.

I could probably do with less – not with fewer books, though. The constant moving at the pleasure of the Air Force did help us by whittling down the extraneous things every three or four years. But I have been in this house now since 1994, and the stuff has been creeping out of the closets and corners – so perhaps it is time for a belated New Years resolution, to sit down and sort out the storages spaces in the house, and purge the things for which we have no present or foreseeable use. The den closet, I am pretty certain, is home to some boxes from the last move which I threw in there when I got tired of unpacking them. We had to get a new washing machine this weekend, which necessitated a good clean-out of the closet where the washer and dryer (and a few other small and relatively little-used appliances) live. Result – A much cleaner closet and a trash can filled with useless stuff – pillows stained beyond all hope of cleaning, a box of the disposable plastic receptacles for the long-gone automatic litter box – which never really worked properly and some other bits and bobs which we steeled ourselves to throw away. It got easier as we got down to the bottom of the cupboard.

So, my daughter and I have gotten ambitious; the pantry cupboard is next. It’s one of those with deep shelves, spaced too far apart, with the result that stuff gets lost in the back and forgotten forever. The plan is to rip out all the wooden shelves and their supports, repair the walls, and put in closely-spaced shallow wire shelves along all three walls, so that it will be easy to see what all we have in there – no need to go in with a rope and a headlamp next time I am looking for a can of tomato sauce.

The Man With a Past

24. January 2014 · Comments Off on The Man With a Past · Categories: Old West · Tags:

It was one of the clichés in the old Wild West – that part of it which featured in dime novels, silent serial movies, Wild West Shows, and television shows – the crooked lawman. It did have some basis in fact, though; the recently established cow-towns and mining towns were tough places. Very often the natural choice for keeping the local bad-hats in some kind of seemly order was to co-opt the biggest, meanest baddest bad-hat of them all to administer order as sheriff. Not infrequently, said bad-hat was also a gambler, owned a saloon or an establishment of negotiable affections, and alternated between managing said establishment or the cards and keeping law and order. Other law officers started off on the side of the angels and went to the bad – such as the sheriff of Bannock, Montana, Henry Plummer, who was hanged by the local Vigilante organization in Virginia City. (The vigilantes were convinced by evidence that he was the head of a gang of road-agents, stock thieves and murderers.) In other words, the path wavering back and forth between the darkness and the light was a pretty well-trodden one, and so was the one-way path from light to darkness. But for one who walked from darkness of a criminal life, into the light of upholding the law – and remained there for most of his life, nothing quite comes close to the life of one particular lawman.

He was born Joseph Horner – although that would not be the name he bore for most of his adult life. The Horner family moved from Virginia after the Civil War, settling in Texas, where young Joseph worked as a cow-hand, with an active hobby in criminal and recreational hell-raising. Eventually he was wanted for cattle-rustling, bank robbery, assault with intent, and public brawling. The confident prediction would have been made that he was well on the way to being hung or shot full of holes, if a stretch in prison didn’t intervene. But somewhere along the way something happened to Joe Horner. He escaped from custody, and vanished from Texas. It seemed that he had vowed to turn his life around. Probably many dangerous and reckless young men in trouble with the law had promised themselves or their loved ones that they would go straight, and some of them actually meant it, and tried to for a time.

Joe Horner actually did go straight: around 1877 he changed his name and went to Wyoming, where he married and became an upright and respectable citizen. Ironically enough, he was twice elected sheriff of Johnson County, and for a time in the early 1890s was the chief detective for the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association. He was involved in the notorious Johnson County war, which seems to have left a bad taste in his mouth. Being in the employ of the Stock Growers’ Association put him on the opposite side from the small ranchers, townsmen and farmers who had been his friends. He moved on – to Oklahoma, where he became a deputy US Marshall, a comrade of the ‘Three Guardsmen – Bill Tilghman, Heck Thomas and Chris Madsen, tangling with the particularly vicious criminals who took refuge in the last of the all-open Wild West. He also went to Alaska, in the Klondike Gold Rush – and there again, became a lawman. When he returned to Oklahoma, after the turn of the century, it was to take up a new office – as Adjutant General for the Oklahoma National Guard, increasingly respected by his colleagues as the years passed.

Sometime around that time, he arranged for a meeting with the then-governor of Texas. He wanted to come clean, about his real name and the criminal he had been, after more than a quarter of a century as a lawman. The governor arranged for a pardon, and although some old friends urged the man who had been Joe Horner to resume his real name, by that time he had spent the larger portion of his life as Frank Canton, a man the very opposite of what he had been when he was Joe Horner.

The Golden Road

19. January 2014 · Comments Off on The Golden Road · Categories: Chapters From the Latest Book, Old West · Tags: , , ,

(All right – here it is, the first chapter of the next book but one – the Gold Rush adventure that I have always wanted to write. This one takes place in between Book One and Book Two of the Adelsverein Trilogy.  Enjoy – I’ll be posting occasional chapters here. )

Chapter 1 – Two Boys

             Spring came to the lowlands around San Antonio de Bexar as it always did – with the springs of clear water flowing clear and ice-cold, with meadows of flowers splashed in swaths of yellow, pink and the deep rich blue of buffalo clover as if a reckless artist had chosen to go mad with the paint. Young Friedrich Steinmetz, whom most everyone called Fredi, had come with his brother-in-law’s herd of cattle and three hired buckaroos to sell in the market-plaza in Bexar. Carl Becker’s ranch spanned a stretch of the hills that defined the valley of the upper Guadalupe, where he had built a tall stone house and brought Fredi’s older sister to it some eight years before. The hill country – ranges of limestone hills quilted with oak trees, formed the wall between the grassy and well-watered lowlands, long-settled by white men and Mexicans, and the Comanche-haunted plains of the Llano country. For more than half his life, it had been home to Fredi and his twin brother Johann. They were alike in form, being wiry of build, hazel-eyed and with light-brown hair, but different in character.  Fredi was the scapegrace, impulsive and bold. Johann was the clever one; this very spring he was to sail away and study medicine in the Old Country, that country where the twins had been born sixteen and a half years before.

“I want to go and see Johann off when the cattle are sold,” Fredi said, that night when they were less than a day’s journey to Bexar. The sun had already faded to a deep apricot blush in the western sky, and the stars to glimmer pale in the sky overhead. The herd was pastured in a meadow on the bank of Salado Creek, running deep and cold at this time of year. The cattle drank from it eagerly, after a warm afternoon of being chivvied across a dry stretch. Fredi’s brother-in-law Carl Becker helped himself to another piece of journey-bread, and answered through a mouthful. “You’re gonna have to travel on your own, then. I can’t stay long enough from the place to see you to Indianola and back an’ I sure as hell can’t pay your way on the stage.”

“That’s what I planned on,” Fredi answered. “An’ … if I run out of money, I’ll work my way back.”

“That’s the ticket,” Carl Becker grinned. He was a big young man, Saxon-fair and soft-spoken, some fifteen years older than Fredi. They spoke together in German, that language which Carl had from his family, who had been settled in America some three generations longer than the Steinmetzes. “But you better get yourself back as soon as you can – I don’t want to explain to Magda and Vati that I’ve let you loose on the world, all on your own.”

“If Johann is old enough to go study medicine in Germany,” Fredi answered. “Then I don’t see how anyone would mind me making my way in the world. You told me that you enlisted in a Ranger company when you were the age I am in now.”

“That was different,” Carl answered, but didn’t offer any explanation as to why that would be. “And if something happens to you, your sister will skin me alive.”

“She’s all taken up with the baby,” Fredi answered, carelessly. “But I won’t see Johann for years and years, Carl – we’re brothers! I want to see him one more time … we can hurrah in Indianola for all the times we won’t be there with each other.” He fixed Carl with pleading eyes. “I promise I’ll come straight back to the ranch.”

“Promises like that are nut-shells, made to be broken,” Carl answered, with a touch of wry cynicism. “You and Johann are as thick as thieves and I always like to think that he keeps you out of trouble … Go and see him away – but if you do get into a ruckus on your own, I promise I will come down and skin you myself. Especially if I have to bail you out of the cabildo.”

“Excellent!” Fredi exclaimed, joyfully relieved. “As soon as you sell the cattle, then – I’ll take the road towards the coast. Johann and Mr. Coreth were to take passage on the steamer to New Orleans in three weeks. I’ll be back well before mid-summer. You can count on me!”

“I can count on you to be a handful – and that’s what worries me,” Carl answered. More »

Off and Away

14. January 2014 · 6 comments · Categories: Book Event, Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

Well, after procrastinating for a good few weeks, scribbling another Lone Star Sons adventure, and playing around with photoshopping a cover for another collection of essays, I got started on The Golden Road – this will be the picaresque California Gold Rush adventure that I always wanted to write. In The Adelsverein Trilogy it was alluded several times that Fredi Steinmetz had gone to California with a herd of cattle …who knew that cattle had been taken over the southern route from Texas to San Diego in the mid-1850s to supply the gold mines? I didn’t, until I read of it in The Trail Drivers of Texas. Anyway, it’s mentioned casually a couple of times that he knocked around the gold mines for a bit and then wandered home again.

So – in keeping with my plan to continue exploring the western Barsetshire, and write the adventures of various minor characters as they star in their own book – this is Fredi’s turn to cut loose. And the venue – California at the heights of the Gold Rush is also a pretty wild and woolly scene, with all kinds of interesting, eccentric, and later-to-become famous characters wandering around … here goes. It is in my grand plan to make this my book for November, 2015. It seems to take me about two years to research and write (sometimes simultaneously, as I have a wonderful idea for a plot twist, and then have to hurry to the reference materials to see if that twist is even historically possible.)

I wrote the first draft of To Truckee’s Trail in a white-hot blaze of energy over the space of three months – but then, that was a book that I had been thinking about for years, and limited as to space and time. The Trilogy did take only two years – but that was essentially one humongous story, later sliced into three helpings. The other books – all seemed to fall together at one or two years, from start to final edit, even when I was working on some of them simultaneously. There are authors who can spin out a book a year, but … those always seemed to me to be a bit mechanical, and the books produced were nothing that any but the most devoted fans could fall upon with happy cries of joy. The authors who take two years, or even three years – well, the work is most usually worth the wait. And yes, this schedule has been kicked around in writer discussion groups for as long as I have been paying attention to them. So – herewith begins the new adventure – and I will, as usual, post the occasional sample chapter, as they are written.

Hurray for Hollywierd!

13. January 2014 · Comments Off on Hurray for Hollywierd! · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings · Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

One of the underappreciated sidelights of having grown up in Southern California was seeing bits and pieces of it masquerading (sometimes quite unconvincingly) as someplace else on TV. You may know, for instance, that all those times on the original Star Trek that Kirk and Spock set down on a planet where they actually went out to a real non-studio set location, it always seemed to be an area north of the San Fernando Valley called Vasquez Rocks. The area is distinguished by all the rocks being round, from the largest boulders down to the tiniest pebble, which makes the place look quite weird and unearthly… but embarrassingly distinctive. If the location sports scrubby chaparral and all round rocks, they’ve been out to Vasquez Rocks again, no matter what the show is and what the plot calls for.

I don’t know how many times I saw the same stand of papyrus swamp at the County Arboretum standing in for some Third World pretense of a nation on Mission Impossible, which along with Fantasy Island always made good use of that ornate little white cottage with the porches all the way around. It’s the guest cottage on the old Lucky Baldwin estate, and I don’t care how big you think it looks on TV, it actually is only about the size of a two car garage, and has only four teensy bedrooms.

Other fortuitous spottings included seeing the Oviatt Library, on the campus of Cal State Northridge (a facility in which I practically lived for two years) masquerading as a Cylon installation on the original Battlestar Galactica. The Fine Arts facilities at Cal State Northridge also doubled regularly on Medical Center as (wait for it) a medical center. Stumbling over a production crew doing exterior shots was just one of the advantages of an education there. I also once spotted a corner of Foothill and Commerce in Tujunga pretending to be some little town out in the sticks in Lou Grant, and recognized it only because it was close to my bus stop. And when the 210 Freeway was being built in sections, a particular  two or three mile stretch of it through La Crescenta and Tujunga was about the last to link up with the other stretches. This made it a popular venue for chase scenes, especially for CHIPS, the notorious Erik Estrada vehicle. They would film a hell-for-leather car chase up one side of that stretch…. and in mid-chase, suddenly be going hell-for-leather in the other direction.

There were a lot of car chases inexplicably changing directions; I recall another one along Roscoe in Sun Valley, which spun into the parking lot of a large Hispanic grocery store, and went back the way it came. If you’re blocking off a goodly length of street, it only makes sense to use both sides of it, but it still gave fits of the giggles to people who knew the area. The rattle-snake ridden cottage where JP and I lived as small children was once used for a week as a location set, to the great amusement of my parents. So far out in the hills, and isolated from other houses, it made a perfect hideaway for an escaping gunman on the old Highway Patrol series… and the leftovers from the generous catered meals on the set augmented the food budget rather nicely, as Dad was in graduate school at the time. Mom and Dad said for years afterwards that the sheer amusement value of watching Broderick Crawford’s male nurse keeping him away from the alcohol more than made up for the inconvenience of lights and cameras, and having to keep quiet and out of the way.

When I began to travel, I became even more sadly aware of just how much the usual locations didn’t look anything like the places they were supposed to be: Korean hills, for instance, were jagged and steep, and bright green in summer, not rounded and dull green, as they appeared on MASH. Spotting a eucalyptus tree in what was supposed to be the Normandy countryside wrecked otherwise carefully constructed believability, just like seeing California live oak trees in the alleged mid-West. Southern California could pass convincingly as the Mediterranean, though —  given the right sort of background architecture. Greece, Southern Italy, Southern France, and Spain any place where olive trees and oleanders thrive could be duplicated in So-Cal. Provence and the Pellopponese felt halfway familiar to me on that basis; that and the propensity for brush fires.

Eventually TV producers tried harder (either that or to save money) when it came to locations. They might not have gone all the way to Alaska to do Northern Exposure, but at least they went farther than the San Fernando Valley. Audiences may be savvier, too; I am sure lots of other people recognize Vasquez Rocks, too. But there is still the thrill of recognizing a location when watching a vintage television show … most especially when it was supposed to be someplace else.

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