Work in Progress

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About the work I’ve started that I’ll probably never finish.

I started writing a novel when I was thirteen. It was an adventure/love story, based roughly on an image I’d had in a dream. I wrote it in a series of five college-ruled notebooks, single-spaced, in the crude printed handwriting of a teenager. I actually finished it, although I can’t remember how long it took. When it was finished, it was about five hundred pages long.

It sat in a locked drawer for years. When my family moved, I took it with me. By that time, I’d started another novel, this one about a successful business woman who was targeted for murder by a rival businessman. I was in my late teens when I started it and it was far more mature than the first book. It covered pages in two thick college-ruled notebooks. I never finished it.

In 1984, I bought my first computer, an Apple IIc. One of the first things I did with it was to type the work I’d done on the second novel into the word processor that came with the computer: AppleWorks. The pages filled several 5-1/4″ disks. You know — the old “floppy” kind. I added pages to the work as time went on. I also dug out that first novel and began rewriting it, now with the knowledge of a 23-year-old.

Time went on. In 1989, I bought my first Macintosh. I wasted no time coming up with a method that would transfer all those bytes of fiction from the old computer’s floppy disks to the hard disk on my new computer. It required a special serial cable and a telecommunications program. I basically downloaded the information from one computer to the other. The limited formatting I’d been able to apply in AppleWorks was lost, but at least I didn’t have to retype hundreds of pages of text.

The first novel nagged at me. I worked on it regularly, changing the story but never finishing it. Instead, I started a second book with some of the same characters two years later. Then went back and started a book with some of the same characters a year before the first book. They became named Book 2, Book 3, and Book 1. One of the characters that was supposed to die at the end of Book 3 managed to survive. (He was too good a guy to lose.) He came back in Book 4. And I even have some ideas about Book 5, although I haven’t actually started it yet.

I’ve also written short stories about some of the characters. The stories were written as a means of clearing my head about prior events in a character’s life. You see, all of my major characters had lives before I started writing about them. It’s important to know about those lives to accurately write about each character’s actions and motivations.

What does all this mean? At this point, I have the modern version of an unfinished book I started writing nearly 30 years ago, as well as hundreds of pages of fiction about the same characters. I carry the files around with me on my laptop and keep a backup copy on my desktop computer’s hard disk, as well as in a Backup folder on my .Mac account.

When I’m on the road and want something to read, I open up one of the book files. I enjoy the story very much. Sometimes I read what I’ve written and am proud of my work. Other times, I read passages that I know need to be fixed up. Some of the passages are especially awful; I’m not too vain to admit it. Sometimes I add new scenes. Other times I make minor corrections to existing text. I’ve put hundreds — if not thousands — of hours into this work. But it isn’t done.

At this point, I don’t think it’ll ever be done. It’s a personal work, something I think I write just for myself. It would be great to see it in print, but at the same time, I wonder what people would think of me after they’ve read it. Some parts are very violent, not unlike some of the action/adventure movies that Hollywood keeps churning out. I find it entertaining, an escape from reality. My escape.

I’ve got other novels in progress as well. A bunch of years ago, I started writing a mystery that I got about 5 chapters into before I stalled. Last year, I started another mystery with some of the same characters. These pieces, if I ever finish them, will be marketable and I’ll do everything I can to see them in print.

So when I complain about writers block, as I did in a previous blog entry, it’s my inability to work on these pieces of fiction that’s the problem. Sure, I can write computer how-to books when an editor is waiting for them. The big motivation there is the milestone advance payments that are dangled like a carrot in front of my face. No computer books, no money. No money, no life. Pretty simple. I can also write blog entries because they’re easy and they help clear my mind of the things that clutter it. But fiction? Adding to a work in progress is like squeezing water from a stone.

Anyone else out there in the same situation? I’d be interested in hearing what you do to overcome this problem.

I Get It Right (For a Change)

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I make three good transportation decisions in the same day.

I’m just finishing up a week working at my summer job at the Grand Canyon. While I’m working, I live in my trailer at Howard Mesa. It’s a 36 mile drive or 28 nautical mile flight to work.

At the end of my work week, I fly home. Normally, I leave directly from Grand Canyon Airport at the end of my last work day. It’s a 1-1/2 to 2 hour flight at the end of a day when I may have already flown six or seven hours. The air is usually hot and full of thermals. Or thunderstorms have moved in. It’s not fun.

So here’s the situation last night. I get a bad night’s sleep, mostly because I have a headache and the wind keeps flopping the awning around. I wake fully at 5:15 AM. It’s cloudy. I make my first decision: I’m not going to fly home directly from the airport. Why? Because I simply don’t have enough time to pack everything up into the helicopter and close up the trailer.

Then I make my second decision: I’m going to drive to the airport. This one had some real logic behind it. It was cloudy and the weather folks were predicting a 50% chance of rain. There was a definite possibility that I wouldn’t be able to fly back from the airport at the end of the day. That means the helicopter would have to be left there overnight and retrieved in the morning. That would add an hour to my travel time the next morning when I needed to fly home. So I drove my Toyota, which had been parked at Howard Mesa for about a month, to work. It took exactly 41 minutes, including the amount of time I needed to open and close the gate.

Later, at the end of the day, I made my third decision: I’m going to drive the Jeep back to Howard Mesa. The Jeep had been parked at the airport for about a month. I use it on the days I fly in, as my local transportation. So I swapped the Toyota for the Jeep and drove back to Howard Mesa at the end of the day.

These turned out to be good decisions. The reason? First of all, I flew 6.5 hours and was exhausted. Certainly not feeling up to another 1.5 to 2 hours at the stick. Second of all, nasty thunderstorms were all over the area — especially at Howard Mesa. The roads were unbelievably muddy. The Toyota would never have made it up the Mesa. Heck, the Jeep almost didn’t — I skidded off the road into a ditch and needed to shift into 4-Low to get out. And flying up would have been completely out of the question.

So now I sit here in my trailer, toasty warm while it rains outside. The Jeep is covered with thick, reddish mud what will certainly turn a few heads the next time it rolls into civilization. The helicopter awaits me outside, where the dust is (hopefully) being washed off by the rain. Tomorrow, I’ll sleep as late as I can (probably until 5:30 if I’m lucky), have a leisurely breakfast, and pack everything up for my return trip to Wickenburg. The air will be cool and smooth for my flight. Sure, I’ll miss a morning at the office, but I can’t work ALL of the time, can I?

A Tale of Two Passengers

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Two passengers on consecutive flights are as different as night and day.

Passenger one was a young boy, about twelve or thirteen years old. He was overweight, with pudgy freckled cheeks. He wore long, droopy shorts and a tee shirt. He sat down beside me and was buckled in by the loader. I handed him his headset as the loader closed the door and continued loading the rest of the family into the back.

When his headset was on, I gave him a cheerful hello. He responded with a very unenthusiastic hello.

“How are you doing today?” I asked him.

“Okay.” The word came out as if I’d forced it from him. It was flat. It told me he really wasn’t okay but he was telling me that he was just so I’d leave him alone.

Of course, I couldn’t do that. “Must be better than just okay,” I said. “After all, you’re going for a helicopter ride. That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”

He nodded glumly.

I got the thumbs up from the loader and started my passenger briefing, glancing in the back. His mom and dad were facing forward. His little sister, about eight years old, sat behind me facing backwards. They were all overweight. They were American, of course, from Colorado.

I took off a while later. We were on an Imperial Tour. That’s the long one, 45-50 minutes long. I gave them a little bit of a narration. Once, I heard the little sister in back yell out, “Look Mommy!” and say something about seeing deer. The boy beside me was looking out through the bubble at his feet at the trees we flew over. Later, he looked out the windows. But he didn’t react to what he was seeing. It was as if he was watching a television show his parents were making him watch when another show he really wanted to watch was on another channel at the same time.

At one point, he rested his chin in his hand. I had to look at his eyes to make sure he was still awake. He had long, curly eyelashes. His eyes were open, but they revealed nothing but boredom.

For heaven’s sake! He was being flown in a helicopter over the Grand Canyon! His parents had coughed up $169 (each) for this life experience and he had absolutely no appreciation for what he was seeing.

(For the record, I do it ten or more times in a day and I still enjoy seeing it.)

When they got off, I gave him and his sister each an Aero-Prop. (It’s a helicopter-like toy I give out to the kids.) His has probably already been added to the collection of junk dropped by tourists at the rim.

The next group of passengers were from England. The woman who sat next to me was probably in her eighties. She was small and rather frail looking and had some trouble getting into the seat. Dennis, the loader, helped her. She thanked him very politely, looking like she really meant it. I helped her with her headset, then said hello to her. She said hello back, then started looking at my instrument panel and the flight controls. She was really studying them. I thought she was going to ask some questions, but she didn’t. Her eyes just kept moving all over them. I started wondering whether she was all there.

I did the preflight briefing. I had a full load of six passengers, all from the same bus tour. Most of them were middle aged. Two of the women had enormous breasts. (That really doesn’t have any bearing on this story, but it is a fact.) They were all crammed into the back seats, but they looked happy enough.

We took off on a North Canyon tour. That’s the short tour, about 25-30 minutes. The woman beside me was very interested in the collective as I pulled it up. More interested than anyone else who has ever sat beside me. I started to wonder whether she might try to grab it. I didn’t let go for quite a while.

We passed the Grand Canyon Railroad’s steam engine on its return trip to Williams. I pointed it out. The woman beside me looked. Then she untangled her sunglasses from her seat belt and camera strap and put them on. She gazed around like an average passenger and I realized that she was probably as harmless as she looked.

But as we made the turn toward Eremita Tank and she saw the canyon ahead of us, she changed. It was as if she’d been told that she was going to see something good and she suddenly realized that it was going to be better than she’d originally thought. Way better. She took off her sunglasses and, as we crossed the rim into the canyon, she began looking at everything. I’ve never seen anyone look so hard. It was as if she were trying to commit everything she saw to memory. Like she was a sponge trying to absorb everything in. And every time I pointed out something, she looked to make sure she saw it.

I thought about my Grandmother, who passed away about two years ago. For a moment, I imagined that this woman was my grandmother and that I was finally taking her for a helicopter ride. It made my eyes teary.

We were on our way back across the canyon when I saw her wipe her eyes. Her fingers were wet. She was crying. Here was a woman near the end of her life and she still saw wonder in the Grand Canyon.

And I thought about the fat kid who’d been in her seat for the last flight. He had his whole life before him but couldn’t see how incredible the Grand Canyon was — even when he was looking at it from the front seat of a helicopter.

(I’m glad I don’t have kids. I couldn’t bear to have a child like him. Or let my children associate with children like him. Small minded, spoiled, and never happy.)

I’ll think about the woman from England for a long time. The fat kid is someone I’d rather forget.

Traffic Jam at Howard Mesa

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Traffic here is of the bovine variety.

Howard Mesa is just that: a mesa. For those of you who slept through elementary school geography, a mesa is a kind of flat-topped mountain. Howard Mesa rises about 300-500 feet out of the Coconino Plateau and is covered with rolling hills, tall golden grass, juniper and pinon pines, and volcanic rocks.

Our place is at the top of Howard Mesa, on one of its highest points. It has great views of all that grass and trees and rocks, as well as mountains in the distance and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. As I type this just after sunset, I can clearly see Mount Trumbull on the Arizona strip, at least sixty or eighty miles away. Cool.

To get up here, you have to take a dirt road. It’s a five mile drive. In many places, the road is just wide enough for one car. That’s okay because there are hardly every any other cars around. In fact, I’ve only passed a car going in the other direction once and today was the first time someone drove past my place in four months.

PhotoBut we do have traffic here. Cow traffic. Lots of black cows wander around the land at the bottom of the mesa. They like to walk in the road. And sometimes you have to stop your car to avoid hitting them. They just don’t like to get out of the way.

And here’s another weird thing about these cows: they can walk over cattle guards. (A cattle guard is a series of metal rails stretched across a road at a fenceline. The theory is, a cow can’t walk over them. Cattle guards replace gates all over the west.) I’ve actually seen them do this. They walk right up to the cattle guard and very gingerly step across the rails. They don’t even seem to mind me watching them. Like they don’t care that I know their secret.

So if you ever come to Howard Mesa, beware of our bovine traffic jams and the amazing cattle guard-crossing cows.

The Bag Works

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I try out my canvas shopping bag and get the discount, without saying a word.

I went shopping at the Grand Canyon Market in Tusayan the other day. I brought along my special local discount canvas shopping bag.

Allow me to regress. The bag is not made of canvas. It’s made of recycled soda bottles that have somehow been spun into thread and woven into fabric. If I understand this correctly, this means my bag is not biodegradable. It will last forever.

Of course, being a used bag that has obviously seen the inside of a coin-operated washing machine, it is pilled. I’ve never seen a pilled soda bottle, but there it is.

I walked over to the checkout counter and unloaded my milk and junk food selections onto the counter. I placed the canvas bag beside them. When the woman appeared to be ignoring it, I shifted its position, making sure she saw the green labeling that clearly identified it as the special bag. She continued loading groceries into plastic bags. I started loading groceries into the pseudo-canvas bag. For a moment, we competed to load groceries. She won. More groceries were in plastic than pseudo-canvas. I guess I’ll never have a career as a grocery bagger.

The total came to $25 and change, but she pressed a few keys and it dropped down to $19 and change. I think some of those keys were to remove the Pop Tarts she’d charged me twice for. But the other keys were for the whopping 10% discount I was entitled to as the owner of a special local discount pseudo canvas shopping bag. I paid with a $20 bill and actually got some change.

Wow.

Now where’s the laundromat?