Readers are beginning to have questions and comments about the novel...

I should have done this a long time ago but today I created an author page on Book Bub under Michael T Shay. The road to writing and editing a book ends with a book that needs readers, surprisingly enough. I thought my blog and in-person marketing would be sufficient. But it's not. While I get the new site up and running, please feel free to ask any questions or make any comments about "Zeppelins Over Denver" here. I can answer your questions on this public forum or via e-mail or by letter. Please ask me to respond via letter! I am a lifelong writer of letters and receive so few these days. Many circulars about metal roofs and new-car sales and restaurant openings. But few letters. Thrill me!

So what does a novel set in 1919 Colorado have to do with the Detroit of the 1960s?

My historical novel, Zeppelins Over Denver, was released in early May by The Ridgeway Press in Michigan, Detroit to be exact.

The novel, set in the Colorado of 1919, doesn’t have much to do with either Detroit or Michigan, but its life has a lot to do with a couple of determined Detroiters. It’s the press co-founded by M.L. Liebler, a poet and author whose resume is about five miles long. As he writes about in Hound Dog: A Poet’s Memoir or Rock, Revolution, and Redemption (Cornerstone Press), he’s a Detroit native, a resident of St. Clair Shores his entire life. He was there to experienced the rise of Motown and the Detroit rock scene that flourished in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond.

He pursued an advanced degree with the vigor he brought to music and poetry. His title at Wayne State University is professor of English and Labor Studies, a one-two punch that shouts Detroit. It has been my good fortune to work with M.L. in the literary arts world, mostly through the YMCA Writers Voice Project. It was launched from New York’s West Side Y (now at the the Central YMCA of New York) by the late Jason Shinder. It has been a facet of Y programming across the U.S., in places as far-flung as the Cheyenne Family YMCA in Cheyenne, Wyo., where my wife Christine supervised the program. Sadly, the Writer's Voice program Chris supervised vanished when the Cheyenne Y closed last year. A sad day on the lone prairie.

As coordinator of the literary program at the Wyoming Arts Council, I enlisted M.L. as a judge for our literary fellowships and had the pleasure of driving him across that vast state and introducing him to The Legend of the Jackalope as well as a batch of very fine poets and writers. M.L took me on when I was failing to find a publisher. I will be eternally grateful to him for that. He was ably assisted by WSU student and editor/designer Brandon Wade. I will have more to say about this as time passes and I look for ways to lift up this blog.

Meanwhile, excuse me while I figure out intriguing ways to promote a book published by one of America's stalwart small presses. It was launched by the Ridgeway Press and Artist Collection 52 years ago. Its roots are deep in the Detroit alternative arts scene. Here's a description taken from Detroit's Book Beat:

Ridgeway Press & Collective is one of Detroit’s vital independent literary-artistic forces. With weekly online meetings, shared vacations, and a screwball newsletter, this band of creatives has remained together, loyal to the call of Ridgeway Dada. 

Writers talk books on a rainy May evening in Ormond Beach

The rain waited until I rolled myself inside the Novel Tea Book Shop in Ormond Beach. In Central Florida, we’ve been waiting for rain since last summer and it seems to be returning. Two days ago, the wide-eyed forecasters on the Weather Channel predicted a Tuesday deluge to cross the state. The clouds appeared but the rain was more a whisper than a monsoon. But yesterday, it came down.

I was in a comfy chair inside Novel Tea for the Wednesday evening Writers Haven. It was billed as a chance to hang out with other local writers to exchange tips and stories, the kind we were working on and the kind you tell about writing’s daily travails. An interesting group arranged around the snack table and living room-style reading room. Me, a novelist and short story writer; a striving sci-fi writer; a guy with copies of the cover of his dark fantasy novel due out this summer; a young woman writing a film script; two romance writers; a writer/editor for two local motor-sports magazines (an illustrator, too, as he’s the shop’s artist-of-the-month); and a woman “between projects” chosen by staff to be the moderator.

I sipped an Earl Grey Moonlight iced tea. The tea was Earl Grey with orange, blue sunflowers, and natural flavors. I drank it and chipped away at a monster chocolate chip cookie that I shared with my son Kevin. I shared the story of my new historical novel set in 1919 Colorado, as foreign a land to Floridians as Florida is to Coloradans (do I have that right or is it Coloradoans?). I had copies with me. Four were signed copies to my sister-in-law Nancy and her three adult children. I slipped her the books while nobody was looking and she slipped me the cash which I could use on any number of novels or teas or giant cookies. I also slipped a copy of my novel to Stephanie Gonter, one of the shop’s co-owners. I brought along my book of short stories. I am on a mission to monetize my writing journey, no easy task for us small-press-published authors.

One of the more interesting conversations was on A.I. Many self-published authors are avoiding A.I. writing yet they also employ A.I.-designed covers. Angel Lowden, the store’s other co-owner, worked the counter. She said that she and other booksellers are on the lookout for A.I. covers and usually won’t accept them in their book stock. The cover is hugely important these days and she suggested getting a professional to do the job. My daughter Annie designed the “Zeppelins” cover. She’s an artist and marketing ace and gave her dad a special deal.

Novel Tea is everything an indie should be. It’s located along a leafy street on the main floor of an old two-story house. It features a big front porch with easy chairs. Inside are overstuffed chairs and many, many books. There is a food bar and a bar-bar that serves beer and wine. Some in the gathering jumped right into happy hour. I am a teetotaler these days so Novel Tea’s specialties and their huge array of leaf teas add to the allure of its name. The play on words is nice too. I noted the shop features an array of craft brews including those from Ormond Brewing Company which is on the other side of the tracks on the line that serves Ormond Station. In reality, there is no train to Ormond Station but me and my neighbors are working on it. The shop’s next big event is June 3 with Boozy Books at the brewery. Here are details from the web site:

Our Summer Boozy Book Fair returns on June 3rd from 5 PM to 9 PM at Ormond Brewing Company.

Browse books from Novel Tea Book Shop, shop local authors and artisans, and enjoy a relaxed evening with a drink in hand. Whether you’re building your summer TBR, looking for a unique gift, or just want a fun night out, this is your spot.

We’ll have:
Local authors and book signings
Handcrafted goods from local vendors
Books for all ages and interests
Ormond Brewing featuring your favorite brews

Come out, support local, and celebrate the start of summer with us.

Free to attend. Bring a friend. 

It’s wonderful, really. Support local. Stephanie stressed that she and her partner are always looking for fun new ways to sell books and teas. I am now local but didn’t sign up in time for Boozy Books. Next time…

Note on accessibility: From the street, Novel Tea appears inaccessible for those of us using walkers, rollators, and e-carts. But it's very accessible. Parking on the east side of the building is ample (mind the cats!) and there is a ramp inside the entrance located near the artist studio. Staff will rearrange chairs to accommodate.

Travel now with Patrick as he contemplates a new life in the West

The opening paragraphs of my new novel, Zeppelins Over Denver:

Patrick Michael Hott pulled his cap down on his forehead and slumped into the seat on the east side of the southbound train. It was the last day of July 1919. He shifted in the seat, trying to bend his lanky frame into the limited space. He looked out the window. Cows grazed on brown swatches of grass that stretched all the way to the flat horizon. He passed green wavy ranks of ripening corn. There was a man laboring out in his field. An old farmhouse. More cows.

He looked in the other direction, past his seatmate and to the opposite side of the train. That was the west and the Rocky Mountains. Heads and hats blocked that view out of the passenger car windows. So many big people. So many hats. Floppy women’s hats adorned with feathers. Towering cowboy hats worn by towering cowboys. Straw boaters worn by rangy young dudes. Beat-up hats worn to protect farmers from the mile-high sun. Every blessed American wore a big hat that obscured his view of the mountains. They were all on his train.

Why couldn’t they wear sensible headwear such as the soft cap he bought in Chicago on the Fourth of July? He had joined his brother’s family to picnic on Lake Michigan for the first Fourth that America celebrated after The Great War. Not even a month ago. He bought the cap from a street vendor. He liked it immediately and spent too much of his hard-earned pay for it. He liked that he could pull it down over his big ears when the winter winds blew off the lake. The bill kept the sun off his face, which would come in handy now that he was on his way to Arizona. It also gave him a dapper air, or so he believed.

To be continued

Order Zeppelins Over Denver by Michael T. Shay now from your favorite bookstore. Just yesterday, friends ordered copies from Parnassus Books in Nashville, co-owned by the magnificent Ann Patchett,  and Mitchell Kaplan's Books & Books in Miami. Mitchell was co-founder of the amazing Miami Book Fair that began in 1984. These bookstores are key parts of the literary world that keep hope alive even when dark forces try to destroy us. 

"Zeppelins Over Denver" now available to pre-order

On April 24, I guesstimated that "Zeppelins Over Denver" would be out by summer. You have to be careful with these things as publishing tends to take time and you don't want to get readers' hopes up unnecessarily. 

"Zeppelins" is now on pre-order (May 5 official pub date) at your favorite bookstore or even from your least favorite big-box outlet that places book bins somewhere among twelve-packs of underwear and rows of gleaming BBQ grills. 

My goal is to get the book into local stores and those in my old stomping grounds of Wyoming and Colorado. It's a bit tricky because the book is set in Colorado, specifically Denver, in 1919. I'm now officially a Florida resident, a return to my roots and the comfort of family. My Colorado roots go back to 1919 when all of my grandparents decided Denver was the place to be. 

My grandmother Florence decided to extend her tenure as an army nurse in France to the new army hospital in someplace called Aurora. There she met and married my grandfather Raymond, a cavalry officer from Iowa who left the war with lung problems so they shipped him to the hospital that eventually became Fitzsimons Army Hospital. Cavalry officer met nurse and there you go. 

My Irish immigrant grandfather Martin left sweltering Chicago after having a lung surgically removed due to empyema. The surgeon urged him to recuperate in a drier clime, Arizona, for instance, or maybe Denver. He chose Denver. Grandmother Agnes, the first postmistress of a tiny town near Cincinnati, jumped into a Model T with her sister and two gal-pals and drove the rugged road to Colorado. She and her sister decided to stay while the others returned to the banks of the Ohio. Martin and Agnes met at the Hibernian Club and one thing led to another and here I am.

That's just background. The setting is important to me as I was born in Denver, did some of my growing up there, returned after college to work, left Denver to go to grad school up I-25 at CSU, and then moved north to Cheyenne to work for the Wyoming Arts Council for 25 years. Retirement party with great homemade pie on a Friday in January 2016. On Monday morning, I sat and started writing this book.

Co-worker at retirement party: Hey Mike, whatcha gonna do after retirement? You can't just sit around, you know. 

Me: I'm gonna sit around and write a novel. A historical novel.

Co-worker: That's nice. Give me another slice of that pie.

Ten years later, I'm in Florida and I have a book. Easy as pie.

Stay tuned here for more updates. 

"Zeppelins Over Denver" due out by summer

Just finished reviewing the galley proofs of my first novel. My first published novel. I’ve been writing for a long time, since I was in my 20s. I actually started earlier, as a kid writing letters that were rarely answered. My first readers were disinterested friends and family members. Maybe that’s where I learned how to hold an audience. Most of my early writing had an audience of one. I discovered journaling and keep up that written practice with this blog. I registered with the original Blogger from Pyra Press in 2001 and posted my first weblog in November 2005. I began blogging regularly in January 2006.

But back to the novel. The title is “Zeppelins Over Denver” and it will be out in May from The Ridgeway Press of Michigan in Detroit. Publisher and friend M.L. Liebler helped me get the ball rolling and I am forever grateful. Small presses rule! Big presses are great too but they have spent a lot of time ignoring me. C’est la vie! I was learning how to write all of this time, from the early 1970s until now. I’m still learning. Always will be.

“Zeppelins” is a historical novel set in 1919 Denver. Its origins lie on the yellowing pages of my paternal grandmother’s diary from her time as a U.S. Army nurse in France, 1918-19. She kept one diary in her lifetime and it was lost for decades, existing only as a rumor that faded with each passing year. It was rediscovered in my sister Molly’s basement in Tallahassee. She’s a nurse like our mother and my father’s mother. Eileen, another sister who also was a nurse, took the diary and transcribed it. She asked me for editorial assistance. As writer and editor, I gladly provided it. I whipped it into shape, working more as a conservator than a fiction writer. I corrected spelling and punctuation. I changed no contents, censored nothing. It was lovely just the way it was.

Eileen asked me to put together a little book for the family. Along the way, I researched the service of army nurses in the Great War and the Great War itself. I thought I knew at least some of the history. I had read war novels such as “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “The Good Soldier Schweik,” “Soldier of the Great War,” and “Winter Soldier.”  I had read “The Guns of August” by Barbara Tuchman and Paul Fussell’s excellent “The Great War and Modern Memory.” I’ve read the poetry: Wilfred Owen, Siegried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. I have read some of the celebratory war poetry, too. Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees" was my father’s favorite poem. I wondered if Dad had contemplated the shattered trees in the Bulge battlefield in the Ardennes in 1944. Kilmer’s reputation lives on at Columbia University’s annual Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest. The Columbia Daily Spectator once ranked the contest as number one among the “Best Columbia Arts Traditions.”

The more I read, the more I realized how little I knew. I dug deeper. In the end, I decided to absorb everything I knew and let it come out in what I see as a historical novel colored by the darkly humorous war novels of Joseph Heller, Juroslav Hasek, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. And there you have it. Ten years of work poured into almost 400 pages. I hope you enjoy it. If you are inspired by the characters, some of them will return in the sequel, “Patrick of the Mountains.” The draft manuscript is complete and it will be published once the edits and revisions are complete. I have roughed out a plot for a third novel but we will see where that goes.

A (belated) Christmas memory, Colorado and Capote

"The closest thing to heaven on this planet anywhere

Is a quiet Christmas morning in the Colorado snow."

That's the refrain in "Colorado Christmas" by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a song written by Steve Goodman. I listened to it numerous times during the Christmas season and call it up other times. It's pure nostalgia, a musician in a L.A. hotel dreaming about "Telluride and Boulder Down below." No mention of Denver, my hometown, or Aurora, where I did some of my growing up, or Fort Collins, where I attended grad school. Telluride is a wonder, deep in the Rockies, well known for skiing and summer music festivals. Something beautiful about sitting on a grassy field under the stars listening to music. Boulder, of course, is known coast-to-coast for its counterculture vibe, beatniks and hippies, Naropa Institute, the CU cafeteria named for a Colorado cannibal, "South Park," and the Flatirons jutting up to the west like, well, flatirons. John Fante grew up in Boulder. You can get heated up about your favorite cause and then cool off at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain Court on the CU campus.

So, is NGDB from Colorado? They are in the Colorado Music Hall of Fame and many in its roster of performers live in Colorado. Long-time member Jimmy Ibbotson had a recording studio in Woody Creek outside Aspen, also known as the lair of the late Hunter S. Thompson.

I first heard "Colorado Christmas" in Aspen. Christine and I were up in Starwood, heading to our friend Steve's father's house, when we got stuck in a snowbank. We drove an AMC/Renault compact, not even front-wheel drive. Driving up the night before, we got lost and stopped at an intersection where a big 4WD was parked. Obviously lost, we waved, the window rolled down, and John Denver poked out his head. Yes, he said, this is the right road to Starwood. We thanked him and didn't even ask him for a song. We maneuvered up the scary road to the summit. Two hours later we drove down. The next morning, we drove back up and got stuck. As we did the usual rock-and-roll motion to free the car, "Colorado Christmas" came on the radio. I thought it was the most beautiful song I ever heard even though at that very moment we were stuck on a quiet Christmas morning in the Colorado snow. "The closest thing to heaven on this planet anywhere..." What could we do? We laughed, and kept on rollin'.

We live in Florida now.

Speaking of Christmas memories --

"A Christmas Memory" was a 1966 Emmy-winning televised story by Truman Capote. A remake appeared later but it lacked what made the earlier one stand out, narrator Capote. So special to hear his voice recall a rural Alabama childhood memory. A young Capote (Buddy in the story) is deserted by his parents and stays with his grown-up second cousin Sook whose goal for the season is to make 30 fruitcakes for friends and neighbors. She is dirt-poor in the midst of the Great Depression and she and Buddy scrape together what they have saved during the year and set out on their quest. First stop: salvage "windfall pecans" from Farmer Callahan's grove. They buy makings at the general store and a bottle of bootleg whiskey from Ha Ha Jones Fish Fry and Dancing Cafe. They make the cakes and distribute them just in time for Christmas. The cakes are sweet and imply a bit of a buzz. The sweetest part is the young Capote and his grown-up voice, this tiny story that came from the writer who gave us true stories of Kansas murderers, Manhattan society dames, and tortured souls who haunt Tiffany's. Capote was a tortured soul but how he could write. 

Lately I’ve been having dreams, Train Dreams w/update

For decades, I kept a copy of “Fiskadoro” by Denis Johnson. I liked the idea of the book more than the book itself. It was an early post-apocalyptic novel set in the Florida where I grew up, the Keys, way south of my youth in Daytona Beach, but still, Florida. With my brother Dan, I was writing a post-apocalyptic novel set in the Central Florida I knew. It was the 1980s and we wanted in on the post-apocalyptic scenario that Reagan’s anti-Soviet MX Missile plan engendered. Dan, Air Force veteran and air traffic controller, was a Reagan man and I was not. There was energy in that – and we were brothers. I miss him still. Today is his birthday.

But back to Johnson. I read “Train Dreams” a decade ago when I still lived and worked in Wyoming. It’s a novella and I read it in two days. It touched me. I didn’t think it would. I did my best to read “Fiskadoro” but failed to finish -- I just couldn't get inside. Is this the same writer? My heart ached by “Train Dreams” end, much as it did last night when the credits rolled for “Train Dreams” on Netflix. It’s set mostly in Idaho, my old neighbor, and in the tall-timber forests I grew to love in my 40 years in the Rockies. Most of that time, the timber industry and environmentalists waged war. I wasn’t in the fight, but my location in the cities of the Colorado/Wyoming Front Range made me suspect.

I put that aside as I watched Robert and other loggers in early-20^th-century Idaho and Washington cut 500-year-old trees. Robert worked for his wife and daughter. He traveled to jobs by train, the most efficient form of transportation then. This was a love story featuring Robert and Gladys and little Katie. The couple planned and built the cabin themselves and did all the work. Tragedy came and some resolution followed. The ending is breathtaking yet somber.

It's a beautiful work, Johnson’s novel and the Netflix film directed by Cliff Bentley. The credits roll to a song called “Train Dreams” by Nick Cave. He was the right person for the job. I have it on my playlist now: 

Lately I’ve been having dreams, crazy dreams I can’t explain; A woman standing in a field of flowers, a screaming locomotive train; Crazy dreams that go on for hours and I can’t begin to tell you how that feels.

Robert doesn’t have the words.

I keep searching for them.

UPDATE: The Dec. 1 New York Times carried a review of a new biography about the late Denis Johnson. The book, "Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures," is by Ted Geltner. He assembled it through interviews with family and friends and fragments of notes left behind by Johnson. The writer spent his last years living in a cabin in north Idaho. If you live in the West, you can picture the cabin and know what it feels like as December snow swirls outside.

Halloween 2025: Lobsters roam the neighborhood

A big lobster walked down our street last night. He/She/It accompanied kids dressed as characters from kiddie shows I don't watch because no more kiddies. But they're in my neighborhood, swarms of families doing what we did with our kids, getting them into costume, grab a bag, panhandle for candy. Chris dressed as Smart Cookie and my son Kevin was Spiderman. They staffed a table by the sidewalk, prepared for the kids. Other neighbor did the same thing. The young marrieds across the street broadcast seasonal tunes. Decades ago, Chris stayed at home as candy-giver and I marched the kids around the neighborhood. One night it was just my daughter and her pal. Indian Summer day gives way to blustery afternoon and sundown rain. The snow came when we finished the first block. Snow crusted their outfits but they ignored my pleas to head home. Halloween! Candy by the bagful once a year. Lights and costumes, family together. My Mom used to dress us up, hand us each a pillowcase, and send us on our way. Kids stream from every house on the street, a mass of post-war boomer babies move as one, parents hold their own bash, peer out the window just to check. No concern about razor blades in candy bars. We brought home apples, oranges, Milky Ways popcorn balls, nickels. Candy canes. The usual Tootsie Rolls. The stars were out here last night; a gentle breeze blew. A lobster strolled by.

In the Soup: Retired CSU professor John Calderazzo reads in the library

Poetry books arrived this week. The first was “In the Soup,” the second book of poetry by John Calderazzo. John lives in the foothills outside the tiny town of Bellevue, Colorado just north of Fort Collins and Colorado State University. John taught literary nonfiction during his time in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at CSU. He was one of my faculty mentors and I enlisted his expertise as a literary fellowship juror during my time at the Wyoming Arts Council. He still writes and teaches in that genre but explores poetry in retirement.

John writes of many topics but travel is a big one. He is a world traveler so writes about trips to Peru and other overseas locations. His U.S.-based poems are set on Flattop Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park, Elk Mountain in Wyoming, and Santa Cruz Island in California.  He dedicates some to friends and colleagues. “Kraken” is dedicated to Richard Jacobi, whom I knew in Casper, Wyo. John hears from Richard and his wife, retired University of Wyoming professor Vicki Lindner, about recent falls which, at a certain age, leads to complications, something this person of a certain age knows only too well. After watching a video of his Peru nephew’s toddler son falling over as he tried to walk, John  writes: “I sense what’s reaching out for him—gravity, the Kraken,/tentacled monster of the deep—already taking/his measure.”

The natural world has always featured heavily in John’s writing. In “Gathering Voltage,” he’s in the mountains again, this time in a summer lightning storm. He and his brother-in-law crouch as a bolt hits nearby and he feels “the fatal breath of the sky.” On another day, he rides his mountain bike in a storm: “Shivering as I fly, I sense a lightning/bolt moving into position, gathering/voltage, checking its GPS, its terrible/book of names.”

The author is not always in the wilderness. Sometimes, “The Retired Professor Reads in the Library.” He’s researching a travel essay and is in the aisle with his books and “old-time reporter’s notebooks.” He moves aside to let a student pass and wonders if the young man just sees “Him again—the old guy.” Thing is, he’s “as happy as I was at 10, freed from class to roam the school library.” I know the feeling, the old guy with his walker, crowding the aisle, as he reads a book pulled from the shelves but not sitting instead at one of the tables reserved for the elderly. If asked, I might tell you that some of the glory in the library is being there in the crowded aisle with my friends, the books.

"The Darker Moods of My Father" took me back to my own youth in the 1960s and '70s. He contemplates his father's "darker moods" and his rants on Vietnam and antiwar protesters and "priests drunk on holy water." Meanwhile, the writer remembers "this thing/that wanted to cannon me into jungle mud/since I'd turned eighteen." The poem ends with a revelation about his parents, about how his mother cautioned her husband about going too far with his his diatribes and the father looks sheepish, "knowing he'd gone too far, back in those days/when it was still possible to go too far." Suddenly we're back in 2025, when every day is a lesson on going too far.

John’s book is published by Middle Creek Publishing and Audio: The Literature of Human Ecology. A fine-looking book, printed in a large and very readable sans-serif type. The publisher is based in Pueblo Mountain Road in Beulah, Colorado, which is located between Pueblo and the mountains. I mention this because there are many fine small publishers tucked into many small places. My old friend Nancy Curtis runs High Plains Press from her ranch near Glendo, Wyoming, just a few miles off I-25 down a rutted dirt road that can turn into gumbo during a heavy rain. Anhinga Press has two co-directors in Tallahassee but founder Rick Campbell supervises from his windswept outpost on the Gulf of Mexico (MEXICO!).

One more thing. Some small presses receive support through their local and state arts agencies or some get National Endowment for the Arts publishing grants. I should say they used to get grants but not anymore from the battered NEA and not anymore in Florida where the Governor is on a scorched-earth campaign against the arts and the liberal arts education.

A sad state of affairs. My career was based on connecting local arts groups and publishers to government funding which they had to match 1-to-1. Most of the time, the government dollar was matched many times over. The U.S. government is now in the hands of a wrecking crew that wants to demolish poetry and prose, arts and education. They want to destroy everything I hold dear.

John Calderazzo writes about everything I want to preserve and protect.

My father, standing in a field in France, Feb. 13, 1945

My father, 21, standing out in a field in France, February 1945. He writes a caption to the photo: “I hadn’t had a haircut in three months. I should have worn a hat.” He lives in a tent, a GI far from his home in Denver covered in Colorado snow. His war will be over in three months but he won’t return home for another year. He stands in a French field that's browned by winter, farm house in the distance. He writes that his hair is too long, that maybe he should have had a haircut before turning over the small camera to a buddy whose shadow lingers in the foreground. He takes my father's photo that will end up 82 years later in his eldest son’s desk drawer in Ormond Beach, Florida. You were right, Dad. You should have worn a hat. That hair of yours is curly, too curly, too youthful for a soldier who spent Christmas in the frozen Ardennes, in The Bulge, on the radio. He relays artillery coordinates, asks HQ where a young man might get a haircut for a future photo of him standing in a French field looking lonely, unshorn, very much alive.

Fiction writers bring new life to dusty historical figures

Last night I finished reading "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson" by Jerome Charyn. A beautiful novel, wonderful historical fiction. Charyn has made waves the past couple decades with his unorthodox takes on historical figures: Dickinson, the notorious Orson Welles/Rita Hayworth relationship, famous recluse J.D. Salinger, and Johnny One-Eye in the American Revolution. There are hundreds of other lives worth a second or even third look by someone of Charyn's skills. ,

Historical fiction is my new reason for living past 74. I've written two HF novels, the first will be out later this year from The Ridgeway Press in Michigan. I'm editing the second now. In the process, I've grabbed as many books off the HF shelf as I can muster. I was floored by "James" by Percival Everett, "Booth" by Karen Joy Fowler, "Horse," by Geraldine Brooks, "Gone, the Redeemer" by Scott Gates, and "Clark and Division" by Naomi Hirahara. 

All this innovative HF isn't without its detractors. Some traditionalists say that writers are playing fast and loose with the facts. Some say that facts are facts and that the timelines of history should be respected. They're valid points. Some HF writers are dogged with the facts. And so are some HF readers. Some writers also have hordes of researchers to help their work, as was the case with James Michener as his career progressed. He was so intent on research that he has a library named after him, the James Michener Library at University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. I've devoured Michener's novels most of my life, first "Hawaii," recommended by my mother, and onto "Centennial," the first novel I bought when I moved back to Colorado after college, and on to "Chesapeake" when I lived in Maryland.

But I also love the art of fiction and don't mind it being bent and twisted for a good yarn. I loved the real underground railroad in Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad" and I was totally caught up in Jim's journey in "James" even when the story veered away from Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" which, of course, was also fiction. 

This reminds me of arguments about creative nonfiction during my days as an M.F.A. student. Annie Dillard was taken to task for some inventions in "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." It led to a prize-winning book so I'm willing to forgive and forget. Others aren't. Remember that CNF stands for "creative" nonfiction.

It may be that I'm too old to care about literary minutiae. Or that I'm too pissed-off about MAGA savageries to mind when a writer invents something lovely to read.

A bit of both

If androids dream of electric sheep, why are there no sheep in my dreams?

I discovered Philip K. Dick and his mind-blowing novels at just the right time. In November 1975 I was a non-trad student at the University of Florida. Non-trad because many in my 1969 high school graduating class had claimed their diplomas and were now looking for work in all the wrong places. Meanwhile, we laggards and slow-learners were on campus with a younger crowd and a passel of Vietnam veterans. And the Krishnas -- can't forget them and the Krishna lunch. 

I spent many of my waking hours at the library where I gobbled up novels I missed reading in high school and copies of Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New Yorker, and any other pub that featured great writers -- Hunter S. Thompson and Joe Eszterhas among them -- and Esquire carried Harry Crews' Grits column and its annual dubious achievement awards. I learned snark from the witty DA awards and writing through Crews in print and in person in his creative writing class. 

A profile of PK Dick arrived in the Nov. 6, 1975 Stone. Great graphics by G.K. Bellows showed the author, book in hand, with an alien invader coming through his window. The header: "The True Stories of Philip K. Dick: Burgling the most brilliant sci-fi mind on Earth -- it is Earth isn't it?" Paul Williams wrote the piece. Was this the same Paul Williams from TV and film? No, it was Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy, who RS called "the first rock critic" and who died in 2013. He also loved sci-fi.

So I had to look up the RS piece. I printed it out and the type was too small for these tired eyes. So I enlarged the e-piece and read the whole thing. I remembered most of it from '75. I found as many PK Dick books as I could, in libraries and second-hand bookstores, and wrapped "Ubik" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" into the folds of my brain that also held Shakespeare in Elizabethan English, Chaucer in Middle English, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's dreamscapes, all from my UF classes. All in books. 

Williams notes in his final paragraph that some PK Dick movies were being discussed. "Blade Runner" came out in 1982, just a few weeks after PK Dick died. It blew our minds. It wasn't Dick's novel but it was beautiful. There now is a Director's Cut and a Final Cut as well as sequels. And many movies based on other novels. 

What is PK Dick thinking out in the Bardo? You may have to go to Colorado to get an inkling of that. Dick's ashes were interred in a Fort Morgan, Colo., cemetery next to the grave of his twin sister who died at six weeks. She is the basis of the "phantom twin," a recurrent theme of his. Fort Morgan was in the middle of the Dust Bowl in 1928 so I assumed the worst about the sister's fate. Go to Fort Morgan on a winter's day in January. Stand outside in the winter gales and think of the many things that could doom an infant in 1928-29. 

Dick, who lived most of his life in California, including mystical Marin County, is buried on the prairie. Only 112 miles from my one-time home of Cheyenne, Wyo., the setting of Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy," an alternate history of World War II (the Allies win!) in "The Man in the High Castle." Dick had the mountains and prairie in his bones which made the Rocky Mountains the best place for the opposition to the Japanese and German conquerors on the coasts.

Dig up that '75 Stone article and find out about the author's situation in a tumultuous year, 1971. There's a mystery at the story's center: why did someone burgle Philip K. Dick's house in San Rafael, blow up his 1,100-pound asbestos-and-steel safe, home to his precious manuscripts, and flood the floor with water and asbestos? All sorts of wild things were going on in 1970s California. Dick posits possibilities and Williams follows leads to no avail. 

The answer is out there somewhere.

All the propaganda I am falling for

 

Courtesy the Denver Public Library by way of a librarian/propagandist/writer
 from Wyoming. The downtown DPL was the first library my parents took me to
in the 1950s. Falling for propaganda even in kindergarten.

How the Great TB Sanatorium Craze came to the Rocky Mountain West

Part 2 of my review of John Green's "Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection." Read Part 1 here.

There was a rush in the early part of the 20^th century to isolate humans with TB, an incredibly virulent bacterium. Call it the TB Sanatorium Craze. Colorado jumped on the bandwagon early. So did New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

While I am a Colorado native, I spent 33 years living and working north of the border in Wyoming. The Wyoming State Legislature approved a TB hospital in Basin and it opened in 1927 . This probably was due to the Legislature’s tendency to parcel out important government functions: Cheyenne gets the capitol, Laramie gets the university, Basin gets the patients of a worldwide plague. It was only fair. As the years progressed, TB patients sought out famous hot springs in Saratoga and Thermopolis. The steam, heat, and sunlight were viewed as crucial TB treatments.

The Wyoming Legislature discussed a TB sanatorium as far back as 1909. During that same time, the National Tuberculosis Association sponsored a well-attended “Tuberculosis Exhibit” in Cheyenne and Laramie. The NTA traces its roots to 1904 when concerned citizens formed the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis. This was their advice during the Wyoming tour, as outlined in the 1910 edition of The Journal of the Outdoor Life from the University of Michigan:

“The cure consists of plenty of good, simple food, constant fresh air during the night as well as during the day, constant rest in the fresh air until there is no fever , and then carefully and gradually increased short walks, proper care and washing of your body, and proper clothing  and, finally, a determination to get well and to be cheerful in spite of everything, and only to look on the bright side of things, however hard your circumstances may be.”

Sanatoria offered all of these things with the predictable results: The Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne shows that in 1910-1912, when most counties in Wyoming had between one and 20 cases of TB per year. Albany, Park, and Carbon counties were on the low end with one to three cases per year (Converse County had zero!) and Sheridan, Sweetwater, and Laramie counties were on the high side with Laramie County showing 18 cases in 1911.

At the beginning of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in September 1930, patient census at the Basin Sanatorium in September 1930 showed 15 women and 37 men. When effective TB treatments such as streptomycin emerged in the 1940s, the heady days of sanatoria came to a close. Old Archives photos show the building in Basin where patients struggled to breathe. Sad, isn’t it, that some settlers came West for breathing room but died for lack of breath?

Why is Green’s book important to us in the 21^st century? The U.S. has a 99-percent TB cure rate and about 10,000 patients yearly although that’s going up. Green takes pains to tell the story of Americans with TB and the tough time they had before modern meds. The Rocky Mountain West, especially, was home to a number of sanatoria for TB patients. The Wyoming State Archives has documents tracing the origins of the lone state TB sanitorium in Basin.

Construction began in Basin in 1926 and the Sanitarium was opened in May of 1927. By 1969 all references to tuberculosis were removed at the Wyoming Sanatorium due to the significant decrease in the incidence of tuberculosis in the state. It was replaced by the Wyoming Retirement Center which provides nursing care to residents with mental health, dementia and other medical needs.

Colorado boasted plenty of facilities. Green writes that some cities in the West were founded by TB. Colorado Springs is one of them. National Jewish Hospital in Denver had a treatment center for consumptives. It’s still known as one of the best pulmonary hospitals in the country. Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora opened in 1918 at the tail end of World War One and its specialty was treating men with TB and those whose lungs were damaged by gas attacks.

The U.S. Army sent my unhorsed cavalry officer grandfather to Fitzsimons as he struggled with a bad case of pneumonia aggravated by chemical weapons used in the war. My grandmother, an army nurse and veteran of a M.A.S.H-style unit in France, treated him there. They married in 1922. Their eldest was my U.S. Army Signals Corps veteran father who in 1950 married a U.S. Navy-trained nurse and here I am.

Lung ailments have figured heavily in my family. My brothers, sisters, and I struggled with asthma in our youth. I almost died after a bad reaction to horses at a Weld County ranch. This pretty much demolished my dreams of replacing The Lone Ranger.  

Movie westerns have featured tubercular characters. In “Tombstone,” Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday gambles, drinks, shoots people, coughs and sweats, not necessarily in that order. A gambler calls him a “dirty lunger” and pays the price. Gunfighter Johnny Ringo calls him a “lunger” and also pays the price. The message is clear. ”I’m your huckleberry,” Doc says, before or after shooting someone. Not bad for a lunger or consumptive patient. Doc succumbed to consumption in 1887 in Glenwood Springs, Colo. He went there in 1886 when told that the hot springs had curative powers. He apparently was misinformed. Visit his grave at the Doc Holliday Grave and Hiking Trail. Flatlanders beware: it’s located more than a mile high and it’s all uphill. Healthy lungs required.

One of our U.S. presidents, sought out the West’s fresh air and healthy lifestyle in North Dakota. Theodore Roosevelt thrived, returned to politics, declared Wyoming’s Yellowstone a national park and Devils Tower a national monument, and the rest is history and myth-making.

North Dakota’s San Haven Sanatorium in the Turtle Mountains treated TB patients from 1909 until the 1940s. As final plans were made for a 1911 opening, Superintendent of Public Health Dr. J.L. Grassick referred to TB as “The Great White Plague” because physicians marked TB-infected lungs with white arrows and healthy ones with black arrows. and assessed the illness as more a lifestyle choice than a microscopic rod-shaped bacillus with plans of its own.

“Wherever man builds his habitation, depresses his vitality by overwork or by debilitating excesses, lowers his powers of life by using insufficient or improper food, surrounds himself with the expectoration of his fellows and deprives himself of the blessings of God’s free air, there you will find it.”

Sanatoriums such as San Haven offered a higher altitude than the surrounding prairie, plenty of God’s free air, proper food, and all the available treatments. One of the more gruesome ones was puncturing and deflating one sick lung to nurture the other. During its time, more than 50 percent of the patients died.

And then came bacteria-battling antibiotics. San Haven closed. The abandoned building is billed on N.D. tourism sites as a good place for ghost-hunting. No mention of how the ghosts of The Great White Plague feel about this.

To John Green’s credit, the book includes blasts at the healthcare industry (especially – surprise! -- major drugmakers) and global policymakers. He does this surprisingly quickly in 208 pages (hardcover) and 256 in paperback. I read it on my Kindle. He requires more pages to describe faulty stars and why those turtles go all the way down, but fiction is one thing and non-fiction is another.

The story that holds “Everything is Tuberculosis” together is one 13-year-old’s journey. Green is a fine storyteller and the one he tells about Henry keeps the reader hanging on to the end.

Postscript: A big thank you to my son Kevin, a writer and tech guy in Cheyenne, for hands-on research at the Wyoming State Archives. As always, the Archives staff went out of their way to help a researcher.

Breaking: Daytona Evening News 08/16/1972: All heck breaks out in Miami

Reading the Daytona Beach Evening News: City Final. Price 10 cents.

Some interesting headlines:

Youthful and Elderly Protesters Join in ‘Gripes’ on Nixon Policies

After Haggling Aplenty, Campsite Finally Slated to Open Thursday

Askew Orders 15 Pct. Increase in Welfare

Argentine Leftists Stage Wild Jailbreak-Hijacking

Speaking of Hijacks…Airlines Find Subject Less Than Amusing

Display ad placed by a consortium of local banks in bottom left corner has an illustration of a man reclining in an easy chair in front of a TV set. He is smoking a cigar and holding a highball. The text: 

Pro and college football, the World Series, coming up. This little guy has it made. How about you? We’ll finance your color TV. Fact is, we’ll finance the adjustable lounge chair. You finance the cool drink. Have a nice day – have a colorful fall.

Dateline: August 16, 1972

It’s going to be hot and sticky with a high temp of 88 and humidity at 82. Ocean temp: 78.

Welcome to Daytona Beach 53 years ago.

The newspaper is yellowed but you can still see the track marks on the margins from the printing press. It’s a big broadsheet, a size you no longer see. Newspapers have downsized and disappeared.

I was 21 and hitching across America with my girlfriend. We were in Utah or Colorado – I didn’t keep a journal then so I can’t be sure. Wherever I was, I probably wasn’t reading the morning or evening papers. I was reading “Travels with Charley” by John Steinbeck who wrote it to reconnect with America. “I did not know my own country,” he wrote.  I was aware that Republicans were conventioneering in Miami and there were protests going on. I didn’t know that Vietnam Veterans Against the War members were there and we would be hearing more from them later. I didn’t know that a gonzo reporter named Hunter S. Thompson was covering the fracas and would be famous for his “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.”

As were so many others, I was out there looking for America. I found it too. It was wonderful and exciting. My favorite summer. I had no clue who Ron Kovic was and what he was experiencing in his heart and on the streets of Miami. I didn’t yet know the name of Scott Camil and the Gainesville Eight were not yet named the Gainesville Eight. I thought I knew a lot but I knew nothing but how much fun it was to be 21 and traveling with a beautiful woman and free of the Selective Service Draft. We met and partied with other young people on the road. It was glorious.

I did read part of this morning’s Daytona Beach News-Journal. I skipped the headlines because I didn’t want to see them. Yes, it’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, a day which I used to spend marching for Martin. It also is another day that I am ignoring. I would rather read above the cute Welsh Corgi named Taco that Palm Coast police take along as a therapy dog. Nice photo – one lovable dog. I did look at the weather. It’s going to be cold, folks, surprisingly cold for Florida. I looked up at my big TV. It’s a nice one, Roku HD4. I am not turning it on today. Not protesting in any park but I’ve done that many times. We put on some fine Inauguration Day protests in 2017 and 2018. More than 1,000 people came to our Jan. 21, 2017, Wyoming Women’s March protest in tiny Cheyenne, Wyoming. People I knew from Laramie and Casper and Fort Collins were there. I made my famous almost-salt-free chili for the post-protest feed. We plugged in so many crockpots at the Cheyenne Historic Depot that the power went out. Despite the downer reason for the protest, a fine time was had by all. Local TV and newspaper covered the event. Lots of photos on our cellphone cameras. I will share one with you if I can find it in my photo cache.

I’m returning to my newspaper. In 1972, Volusia County had six A&P stores and now there are none. In 1972, I could buy a loaf of white bread for 22 cents and a pound of coffee for 69 cents. A pack of frozen waffles was 10 cents and a big box of Sugar Frosted Flakes sold for 55 cents (Everyday Low Price!). No prices are listed for eggs but they were cheap, I know that, maybe as cheap as they’re going to be starting today. I can’t wait.

P.S.: You might wonder why I was reading a 1972 newspaper. It was included in a packet of stuff sent to me by my sister who is downsizing and cleaning decades of storage from her house. She knows I’m a history buff who writes about arcane stuff.

On the ghost trail to Lulu City

I am caught between two worlds.

In one, I am at the beach or in a park or lunching with friends at Inlet Harbor.

In the other, I tense up, stare at the wall, and wonder where I am and who I am.  I drift off, imagine I fly over the Laramie Range. Below are the convoluted rock shapes of Vedauwoo. On one of the heights is my son, waving up at me as he used to wave down at me on the flatlands as I wondered how in the hell a 12-year-old scrambled to the top without falling. I soar above the beach and see the waves I no longer ride or no longer even stand calf-length in since I can’t walk unaided to the water.

I almost died twice during a four-day hospital span that I can’t remember. I awoke a mess, unable to walk or shit or even talk. “What month is it?” I haven’t a clue. The medicos gave me fentanyl to let me float through the trauma and it worked as a mind-eraser. I float through those four days that I don’t remember.

Yesterday I sat for three hours in the nicely-appointed customer waiting room at KIA HQ. The people there seemed human enough as did I. I read a non-fiction book about Japanese fliers who flew airplanes into American ships in a last-ditch effort to halt dreaded defeat. Kamikaze, Divine Wind. In Korea, where my SUV was made, Japanese troops rounded up young females to serve as “comfort women” and worked to death Allied soldiers my father’s age of 20 in 1943.

I live on a thin thread. We all do. I didn’t want to die from septicemia but almost did and it was nothing that I did or didn’t do. An occupying army of bacteria invaded my bloodstream and began to switch off my organs, one by one, like you walk through the house turning off lights, eager to get to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. Antibiotics stopped the massacre. And medical staff on a mission. And time. And something undefined. Something blessed.

I sometimes see the world’s forests on fire. Other days, I peer down into Rocky Mountain National Park and see me hiking with my wife and kids. That is just one part of one summer day. It’s frozen in my memory. I am always on the trail to abandoned Lulu City, walking past falling-down cabins with a ghost in each doorway. One of them looks just like me.

A snowless Christmas season ain't all bad

The most beautiful song about missing snow at Christmas is one written by Steve Goodman and performed by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The song’s narrator looks out the window of his Hollywood Hotel on Christmas Eve and sees billboards, neon, traffic, and palm trees, and notes it’s 84 degrees.

He yearns for Colorado. The song’s refrain goes like this: “The  closest thing to heaven on this planet anywhere/is a quiet Christmas morning in the Colorado snow.”

Nothing gets me as nostalgic for Colorado. John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High,” maybe, a 1972 song that planted the seeds for Colorado’s marijuana boom.

The state is not always snowbound at Christmas. I do remember a time when it was, Christmas of 1982, the year of the Great Christmas Eve Blizzard. Two feet of snow fell in one day. I watched it outside my walkup apartment window in City Park South, where we could hear the zoo’s peacocks almost every day.

Chris, alas, was trying to figure out a way to get home from her downtown job. Buses weren’t running as businesses and government shut down. A coworker herded Chris and four others into his 10-year-old compact car and raced up Colfax (“The Fax”) to drop everyone off. He hoped for the best, as did they. After maneuvering through a maze of stuck cars and two-foot drifts, Chris was released on Cook Street. As she said later, “He just slowed down and I jumped out.” A bit later, I saw her maneuvering the drifts, her diminutive figure whipped by the winds and flurries. She was shrouded in snow and ice by the time she reached the apartment. We unwrapped her carefully, fed her coffee and soup, and soon she was able to tell her tale.

We went to sleep secure that the snow would wrap up in the night, Santa would arrive, and we would wake up to a winter wonderland.

Chris woke up with a cold, and went back to bed. I ate, grabbed the snow shovel, and wandered out looking for people to help. Our neighborhood was a mix of old brick houses, apartmentized houses such as ours, and small apartment complexes. Most of the neighbors were young but there were some elders in the mix. I sought them out. But they knew better than to venture out. I was able to help a driver dig out his stuck car but that was it. I headed home.

We had other big snows but rarely ones like this. In 1982, we were recently married and were only four years into our Denver adventure. We still remembered snowless Florida Christmases. It snowed once in Daytona and twice one year in Gainesville. Never a blizzard but a sprinkling could shut down the city. And did

Git along little dogies -- and watch out for that six-foot gator behind the palm tree

When I moved from Florida to Denver in 1978, I wandered down to the local bookstore and bought “Centennial” by James Michener. It was published in ’74, two years before the Centennial State’s centennial. That tie-in helped boost the book into the bestseller lists. Michener had a history at UNC. He taught there from 1936-40 when it was called the Colorado State College of Education. He donated all of his papers and research material to UNC and it became the Michener Special Collection. The library was named for Michener in 1972.

When I moved to Wyoming in 1991, I picked up John McPhee’s “Rising from the Plains.” In it, McPhee, with the help of legendary Wyoming geologist David Love, Tracked the amazing millennia of land masses rising from and falling into the plains. On one of my first work trips around the state, I listened to the audiobook and found myself on site at the Red Desert and the Snowy Range and the big caldera that is Jackson Hole. Never looked at them the same again.

I’m writing this because I now have returned to Florida from Wyoming which, as I remind people who seem a bit confused by its whereabouts, I say it’s the big (almost) square state just north of another square state, Colorado, where both pot and membership in the Democratic Party are legal.

But I digress. When I arrived in Florida in August just before back-to-back hurricanes, I vowed to read a book by a Florida writer about an era of the state I knew nothing about. So, naturally, I chose a book about Florida cowboys and their cattle drives. Head ‘em up and move ‘em out – and watch out for the snakes and the gators and malaria-carrying skeeters.

“A Land Remembered” from Pineapple Press of Palm Beach is an excellent novel by Patrick D. Smith. It tells the story of three generations of the MacIvey clan from 1858-1968. In the early years, they face starvation, gator attacks, ambushes by Confederate deserters, and all kinds of wild weather. They round up stray cattle with bullwhips and the crack of the whips give them the name “Crackers.” They assembled herds, drove them to the west Florida port of Punta Rassa near Punta Gorda, and faced all sorts of adventures along the way. They eventually moved from cattle to citrus to land developers, each with their successes and pitfalls. They lost friends and family to raging bulls and rustlers. But all of that land that the family bought in what’s now Dade County became very valuable once air conditioning entered the picture.

It's a fantastic tale, the book worthy of the kudos heaped on it. I couldn’t avoid making comparisons to books and movies of cattle drives in the West, especially Wyoming and Colorado. I worked for 30 years in Cheyenne and learned a lot about the history of the cattle biz in the West. Cheyenne Frontier Days is in its second century and that history is featured in the CFD Old West Museum, the Wyoming State Museum, and many works of art around the city.

“A Land Remembered” is a great novel and opened my eyes to Florida history I knew little about. The MacIveys make their home on the Kissimmee River near the town that’s mostly known as the neighbor to DisneyWorld, SeaWorld, and all those other amusements of Central Florida. Kissimmee hosts an annual rodeo and an excellent museum, the Osceola County Welcome Center and History Museum at 4155 W. Vine St. There you can view dioramas of some of the scrawny cattle rounded up from swamps and scrubland, the outfits worn by Florida cowboys (no Ray-Bans but they could have used them), and info on the various predators that threatened cow and cowboy. The Seminoles also played a part in the trade and Smith does a great job describing their culture in his novel.

I think my next move will be to the Ormond Beach Public Library and see if I can find a Florida-based book targeted by Moms for Liberty. There should be scores to choose from. I’ve been here for two months and don’t yet have a library card or whatever they use for library access these days. I do have access to Libby on my Kindle but Libby is not the same thing as spending hours scanning the new books section. I have found so many treasures there.

Welcome to Ormond-by-the-Sea which, surprisingly, is next to the sea

My new home is in Ormond-by-the-Sea, Florida. It is separated by the Inland Waterway from Ormond-not-by-the -Sea where most of the rest of my family lives. They just call it Ormond. As I drive A1A up the coast, I look out at the billions upon billions gallons of water in the omnipresent sea or Atlantic Ocean as some call it. It is so vast that I stand by-the-sea and gape.

It is a big change from Cheyenne-by-the-Prairie which is also a vast land that, coincidentally, was once an inland sea where plesiosaurs pursued prey under my patch of dry ground. A better name might be Cheyenne-pretty-close-to-the-mountains which is the Laramie Range and then the Snowy Range and if you travel south the Mummy Range and Rocky Mountain National Park. Beautiful, beautiful places where our family spent a lot of time and those memories will be forever lodged in my heart.

Vedauwoo was our favorite. Son Kevin learned to free-climb there and our daughter Annie loved to hike and camp. We watched UW’s Vertical Dance on a rock face of 1.5-billion-year-old granite. I’m pretty sure Florida will be underwater by then. I recently saw a map that showed Florida twice the size 18,000 years ago due to a 30 percent drop in sea level. Ormond-by-the-sea would have to move east to maintain its name and dignity.

Yesterday Chris and I drove to Flagler Beach. You can see the waves break from A1A. The day before, a stretch of this road was swamped by a monsoon rain and traffic had to be rerouted. Once we reached Flagler, we had to slow down for construction. The Army Corps of Engineers brought their massive equipment here to refurbish the beach and roadway washed away during the last two hurricanes. They are piping in beige sand from a huge barge. The current sand is red which has its origins in coquina rock and is a rougher sand that washes away easily. The beige sand is more stalwart.

After six or seven miles of construction, we get to the Flagler Pier and summer crowds. Surfers have arrived in droves to ride the waves which break better near the pier. My brothers and I surfed here in the 1960s and ‘70s. The crowds were smaller and the locals pretty welcoming unless you took off in front of them on a wave and then they would kick their board at you trying for some decapitation or maybe just a few bruises. We did the same thing at our beach in Daytona. All in fun.

Chris and I were on a mission to get our Florida driver’s licenses and tags and also register to vote. We didn’t want to miss out on the most important vote of our lifetime. We volunteered for election day duty. Some say it’s going to be a free-for-all but ruffians will think twice when they see this gray-haired man in a walker sent to keep the peace or die trying. It’s easy to come unglued at times like this. MAGA people and Christian Nationalists have followed Trump’s lead and issued threats. The other side (my side) tries to keep cool heads and say only positive things online. We often fail.

Chris and I accomplished two of our goals. The tags had to wait due to additional paperwork. We celebrated by taking naps and ordering take-out from Stavro’s, a fine Italian place just up the street and in sight of the sea. I should say by-the-sea.