* * Planning the next novel

I’ve been thinking about a future book, a novel that begins at the Old Fiddlers Convention in Galax and continues over the span of three to four months in the neighboring communities. 

I’m a bit of a fatalist, as I’m sure are many other people these days.  I’m considering a  scenario whereby the national power grid is attacked by terrorists. The attacks on 9/11 would be considered modest indeed to the destructive effect of the extended loss of electricity across wide swaths of the nation, particularly if not easily remedied.  Almost nothing our society depends upon happens without electricity.  The story would follow the lives of several families and their efforts to feed themselves while hosting some out-of-towners who are stranded by the circumstance. 

One of my advisors suggested that might be too ambitious, given the technical nature.  He suggested perhaps a theme of a musical prodigy who in spite of her parent’s best intentions to study classical music, was enamored by Appalachian Roots music.

The Old Fiddlers Convention, now in its 75 year, is a setting that provides rich opportunities for exploring the themes of the day.  At many music events, there are performers and there are audience members.  In Galax, there seems to be no clear distinction between the two.  The stage events are fun, but the real event is in the countless jam sessions scattered throughout the park; it’s the state’s largest and longest tailgate party.  If the lights went off, I’m sure the party would still go on, especially if people had difficulties with transportation and getting home.  But what then?  Southwest Virginians are a friendly, hospitable lot, but this hospitality would be strained to the max if food stopped showing up at the grocery stores. 

I welcome your input.  Write and let me know what kind of story you’d like to read.

I wish you and yours a very happy and prosperous New Year!

* * Pondering the new mole

I found a mole on my scalp.
It’s not something we tend to think about very much, but we have one body each – no more, no less.  And within it we have a brain, which provides the personality, the intellect, and the “soul.”  A functioning body and a functioning mind are necessary for a functional being. Neither lasts indefinitely.
Sometimes the mind goes first.  
What’s so maddening about diseases like Alzheimer’s is that while the body still functions, the brain dissolves from within, like termites through old wood.  
With diseases like Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), the brain still does fine, but the body’s muscles stop receiving signals from the brain.  With no instructions to do anything, the muscles atrophy, typically starting with the extremities but eventually the muscles that control breathing and digestion.
I’ve always felt good about my body.  Certainly there are parts I like better than others.  My legs and arms are stubby and I’m not the athlete I’d like to be.  I’m typically the last person to reach the top of the hill when hiking or bicycling.  My face will never grace the cover of GQ and my hair is rapidly thinning in male pattern baldness. But my skin has always been my friend.  It is generally free of excessive wrinkles, moles, or even freckles.  It heals quickly when I damage it. I like the impression, “He is comfortable in his skin.”
I’ve tried to be a good keeper of my body.  Sure, I do some physically near-reckless things, like bicycling and motorcycling.  But I gave up consumptive vices decades ago. I try to breathe clean air, consume healthy food, and drink clean water. Someday, regardless of any best efforts, either the mind or body or both will begin to break down.  That’s what aging is all about.
But as I said, I found a mole.  It reared its ugliness at the top of my head. And it came on quickly.  One day I was brushing my hand across my scalp and there it was.  Jane said she didn’t see anything when she cut my hair last, a few months ago.  Sometimes a mole can be the harbinger of evil, unhealthy things.
I have had several friends who within the past year or two have contracted cancer.  One of them, Bob McGraw of Tazewell, died last year of melanoma, skin cancer. Cancer seems like that awful thing that attacks internal organs, not the thin film of an organ that is the skin.  In my mental image, one day a body is free from cancer and the next day it isn’t.  Certainly there are things like smoking that make cancer more likely, but the thing that triggers it seems arbitrary.
Last summer I shared a campsite with a friend and one of his friends who happened to be a retired laboratory oncologist. It was his job to analyze the things surgeons sent to him that had been removed from patients’ bodies.  He would determine whether they were benign or malignant.  He told me, “One day I had lunch at the hospital with a doctor friend.  After lunch, he wasn’t feeling well, so he spoke with another surgeon about his symptoms.  Within two hours, he was on the operating table.  The tissue specimen they sent me was malignant.  Within six weeks, he was dead.”
This morning, in a driving snowstorm, I went to a dermatologist.  He numbed my scalp and sliced off my mole with a razor blade.
This moment, as I type, snow is turning to sleet.  My scalp aches mildly where the local numbing chemical begins to wear off.  And a lab tech is determining whether the small mass of my mole is kind or malevolent, and whether its presence will quickly fade to afterthought or whether it will portend a shortened life of misery and uncertainty.

* * Dancing (okay, walking) in the moonlight

We get it almost everynight
When that moon gets big and bright
It's a supernatural delight
Everybody was dancing in the moonlight

            Van Morrison

Okay, I wasn’t really dancing, but I just returned home from a 4-mile walk in the moonlight on the Huckleberry Trail with my dog, Shasta.  I love to walk; she does too.  It’s great exercise and good thinking time.  This time of year, if I’m in my office all day, it’s dark by the time I get home.  So if I’m going to walk at all, it’s usually in the dark.  I don’t prefer the dark, but I don’t mind it, either.  Especially if there’s a moon out, there’s enough light to see where I’m going and to stay on the trail. It’s occasionally spooky, but the solitary aspect is enticing.
The moon is a few days from full, at which time it rises at sunset. As walked around 7:00 p.m., it was directly overhead.  Only the brightest stars of Orion and Cassiopeia dared to compete with the overwhelming brightness of the moon.  Shasta and I cast a clear moon-shadow as we walked.  
As my third book starts approaching its completion, I’m thinking about book number four.  In this one, I plan to return to the world of fiction. I have a setting and a premise, but not yet a story.  The opening scene is at the Old Fiddlers Convention in Galax.  The gates open at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday in August, even though the competitive events don’t begin until Wednesday night.  As people come streaming in to claim their usual spots, the power goes out.  No big deal, people think, as it will be restored quickly.  But this is not to be. The power grid has been attacked and the power won’t be restored forever, or at least that’s the conclusion people begin to reach as the days that follow remain in the dark.
Shasta and I traverse an open area south of the entrance to Warm Hearth Village.  There are a few homes nearby and some have Christmas tree lights sending lumens into the cold night sky.  Coal is being burned in the power plants in West Virginia, turning water into steam that spins turbines that powers the shafts of dynamos, sending electrons streaming at nearly the speed of light through miles of copper wire, powering our civilization.
I’m wearing three layers atop and two on my legs.  I have a polypropylene shirt, a fiber-pile shirt-jacket, and my heavy down parka.  I wear long johns and heavy wool Swiss army pants.  I have wool gloves and a stocking cap.  It’s biting cold, perhaps 18F, but I’m comfortable.  As my legs loosen and my pace quickens, I watch vapor clouds stream from my nose and mouth.  
We enter a wooded area between Hightop and Merrimac Roads.  Where the sun hasn’t hit the trail since a dusting of snow fell a few days earlier, there are lots of patches of ice that crunch when we walk over them.  
My mind drifts back to my book and the idea of living without electricity.  The sun will still rise and the birds will still sing.  But gasoline won’t get delivered to the stores that sell it and what’s there won’t be pumped into our cars.  We won’t be going nowhere. Fresh food at the grocery stores will spoil in a few days and there won’t be new deliveries. And the lights won’t come on.  We’ll spend lots more time in the dark and we’ll be in bed much earlier, hungry.  
Shasta and I enter the area that once was the Merrimac coal mine.  Coal hasn’t been mined here for decades, but this area is thought to have provided the coal that made the steel used in the Confederate warship the Merrimac.  Ghosts of the coal miners are all around and much of the ground is still black.  
We turn around just before the long bridge over the active rail line not far from the New River Valley Mall.  The bridge has a slope to it, and with ice on the boards, I don’t want to risk sliding on it.  The trail gets lots of use, more all the time.  But tonight it belongs to Shasta and me; there’s nobody else around.
The moon is so bright I can see the outline of trees on nearby hillsides.  I’m not exercising hard enough to work up a sweat, but I become warm enough to open my parka and unzip my jacket underneath.  Shasta ambles along, oblivious to the cold.  
Most people, I’m sure, take electricity for granted.  I think some people believe it is manufactured magically behind the wall socket.  I’ve always been haunted by the fragility of it.  If and when it was to ever be gone, it would change every aspect of our lives. It is a burden of dread that sometimes I can’t shake.
We reach the car and electro-mechanical things quickly happen again with the turn of a key.  We drive the short half-mile trip to our street and return to our electrically treated home, where the heat pump churns away quietly outside the living room window.



* * Finishing the new book, Harmonic Highways

Legions of my fans (okay, actually just one fan) asked me recently about the progress of my upcoming book, Harmonic Highways: Motorcycling Virginia’s Crooked Road.  Here’s an update.
The book is essentially complete.  It is written and typeset.  I did the design work myself, learning to use InDesign, which is the industry standard graphic design tool.  I got lots of help from my friends, principally Josh Wimmer who used to work for me at Christiansburg Printing.  It looks pretty good, if I say so myself.
Several careful readers, including Mary Ann Johnson, Charlie Brown, Sally Shupe, and my wife Jane have edited the text.  I can’t claim it is 100% error free, but I hope it’s pretty darned close.
I have a real graphic designer working on a cover for it.  That will hopefully be completed within a week or two.
Once the book is fully ready, I face a dilemma.  When my first book, The Spine of the Virginias, was nearing completion over a year ago, I was interested in having it taken on by an established publisher. Being a first-time writer, I felt there was some implied legitimacy in having a publisher take it on.  Mary Holliman at Pocahontas Press took it last November and, working with a student intern from VT, had it completed by June.  In July Mary got sick and she died in August.  So the book fell back into my hands for sales, marketing, and distribution. 
Meanwhile, since Mary didn’t publish fiction, I self-published my novel, Union, WV. With her death, both books are now in my hands.
I love public speaking and have been successful at selling books when I’ve been able to find receptive audiences.  But I haven’t been successful at getting the media to do interviews or book reviews.  Those are things a good publisher can do. On the negative side of having publishers, distributors, and retail stores, there are more hands in the till.
I’m in active conversation with a publisher now. We’ll see where this goes.
Thank you for your interest and support.  Stay tuned!


* * Fixing our economy

Big global policies reach into our lives in meaningful ways. Everyone wants our Great Recession to end, but the policies recent administrations have put in place indicate otherwise.

As I walked on the north shore of the New River recently in Fries, Virginia, I could almost picture the grand cotton mill that operated there from 1903 until 1989. The buildings have been razed and only the dam, once used to generate power for the mill, remains. Its closing not only cost the employment of 1700 people, but sent the town into an economic tailspin from which it has yet to fully recover. Many locally-owned downtown retailers and support businesses are still closed.

The story of Fries is not unique. The demise of local manufacturing and independent retailing means the loss of core jobs throughout our region and nation. Outsourcing and corporatization has been the order of the day.

Today the economy is suffering from a widespread recession from which recovery has been slow and weak. It will remain slow and weak because everyday people aren’t spending. They’re not spending because they don’t have jobs. They don’t have jobs because the jobs have been shipped overseas. Rich people have benefited by the exploitation of cheap wages from overseas operations while our income gap widens.

Governmental polices have long made this happen and both parties are complicit.

Decades ago, Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, said famously about farming, “Get big or get out.”  Southwest Virginia was once filled with small, family owned farms, but it is almost impossible for an independent farmer to make a living wage today. There are tragically few dairies, canneries, or meat-packing facilities processing locally grown food.

Ronald Reagan championed “Trickle-down economics” arguing that in making rich people richer the money would flow through job creation to the masses. Instead of flowing down, it flowed overseas where corporations could employ cheap labor unencumbered by workplace safety and environmental protections.

Bill Clinton brought us NAFTA and GATT (acronyms for North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement and General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade, respectively) which absolutely annihilated local manufacturing. To his credit, a decade later Clinton was contrite about it, admitting about his corporate farming backed initiatives to eliminate crop tariffs, “It was a mistake that I was a party to ... I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did.”  About his financial deregulation that paved the way to the current crisis, he said, “I think (my advisors) were wrong and I think I was wrong.” 

George W. Bush was worse, turning a total blind eye to the machinations of the financial industry and passing along massive tax breaks to the rich who often took their money overseas.

Barack Obama has favored stimulus packages and bailouts. While they have been successful in resuscitating Wall Street and the automotive industry, the costs have been on the backs of everyday taxpayers. Today’s recession is not of the upper class, which has continued to prosper at the expense of everyone else.

Globalization, counter to the prevailing myth, was not spawned organically or spontaneously from enhanced technologies for worldwide communication or the inevitable result of free markets.  Rather, it owes its prominence to deliberate, long-term, purposeful policy decisions.

Recently, Governor Bob McDonnell said, “We are continuing to improve Virginia's pro-business, pro-job climate by providing new tax credits for major job creators, streamlining our permitting process to get businesses up and running faster, protecting our sound right-to-work laws, proactively investing in economic development projects and balancing our state budget through reducing government spending, not by raising taxes on job-creators and workers.”

McDonnell seemingly understands the problem but his steps will be ineffectual because they don’t address the root causes. What will get us out of this mess? 

We must end the programs and policies that coddle corporations at the expense of small businesses.

We must recognize and reverse the policies that help ship jobs away.

We must as citizens, through our voting, support the candidates that make local development a high priority. We must support our local businesses, even if their products cost more, keeping the money local.

We must insist our trading partners provide the same environmental and workplace protections we have.

We must tax the energy used in transportation (and offset that tax through reductions in income and dividends taxes) to make locally-produced goods more competitive relative to imports.

We must overturn NAFTA and resume reasonable trade protections.

And finally, we must resume reasonable taxation of the wealthiest citizens to provide funds for infrastructure repair and development.

If this recession is to ever abate, it will be because we end the policies that killed local jobs. Where is the politician who “gets it”?