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.

. 

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