Jaws, The Underground Railroad and Camels

Happy Mid-Summer,

After two years of writing and fretting over the story, A Different War Entirely is finally for sale on Amazon and I’m here to jaw about it. As before, I apologize for this blatant self-promotion of my new novel, but sadly, that’s a key way word spreads about ‘craft’ novels like mine.

Some teasers about the plot:

In 1974, 50 years ago, Peter Benchley published his novel Jaws. A fine scary novel, a great even scarier movie.  One of Benchley’s great-great grandfathers was a Massachusetts state senator from Boston, way back before the Civil War.  He didn’t write a spooky novel about a big fish with big teeth, but as a widower he did move from Boston to San Antonio and opened a music school. Grandson Peter has mentioned that he suspects Grandpa Benchley’s music school was a front for the underground railroad in Texas, his building a layover for men who’d escaped from Texas plantations and were running for Mexico. After a while, Benchley closed the school and returned to Boston for unknown reasons.

In 1856 the U.S. Army imported about eighty Arabian camels to see how they’d do as pack animals on Texas prairies. They did fine, but that’s another story.  A year later a cotton planter imported another eighty camels but they were blocked from being off-loaded in Galveston for weeks because of suspicions the camels’ stench was masking an even worse smell seeping from the ship’s lower cargo hold. A powerful fecal smell coming from kidnapped Africans brought across the ocean in chains to be enslaved in Texas.

In 1857, before railroads connected Central Texas to the Gulf Coast, white men hauled freight between the seaports and San Antonio in mule-drawn wagons. Competing for the same trade, Hispanics carried freight along the same rutted road in huge ox-drawn two-wheeled carts. More and more businessmen protected their profits by hiring the larger, slower, but cheaper ox-carts instead of mule-drawn wagons.

To regain their dominance of the Chihuahua Highway a band of angry white muleskinners turn to deadly violence. In disguise they become night raiders attacking trains of ox-carts, destroying and stealing cargo, smashing carts, killing men and beasts.

After two wars with Mexico, much of the Anglo population considered the Hispanic cart trains a threat and sympathized with the night raiders. Regardless, business leaders pressured the governor of Texas to form a new company of Texas Rangers to stop the attacks. Milo McKean and Jesse Gunn, my main characters in A Different Country Entirely once again answer the call to ride as Texas Rangers, this time to stop the night marauders. A vicious "Helena knife duel', night gunfights, waylaid riverboats and inexplicably, ownership of a string of Arabian pack-camels result.

At the same time, a secretive underground railroad is aiding men escaping enslavement on the plantations along the Colorado River. Milo unintentionally becomes entangled in a suspect music school and faces hard choices as his moral compass is challenged. 

And Jesse becomes a ‘cameleer.’  Such is my tale of the Texas cart war of 1857.

Here is the link to the page on Amazon where it’s available as an ebook or a paperback.  Hope you’ll give it a look and a read.

https://www.amazon.com/Different-War-Entirely-Novel-Texas-ebook/dp/B0DBJ5KL9V?ref_=ast_author_mpb

 

 

The Elissa, the Eclipse, and Me

 

On Monday I went on a 6-hour day sail on the tall ship Elissa, based in Galveston, Texas. The Elissa was built in 1877, has an iron hull, and 19 sails, some square, some triangular. She hauled cargo around the world, including Galveston where there is one record from 1882 of the Elissa unloading a cargo of bananas from Central America and reloading with 500 bales of cotton bound for England. A workhorse ship, not a warship, not a pleasure ship. Only one head (toilet) to serve the working crew of about a dozen sailors back in the day. No cannons. She sailed after the days of the Jolly Roger. The pirates were building railroads across America instead. Elissa was rescued (bought) in 1977 from a ship scrapyard in Greece waiting to be cut apart for her iron hull. She was towed to Galveston where for the next five years she was given a new life. In 1982 she opened as a floating museum at Pier 21 in Galveston, and she sails every April.

We sailed from the pier at 10:00, and by 11:30 we left the Houston ship channel. In the Gulf we encountered bigger waves, I got a little seasick, but didn’t lose my lunch. I am a landlubber, for sure. I did look up at the solar eclipse, almost lost in the shifting cloud cover over the Gulf of Mexico.

Mostly though, I gazed upward at the masts, sails, and rigging as crew members climbed the rope ladders attached to the tall masts to the cross-yards (timbers) from which the big rectangular sails hung. Up to eight crew on each yard shuffled outward, clinging to the thick tapered yard, standing on a single rope under each yard to furl and unfurl the big canvas sails. I was spellbound by the slow motion dance those men and women performed, 50 to 90 feet up in the air, just doing the tasks needed to sail the boat. Reaching around the Douglas fir tree trunk yards to wrap the ties around the sails, or unwrap them. All the while the ship did this little up-down, side-to-side motion that turned me green sitting on the damned deck.

From the deck I listened to commands passed along from the professional, itinerant captain, to his key mates, and on down to the local volunteer crew members, all of whom had undergone 25 Saturdays of training during the past year.  Crew members wore color-coded shirts. white, black, green, red, blue. About half the crew were women and the age range looked to be from the 20’s to 50’s.  The culture of sailors was evident even among the volunteers in lots of tattoos and colored hair. All in all, I witnessed a delightfully varied, joyful and informal, but utterly focused crew, working like beavers to get us out there in the Gulf and back again.

The deck of the ship was lined with coils of thick lines (ropes to us non-sailors). Above the deck, the innumerable, endless lines stretched tautly between the 298 white wooden blocks (pulleys), 112 of which were reconditioned during the past year by my good friend and host Dick Gray, during his 312 hours of doing volunteer maintenance work, thereby earning the privilege of inviting me along on a day sail which otherwise costs $300—and are sold out every April. Every adjustment to the set of the sails required deck hands hauling on the proper one line out of the dozens of choices, striving to keep the right tension on the sails. It was a show. 

Oddly, I never went below deck to the head or anywhere else. Dick told me it is mostly a big dark cargo hold, with a little space up front for the crew to sleep. The kitchen is in a little wooden shack on the deck. Anyway, since all the action is on the deck and high up the masts, I was content.

The whole day left me sort of ga-ga, not from being seasick, but from a first-hand, tiny sliver of a look at how the whole world traveled the oceans on little ships without engines for hundreds and hundreds of years. And why navies had to impress (kidnap) men to serve on those tall masted ships. And even after fifty years of reading Hornblower novels and other sailing ship tales about waging war on the high seas, I shiver at the thought of two fleets of sailing ships pounding at each other with cannons at point blank range. Mercy.

Lastly, while the Elissa sports no weapons, we did sail close by a skyscraper size pleasure cruise ship, one of the Carnival Line, based in Galveston. As the cruise ship left the dock, she was escorted, fore and aft (front and rear) by two US Coast Guard patrol boats, each with a manned 50-cal machine gun in the bow (front) of the boat. Riding shotgun to intercept any terrorist boat loaded with explosives, I suppose. I’ve no idea if that practice is common among cruise lines in 2024, but it sure grabbed my attention.

Come July when our family vacations in Galveston, I’m going to take all 12 of us through the Elissa as tourists, and get to see the head. 😊

 There are more photos from my day sail on my facebook page if you are interested. 

Bluebonnets, Crawfish, and Changing Churches

I’ve not added a blog post for several months. In fact, I only wrote one blog post last year. Not that my life has gotten any more dull, but 2023 brought an unexpected curve ball that almost knocked me out of my writer’s box. Since I became a blogger in 2014, I’ve written nearly 200 blog posts, touching on lots of things: writing novels, our travels, family including the births of grandkids and the deaths of both parents, my volunteer activities as a retired guy. As a past high school principal, I wrote of my horror regarding school shootings and my support for banning assault rifles. I probably lost a few readers with that post.  Intentionally, with that one exception, I’ve avoided politics and religion, because no one wins those debates. So, it’s not surprising I’ve not written any posts about my church, which is where that curve ball came right at me by surprise a year ago.

I’m a lifelong Methodist. Mama was a Methodist Church organist for over fifty years. Pop was a devout and active Methodist. Nita was raised Methodist. We married in her childhood Methodist Church. But we also were teenagers of the rebellious ‘60’s, and were a childless young married couple in the ’70’s. For a decade, we didn’t go to church. Then came two sons and a move to a small town where we decided we did not want our kids to be ‘unchurched.’ We joined the First United Methodist Church of Lockhart, and for forty years were active members. It’d take a long paragraph to list all our roles in the church during those four decades, and the church’s importance to our lives.

But our membership and commitment ended in mid-September 2023 when during a Sunday afternoon meeting our congregation voted overwhelmingly to leave the ‘United’ Methodist denomination and attach to a new ‘Global’ denomination.  There was a six-month ‘discernment’ period in which folks took sides. There were several meetings to delve into the pros and cons of staying ‘united’ or going ‘global.’ Our side lost, causing Nita and me to make another tough decision about our own membership in the new ‘global’ congregation.

We and others who voted to remain a United Methodist church had to decide whether our many wonderful friendships and our long commitment to this congregation, or our personal theological beliefs, were more important to our spiritual well-being.

If you don’t know, the key issue was an old issue in which the greater United Methodist denomination was about to reverse its position on homosexuals not being allowed to marry in United Methodist sanctuaries and end the prohibition on homosexuals becoming ordained United Methodist pastors. Nita and I needed no convincing that we stand with the queer community in this one. To us, inclusiveness, not guard rails, reflect Jesus’s teachings. Unsurprisingly, but sadly to us, it turned out 70% of our local congregation disagreed and voted to abandon the United Methodists for the much more restrictive new Global denomination.

The next day, we resigned our church membership of forty years and began visiting United Methodist Churches which had not voted to leave the denomination.  After six months and visiting several churches, we have settled in at Manchaca United Methodist Church in far south Austin, a thirty minute country drive from home, instead of our old one-mile drive. We are making new friends. Our hearts are joyous to be in the midst of other Methodists who share our stance on queer inclusiveness as scripturally sound and personally agreeable. We are pleased to have come out the end of a year-long dimly lit tunnel, to find we are in the light again.

Nita and I are now experiencing that we are not too old or too set in our habits to make a big adjustment supporting our belief that homosexuality is not God’s little boo-boo, a belief that we had long held in quiet suspension, but had not forgotten.

2024 is our new ‘start over.’  Still, we both are striving to maintain our friendships with those who continue to worship in our ‘old’ congregation. It’s working, because Christians really can ‘love the socks off each other’ even as we harbor conflicting views about a few things.

What’s more, yesterday on the drive to and from Manchaca UMC, the bluebonnets along the highway were in full glorious bloom. Easter’s coming, ya’ll, to all of us. Christ is Risen, he is risen indeed.

And for fun, here’s a new bluebonnet and grandkids photo.

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And the other grandson on a spring break trip to New Orleans with a personal dilemma.

Wargaming the Second Day of Gettysburg

 Today, after a long pause in my blogging,  I'm taking a new blog post away from writing and family to instead post about a tabletop wargame with miniature soldiers.

Yesterday, a friend, who was in one of my junior high classes back in the 70's, when I was young green naive teacher, and I gamed a piece of the battle of Gettysburg.

General Longstreet Michael and General Sickles McBride gamed Sickles Salient with Brigade Fire & Fury rules. We were both near-beginners with the brigade version of the F & F rules. Nonetheless, we blundered along without too many pauses to check the book.

The battle went along historical lines. The initial cannonades had minor impact, causing various batteries of both forces to fire with damaged guns through the whole game. The Union's reserve triple battery in the center of the salient proved a tough nut.

The Yankee infantry were not so tough, the scenario design causing them to go 'worn' after a single lost stand. Those guys knew they were stuck out way too far. So the blue infantry brigades fell back all along the line, eventually losing the wheat field to the Rebs on our last game turn. Six hours to play 5 turns, the first two of which were cannonades only. Like I said, our pace was that of learners, not gamemasters.

The rules do have a nice flow to them and I now realize that Brigade Fire & Fury rules better duplicate the long ribbons of Civil War infantry formations than any other rule sets I've played, including Regimental F & F. That surprised me.

Finally, as the Union commander, it was great fun to launch Vincent's Brigade off Little Round Top and smack Law's Brigade in the flank down in the Valley of Death along Plum Run. Less fun to see several other brigades refuse to hold the line after losing a stand.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable day.

Little Hannah, The Accidental Juror, and Little Round Top

I’ve not posted in almost five months, which must mean my life is in one of those periods of routine events taking over. Not blog-worthy. In my world since the end of May, it’s been a hotter-than-hell summer in Texas, with week after week temperatures over 100°.  Even more importantly to Nita and me, our sixth grandchild, Hannah Mae McBride, was born on August 22.  She’s a doll, isn’t she? 

 

And, the sweet girl's birth interrupted the final wrap-up of my new novel, The Accidental Juror.

TAJ is my tenth novel, each having sprung from a yearlong gestation and a final grateful birthing. TAJ took me into new ground as ‘modern’ historical fiction. It’s a fictitious story of a young woman who is the first woman in her county to be summoned for jury service. Historically, women in Texas were not allowed on juries until an amendment to the state constitution passed in November of 1954, so the first women to sit in jury boxes did so in 1955. This was 35 years after the women’s suffrage movement won women the right to vote in 1920. 

My tale is about Lynn Edwards, a 28-year-old-mother who ‘accidentally’ receives a postcard in the mail calling her to jury duty. I won’t be a spoiler, but Lynn encounters resistance and support from unexpected places. Writing about 1955, when I was six, was great fun and little touchy. The fun part was including houses with no air-conditioning but with attic fans, big black corded telephones, the early days of black-and-white television, big flashy cars with big fins, and young men with ‘Elvis’ hair. The touchy part was addressing our segregated society in a way that was realistic. Deciding on an appropriate crime for the trial was important, and I think, but I’m still not really sure, I came up with one that is serious enough and interesting enough to make a good courtroom story.  All to say, please take a look at The Accidental Juror on Amazon. You can read the first chapter by clicking ‘Look Inside.’ Then you can make me happy by buying a Kindle or a paperback version.

Here's the link to the Amazon page:     https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BF2ZRXP4

You may be one of my friends whose connection is through Civil War reenacting, which I’ve regretfully aged out of, helped along by the years of COVID cancellations of events. While I’m not reenacting any longer, I’m still a Civil War nut, having returned to tabletop wargaming with miniature soldiers. Here’s a pic of my brother and me this summer refighting Hood’s assault of Little Round Top at Gettysburg.

Otherwise, it’s the season of the Longhorns and Cowboys, both of which may have long seasons.

Teaching Kids About an Ugly Past

Yesterday I stepped off an airplane that flew directly from Frankfurt, Germany to Austin, Texas. The plane was packed with both Americans and Germans—two nationalities that share the difficult challenge of how to teach our children about the sins of their grandfathers.

My aim today is not to address how we teach our own children about our national sin of three hundred years of legal American slavery. Suffice to say that those of us, like me, whose ancestors owned slaves most likely have some conflicting emotions buried inside. And I suspect those of us whose ancestors fought in the Confederate army simply to defend their homeland from invaders also sometimes question the roots of the ‘lost cause,' in honor of which so many statues were erected on southern courthouse lawns.

But today is about Germany and World War II.

In Nuremberg, Germany, on the last day of our trip, we visited sites where huge Nazi rallies were held, outdoor venues of immense concrete edifices and vast open space for up to half a million people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, chanting, singing, experiencing the emotional high of a shared devotion to an inspirational leader, as they became part of a highly-efficient propaganda machine. As a side note, we learned the citizens who attended these enormous rallies had to buy tickets to the events.

The same day, we ended our tour of WWII Nuremberg by sitting in the courtroom where in 1945, just months after the war ended, 21 Nazi leaders were tried for crimes against humanity in an international court with judges from France, England, the United States, and Russia.

As I stared at the box where the defendants had sat during the long trial, I couldn’t help but think that the trial had offered the German people a free-pass to dump their collective guilt onto those 21 men. To those bakers and housewives whose cities had been bombed to rubble, whose sons had died by the hundreds of thousands for the Nazi cause, the 21 men on trial could conveniently assume the burden of Germany’s national sin of the genocide of millions in the gas chambers and the slave labor of millions more. No doubt such scapegoats were welcomed by the ‘uninvolved’ men and women who no longer needed to rationalize, to look the other way, while mass executions surrounded them during the Nazi years.

One of our German tour guides spoke to the challenge of how in 2022 to teach the children of Germany about WWII. Like here in the USA,  public education is a state-level function, rather than a national one, and we were told there are 16 varying approaches to teaching about WWII and the Nazi regime.

She said until the 1970’s, usually the decade from 1935 to 1945 was generally ignored by teachers who were unwilling and unsure how to teach the years of Hitler’s horrific regime. Schools simply left it to parents and grandparents to let their children know or not know the evil realities behind their devastated country.

From the 1980’s until now, she said there was more coverage of the war and Hitler, but not much about the genocide. An aside: Who knows what was taught to East German children under the Soviet era until the Soviet collapse in 1989?

These days, our guide said there is a growing effort to shift the lens away from textbook photos of the Nazis’ mass rallies and giant swastikas, to stories of everyday citizens who simply endured the era. They are trying to take the memorable Nazi ‘optics’ out of the spotlight. Stop letting the ghosts of the Nazi past define the teaching of the Nazi era to the children of today. Quit showing the propaganda photos the Nazi’s themselves created of their lockstep rallies, the mass ‘Seig Heil’ straight-arm salutes, the adoration of a madman. Replace those visuals with other optics—of what exactly, I don’t know.

As a side note, I personally doubt if the shift to sidestep the terrible Nazi scheme to ‘purify’ Europe by murdering millions of civilians will ever include the chilling photos taken by Americans who first came upon the extermination camps, photos and films which were shown in the Nuremberg trial.

What  was hammered home to me in Nuremberg is that we walk a slippery slope when teaching kids about an ugly past. It's hard, damned hard, to be critical of our grandparents. Yet, sometimes the hard truths need to be dredged up if we expect our grandchildren not to go down the same terrible road that our grandparents did. 

 

 

 

Tunnel Hill and Sixty Years

 

What people like doesn’t change all that much. At least for me. I still love the same woman after fifty-two years. I still wear button-down shirts. And I’ve had the same hobby for sixty years—collecting, painting, and playing tabletop wargames with lead soldiers. Here are two photos of me at the wargame boards in my house, the first one in 1962, the second one in 2022.

The military miniatures haven’t really been cast of lead for a long time now, all the makers having switched to pewter. Our tabletop terrain has vastly improved from chalk-drawn forests on bare plywood, but back then we spent every spare dime on soldiers, not model railroad terrain. My brother and I were poor young teenagers, after all.

Back in the ‘60’s I didn’t care about the history the toy soldiers represented, I just liked to buy them, paint them, and play tabletop games with simple home-grown rules. There was one guy in California named Jack Scruby who sculpted and produced military miniatures for tabletop wargaming. He advertised his catalog in Boys Life magazine, where we discovered him. Now, there are endless choices of companies sculpting and producing highly detailed miniatures of every imaginable historical army from the ancient Egyptians to modern armies, and fantasy figures from Tolkien’s elves and dwarves to post-apocalyptic mutants.

Of late, I’ve taken to playing solo games of specific Civil War battles, with lots of attention paid to replicating the historical terrain and regiments which fought, right down to the correct flags they carried. These photos are of my tabletop today, in the midst of the battle of Tunnel Hill at Chattanooga, Tennessee in November 1863. The tunnel entrance is still there, looking like it did in 1863. It was the challenge to use a paper template of the rock face of the entrance (downloaded from the website of the Fire & Fury game company). Drawing on the methods used in my junior high science fair days, I cut up a cardboard shoebox and shaped the humped tunnel you see in the photo.  

Here's the bigger picture of the game: 

I am perhaps drawn to this particular Civil War battle because I’ve walked the ground a couple of times—it’s now an urban, and neglected, National Park site. And Tunnel Hill is one of the key battles in my first Civil War novel, Whittled Away; And one of the Confederate regiments in the thick of the fighting was the 6^th Texas Infantry, which is the historical regiment chosen by our reenacting club for our name, the ‘Alamo Rifles’ since the men who formed one company of the 6^th Texas came from San Antonio. The photo is us in a sham battle in Tennessee, not Tunnel Hill, though. But our flag in the photo is the same one they carried at the battle of Tunnel Hill.

To close, here is a meme off the ‘net that reminds me of the heroic defense ongoing in Ukraine this week.
Bless those patriots. May God give them the strength to persevere and stay the course.