The Giant's Skull

Last week I decided to burn some holiday calories with a bike ride into the mountains. So I bundled up in winter gear, packed map and snacks and extra clothes, and climbed up leafy trails, crunching through frozen mud, sliding across brown ice, crisping through snow patches.

Up and up, until the views expanded and I saw the world ringed with lines of blue mountains. Uphill and downhill and uphill and downhill. A few creek crossings, much bushwhacking through fallen trees and tangles of thorny brush, heated curses at the terrain, thorns, shoe soles caked in ice, my own lack of energy.

When I came out on top after a climb so steep I had to push my bike, I was rewarded with the long views I'd glimpsed through the trees earlier, except now the sun was out. Ridges of blue mountains marching west to the horizon, into West Virginia. And then I saw a gleam of white: the most distant and highest shape was a mountain covered in snow, no larger than a fingernail peeling but bright white against the blue sky. Like the skullcap of a giant three hundred miles distant, or maybe the Rocky Mountains.

Satisfied at at least this glimpse of winter, I chipped the ice off my shoes, clipped in, and started pedaling. Downhill at last.

And we roll on

Where is all the writing? Thousands and thousands of words appearing not here in this neglected blog but on the creeping growth of my work-in-progress. I've always known that consistency and moderation are the keys to smart exercise, like marathon training. But it turns out the long slow burn -- for me, anyway -- is also the way to write a novel.

Actually, in this case, I am re-writing in a complicated and risky way that I hope will pan out. "Just wait until the re-read," I keep telling myself. You have to kill the doubts, because even though they may be justified, they will douse the creative spark.

I am unraveling the threads of the book and weaving in a new character, new perspective, additional thickness that should make it more real and more compelling. Many scenes are new; a few are rewritten from another point of view, which involves (I'm learning) more than a simple copy-and-paste of pronouns. Different characters describe things in different ways. They notice different things, use different vocabularies. They are different cameras through which to see the world.

Right now I'm rushing to get it all down in a way that makes rough sense. Later I'll shape it. Will it work? That's what I'm gambling on. If I didn't believe I wouldn't work at this solitary mind game.

Hellfire in blue and gold

Once upon a time I wrote a book that featured a lean and rakish ship called the Hellfire. She was based on the nineteenth-century pilot schooners featured in Chapelle's The Search for Speed Under Sail and, more recently, embodied by the Pride of Baltimore II, Lynx, and others.

Just look at that photo of Lynx in a thundering reach on their homepage!

I put a ship called Hellfire in the book because I always wanted to name a ship that, I've always loved the look of these old schooners, and because I needed a dangerous and unmistakable vessel.

So when I got a chance to join Steve Earley for a sail this past weekend, I bundled up against the cold. Just after dawn we tacked up and down along the Chestertown waterfront, where the tall ships had gathered for Downrigging Weekend.


Steve's boat Spartina is the same Pathfinder design I'm building, and it's always inspiring to see that familiar shape in a completed boat. And even better to sail in a fresh breeze! OK, we had to tuck in a reef. And by "we" I mean "Steve."

As a clear sunrise warmed the frosty air, we slipped past Pride II and I shot a stream of photos.

Inspiration for the Hellfire:

Take that, inertia

Book revisions continue, but today I took the big step of leaping from reading and researching, jotting notes and thinking, to actually writing. Starting is always hard -- nearly paralyzing. I got over it by reasoning that it's going to be awful no matter what, so why waste time looking for the best way to start?

If you can't avoid crap, well, full speed ahead. Getting past that hurdle of my own expectations is like knocking the first shackle off my legs. Now I can get started. Is it bad? Yes, I hate it. Just as I expected, and just as it's been every other time.

Writing: the cure for hubris. But at least I started.

Limits

Okay, I think I may be able to manage one posting per month. This even takes into account my boycotting of Facebook as just another time-suck. I mean it!

We all have limits. Sometimes those limits are physical, as I learned a few days ago after cleaning out the garage.

I have a large pile of scrap lumber, mostly plywood, leaning up against two 6x6 beams of oak that are probably 12 feet long. Why do I have these? No idea, but why would I get rid of such massive timbers?

When I moved all the scrap plywood out of the way, I saw that the previously covered side of the oak beams was crawling with a half-dozen cave crickets. After a soothing beverage to cool my screech-torn vocal cords, I returned to the garage to find all the crickets still in situ with one. Important. Addition.

A very large wolf spider had approached them.

TEE HEE HEE! I giggled, putting my hands to my mouth and getting very wide-eyed. TEE HEE HEE!

I watched the crickets stupidly and suicidally crawl in their disgusting way closer and closer to the waiting spider. TEE HEE HEE! I may have clapped my hands.

Closer and closer ... but the spider didn't move. I sprinted into the house for a camera, and when I returned I saw that the arachnid-hellbeast standoff had continued. So, moaning, I approached, camera in hand, to get a better look.

I have seen some beauteous and wonderful sights in my short life, but nothing as delightful as this: a cricket was hanging from the spider's jaws.

TEE HEE HEE! TEE HEE HEE! TEE HEE HEE! I gamboled and capered about, pointing and gibbering like a chimp. The spider sat there, calmly draining her prey's liquefied innards through the fang holes in its spotted carapace.

I adjusted the light and snapped a few photos. Hooray for wolf spiders! HOORAY!

What about limits? The cricket discovered the limits of sharing a stack of wood with a wolf spider. Because once in a while your neighbor gets ... hungry.

I said, You can keep my things, they've come to take me home

Well, well, well. Been a long time, what? After some disruptions with my day job and a change of seasons I have rediscovered this blog. Doors swing open that had been shut.

It's a rainy fall day, like someone is wringing a sponge out over the trees and lawns and puddled driveways. I can hear it ticking on the roof; the view outside is a clot of green leaves and mist.

I have coffee, a one-inch stack of revision notes, a second and completely different novel in progress, my favorite pen, a new desk lamp, a boat project in the garage, a bike in the shop, another bike in the garage, and list of things to do running the length of a legal pad.

In the past five weeks I have ridden over 200 miles of backcountry mountain bike trails; discovered an outstanding new beer; said goodbye to a young friend; attended two glorious weddings; considered new career paths; considered moving across the country; returned to boatbuilding; and rethought some of the fundamental structure and meaning of my book.

There is much to do!

When I Was Young

When I was young, I didn't believe in the real world. Not really, anyway. The world where I got up and went to school and looked at cars and heard boring conversations about politics was, I was certain, a front for something deeper, richer, and much more wild.

If I could just break through!

There were signs everywhere, I told myself. The whispers of wind; a falling leaf arranged just so on the forest floor; a cat that looked at me a little too long. The constant belief that this world wasn't all there was kept me going through the mundanities and frustrations we all forget about as we grow up.

I didn't yearn for this other place to exist; I knew it did and I yearned to get there somehow. How? How? Through dreams? Hypnosis? Travel? Time travel? Astral projection? How do I break through?

And the saddest thing of all was when that started to fade and I grew up.

But even now I catch myself wondering: what if that tree bending in a storm is a signal; what if that dark little hollow in the forest is a doorway; what I touch this boulder and my hand presses on through?

It turns out I have found the way through, after all: what we call "fiction" is really just my way of communing with that Other Place. I close my eyes and imagine it, and then I write it down and try to bring back some of the wildness and strange beauty.

Because, to roughly quote Tennyson: All experience is an arch through which gleams the untravell'd world.