On The Road Again - 2

My Summer Road Trip, part 2

I understand that not everyone would drive so far just to go past a house from one's childhood, but that's me. In childhood trips with my parents, it seemed that my father loved to drive more than arrive. 

It seemed he tried to see how far he could go away from home. We did arrive at places, of course, but that was only a side-effect of the driving. I recall one trip, as we were returning home, he spent the whole afternoon/evening driving back and forth looking for the farm where he'd spent his boyhood in rural Nebraska. We didn't locate it by the time it was dark, so we continued on home.

For me, the driving is more than half the point: to drive is to move through time and space. Good music helps. It's better to traverse open spaces, away from all civilization, just grasslands and distant mountains, the horizon always retreating, giving way, teasing us. The mind becomes soft, can compose ideas, especially for me story ideas, while the other parts of the mind stay focused on the driving itself. I practically plotted the entire novel of FLU SEASON 4, which I started writing on my laptop in hotel rooms each evening.

The next stop on my summer trip, because it was on the way and I'd put off visiting for a long time, was the unassuming town of Forest City, Iowa. It's notable as the manufacturing base for the Winnebago recreational vehicles. Yet I'd long vowed to visit it out of spite. Why?

I speak of the notorious Waldorf Week, an event in my past which changed the course of my life. While I sought a long-term academic position (a.k.a., tenure-track professor) after graduating with my Ph.D., I applied to little Waldorf College in Forest City. I thought a small college, like the one where I got my B.S. degree, would be ideal for me. With this telling, I don't mean to disparage the school, now called Waldorf University. It is merely the piling on of ridiculous circumstances of this week which makes the telling a poor amusement.

In mid-May of a year more than a decade removed, the folks at Waldorf arranged a phone interview with me because I lived in upstate New York. I had a good interview. They sent additional questions by email and I replied immediately with my answers. The next day, further impressed, they invited me to visit the campus. (Usually, a school will reimburse travel expenses for the finalists.) 

The travel arrangements were rather arduous but I got them made in a single day and left home the next morning. I drove 90 minutes from my home in Utica to Albany, parked my car at the airport, flew to Chicago, changed planes and flew on to Minneapolis, and checked into an airport hotel for the night. The following morning, I picked up my rental car from the airport and drove south into Iowa, arriving in Forest City by mid-afternoon. I drove around the city and eventually checked into the designated hotel, an out of the way family-run lodge in the woods which seemed quiet. 

A realtor picked me up to show me housing possibilities were I to win the job and move here. Then I was picked up from the lodge by one of my future colleagues and taken to have dinner at the department chair's house, seven people around the table, a chance to get to know each other. So far, so good. 

Back to the lodge, I settled in, ran through my presentation and refreshed my memory on other matters for the next day. I wanted to get a good sleep because it was to be a full day of campus events. However, when I turned out the lights, a little earlier than my usual time, I noticed the noise from the TV in the next room. I tried to ignore it, expecting the guest to turn it off eventually. But it continued. This being a family establishment, there was no night manager. The noise continued, just loud enough I could not ignore it. I dared not take any sleeping pill for fear it would leave me groggy the next day.

Finally, I gave up and got up, got myself ready for the day and went over my notes again as I waited for a different colleague to pick me up and take me for breakfast. That turned out to be a rather lovely coffee cafe. I thought enough coffee would compensate for the lack of sleep. A little, yes, but my bleary eyes would not focus. I blinked through all the HR talk and additional paperwork. 

Then I was ushered into an auditorium for my "teaching demonstration", a traditional hurdle for would-be professors. I was not as prepared for the lesson as I could've been. My forte is to "wing it" and "go with the flow", drawing from the energy and interaction with my students to keep the lesson light yet informative. Into the auditorium came the entire faculty, maybe 70 professors, and I stood on a stage without even a podium as if giving a lecture. It was hardly a realistic situation for a classroom lesson. I felt embarrassed, having them leave their important work for little ol' me. Of course I bombed, not being able to think on my feet because of too little sleep. They filed out, dropping off their evaluation forms.

I believed I'd failed at that point, but I recovered during our working lunch, where I gave sharp, often profound, meaningful answers to their pre-written questions on things related to our field. I was lucid and witty, charming and professional. I thought I might have a chance. A tour of the campus followed. Then I was returned to the infamous lodge where my rental car remained parked all day.

I'd gotten rather sweaty in my suit and tie by then, but eager to get away. I was on a schedule. I drove north to Minneapolis, arriving at rush hour. I got to the airport, turned in the car, returned to the same hotel for the night. As arranged, the next morning I flew to Chicago, changed planes, flew to Albany, picked up my car and drove home to Utica. 

Monday through Friday: Waldorf Week.

I did not get the position, as I expected. They gave it to the other candidate. Just the two of us. Oh, well. I had many other interviews before and after, and went on several other campus visits before landing the position in Oklahoma where I taught for 11 years. But the intensity of that single hectic week lives on in family lore.

Returning there this month, driving up from my hotel in Clear Lake, it was still early. I stopped at the same coffee cafe and had a fine breakfast and coffee. I drove to the campus. I stood in front of their historic main hall. I grimaced while taking a selfie, confident in my rebuke: "I'm retired now."

Then I drove through the corn fields to connect with Interstate 90 just over the border in Minnesota - only to discover that the on-ramp to go west was closed for construction! I decided to go east and get off, swing around and back on going west. The two-way road was slow enough, however, that I could pull over to the shoulder and do a U-turn between orange barrels into the opposite direction to continue my trip west. 

Eventually, I entered South Dakota and stopped at a visitor center to plan the next phase of my trip. I would, however, come to discover that I-90 would remain the bane of my travelling existence for the duration of my trip. Easily 50% of I-90 was under some kind of renovation with barrels taking us down to a single lane or having both directions on one side while the other side was torn up. This was not to be the summer of I-90 love.

I went out of my way to visit Devil's Gulch, a small gorge where Jesse James supposedly leaped over on his horse while pursued by a posse of lawmen. You wouldn't notice it from the county roads through the fields, but they say it's quite deep, a cleaving of the earth under the water. Then I drove on, heading across South Dakota, lost in the endless landscape.

NEXT: The Long Way West - with a detour!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

On The Road Again

My Summer Road Trip, part 1

So there I was: eating a rather inauthentic burrito in a no-star Mexican restaurant on the north side of Independence, Missouri. I sat at the south end of a long table, the other end bedecked with a tall birthday cake while various relations whooped and hollered in celebration of one of my cousin's birthday. Suddenly, between bites, I had an epiphany: I could just leave, could get up and leave the table, go out and drive far away and never return. I had my bag packed; I always keep a packed bag with me in case of errant interdimensional tangents opening up. I wasn't expecting any, however; indeed it had been years since the possibility last occurred. 

Actually, I had been planning a road trip ever since the issues of 2020-2022 made the idea disheartening and possibly inconvenient (running out of gas, quarantine checkpoints, etc., yes, the stuff of my FLU SEASON trilogy). Now I was ready to go again. As planned, my route would take me eventually northwest to Montana. I planned to stop at specific scenic locations along the way which I'd never been to in all of my youthful travels.

As my general direction sent me northeast to Kansas City to start my travel, I found myself pushed into a birthday party not of my choosing. Enduring that brief detour, I left my hometown and continued north into Iowa on a bright, sunny Sunday morning. A surprisingly unassuming bit of pasture I hadn't passed through since 2019 when I went to Canada spread out from the pavement as I rolled along. As I drove, I listened to the soundtrack I'd put together for my pandemic trilogy and little by little managed to plot out the next book.

For that 2019 trip, I had it stuck in my head to replicate the travels of my youth when my teacher-vacation parents drove me here and there at their whim while I remained ensconced in the backseat sans seatbelt. I went as far north/northwest as Edmonton before venturing south to slink back into the comforts of Montana, and onward home. In my childhood and youth, we had gone all the way to Alaska.

Not this trip, however. No, the Great White North was not my destination. I had nobody to buy me lunch there. Instead, I would travel to nearer places of childhood significance as well as revisit some places that had glittered with roughshod joy on that 2019 trip. So I began with a deliberate stop in Iowa. Because it is there.

You wouldn't know it to look at me but I once flew from Kansas City, before the vast new airport was built in the countryside far to the north of the city, all the way, non-stop, to Cedar Falls, across the river from Waterloo, in that so-called Iowa. I think I must have been around 14. I know it was summer and I was allowed to fly by myself (there were a few other passengers) on an Ozark Airlines turboprop (no longer in business). 

My purpose there in Cedar Falls was to help my great-aunt (little sister of my grandmother) and my great-grandmother (their mother) build a "dog run" in the small backyard of the house. In exchange for my help, I would be fed and perhaps get a gift later (it was a model airplane kit). My great-aunt raised poodles for show, so being a boy who liked dogs but did not have his own, I also liked that aspect. I got to play with dogs. Back home, our landlord didn't allow dogs. 

I also flew up there in March of my final college year, all coursework having been completed the previous December and awaiting the May graduation ceremony. The purpose then was for me to consider continuing in my field of study at the University of Northern Iowa, where my great-aunt had been a professor (but at that time recently retired). I consulted with a Music professor there about my musical future. The lingering snowy landscape did not impress me, however. In hindsight, I should have given it a go because you never know where you might go if you don't go, you know? So it goes.

I found the house from my youth after a day's drive, long since occupied by other people, and was pleased it looked as quaint and charming as it did during my previous visits. There was no longer the "dog run" I had helped build, yet to my mind everything else remained the same. It had been 40+ years since I had been there, after all. Yet I felt nothing. No nostalgia. This is a phenomena I've noticed when seeing other places from my childhood: my mind knows it is the same place but the emotions I expect to flood me instead evade me. (Same with seeing my cousins after many years' apart.) As I drove the neighborhood, I recognized other places from my two visits. Creepy.

On that first visit at 14, I recall spending my evening hours in the house's cute little attic, which my great-aunt had filled with bookshelves. There was a small desk up there and once I climbed up, I could hide away. While hiding away, I would peruse the books on the shelves or, more typically, sit and type on a story using my great-aunt's manual typewriter. It was one of my first long-form pieces, a rip-off of Dr. Zhivago, which I eventually turned in for a class assignment. The teacher was amazed by my 105-page double-spaced epic. However, my great-aunt constantly urged me to stop typing and get to bed, to stop the racket she was not used to - though she was happy to let the dogs bark!

Finding nothing suitable for overnight accommodations, I drove back across the state and did not find anything that had changed during the day. At the west side, I was close to my next visitation destination, the site of a week which shall live in infamy! I would get my revenge by driving there, parking, and taking a photograph of myself standing there (to prove I was there) and that would put them all to shame! They would feel sorry they hadn't embraced me into their family but sent me home like a sewer-soiled puppy.

NEXT: "Waldorf Hell Week"  and Devil's Gulch!

THEN: The Long Trek West!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

Fictional Fathers for Father's Day - Update #2

I've just finished a dystopian trilogy, FLU SEASON, about a quirky family dealing with a pandemic and the violent fallout from that devastating reality.

Book 1 and 2 are out and Book 3 is finished and coming out this fall. The narrator of Book 1 and 2 is a teen son, describing in Book 1 his sassy never-married mom ("The Book of Mom") and in Book 2 his own family ("The Way of the Son"). So far the story is about this teen boy becoming a man and with that title a husband and father (no spoilers; it was inevitable).

I've done a lot of thinking about that arc as I wrote this family drama. The ideas a boy has about becoming a man and all that comes with that role. The criteria to be met. The duties and responsibilities. The joys and regrets. The fact that the roles keeps changing: son, father, grandfather. Because I've borrowed liberally from my own thoughts and feelings, these novels are deeply personal to me - even though they are, of course, totally fiction. (We know our pandemic ended officially in 2022. But what if it didn't? How would everything be, say, six years on? Eight years? Eleven years? What would remain? How would people carry on?)

Book 3 ("Dawn of the Daughters") is narrated by the daughter of this boy/man/husband/father and tells the continuing story of the family through her entire life, including views of how society has changed post-pandemic. I have ideas for a Book 4 which would be narrated by her grown son, now a father, and describe how he deals with the dystopia of the post-pandemic rebuilt world as well as the effects of having her as his mother. It truly is a vicious circle.

Here is my blog posting for 2020's Father's Day:

Last month, for Mother's Day, I waxed poetic on the three kinds of mothers I happened to have in my novels. Well, turnabout seems fair play, so let me ponder the types of fathers I find in my novels and consider their source.

So I'm sitting comfortably at home this summer, counting the sales of my latest novel, and it hits me! I should be promoting my Father's Day novel, the one titled AIKO. It's a kind of Father's Day story, after all. And because Father's Day is here again, everyone is doing a grad and dad marketing blitz. My just launched novel EXCHANGE has a dad at its center. Unfortunately he has lost his wife and his daughter in a mass shooting, but there are many "dad" tropes as he struggles to put his life back together and find meaning in what remains.

Everyone knows that grads are tired of reading. Dads tend to be reading averse, too. So maybe books do not make the best gifts. Job search books for grads, perhaps. A book on whatever is dad's current hobby, maybe. But fiction too often falls to the dark, dusty shelf of well-intended gifts. Beside the neckties. My own father would rather read through a stack of history and politics books before he would ever crack the cover of a novel. He is ok with wearing a necktie, however.

So how many books are there that feature Father's Day, anyway? Or about fathers in general? Mothers are easy. Brothers and sisters are common. The sweet aunt and the generous uncle are often seen in literature. Fathers are generally the bad guys, villainous, cruel, authoritarian, mean, and uncaring. They are more often than not portrayed as abusers. Sometimes they only appear as the bad memory of a protagonist and we get a couple of graphic incidents to showcase dad's unpleasantness. (I had to do that in A BEAUTIFUL CHILL and A GIRL CALLED WOLF because they were based on real people and their lives; however, fathers in my other novels are thankfully less abusive.) It's almost a stereotype. Fathers get a bad rap, I think. We tend to only hear about the bad ones. Think of Darth Vader, a.k.a. "Dark Father", and others of his ilk.

I think about the fathers in my other novels. My protagonists seem to relate to their fathers very much like I relate to my own father. Funny, that coincidence, right? Write what you know, they say. Or am I drawing on the only role model I have? (Curiously, I'm an only child and my protagonists tend not to have siblings, also - or siblings that are throw-away characters, mentioned but not active in the story. In AFTER ILIUM, the young hero dislikes his dentist father's strictness and is glad to be on his own touring Greece and Turkey after college. In EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS, our dragonslayer hero's father was a military commander killed in battle, so our hero carries only the memory of a violent, frightening man. In A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, the first volume of my vampire trilogy, our poor hero is transforming into a vampire. He is angry at his father for not warning him and for sending him away to live with an aunt. Otherwise, that fictional dad sounds an awful lot like my own father: haughty, disinterested, aloof. In volume 2, SUNRISE, the father comes across disturbingly like my own father at the time I was writing the book: well-meaning but still authoritarian to an uncomfortable degree.

In AIKO, our hero discovers he is a father, then struggles to find his child. There is a brief mention of his own father being stationed in Japan after WWII - like my own father was. After the war, my father went to college on the G.I. Bill and became a social studies teacher, then later a librarian. Now he is deep into retirement, having put his books away for poor eyesight and sleepier days, not to mention the devastation of a hurricane.

When I think of my father, the image that comes most readily to my mind is of him sitting in his reading chair, reading: reading in such a focused, determined manner that I could get away with literally anything because nothing could disturb him. Thus, he was separated from my everyday activities, always there but on the sidelines, uninvolved in my youthful experiences. And that is what I learned of fatherhood: 1) provide the family income, 2) relax at home after the job, 3) fix things around the house and yard. Also, 4) be master of the castle, 5) enforce the rules, and when necessary (6) represent the family like a knight in shining armor when some authority or institution challenges us. He is the (7) champion, the protector, the lord of the manor. And that is, for better or worse, how I portray the fathers in my novels: powerful yet distant. 

If you've been following this blog you probably know I'm a dad. It's a weird feeling knowing there is someone living in the world partly as a result of my actions. Sure, we can imagine clones, or cyborgs, but another human? That's crazy. Like us and yet not like us. And eventually they go their own ways and have their own lives and we scratch our heads and think What just happened? Now my offspring is finishing college, studying to be something in the medical field. This is after going through Army training to be a combat medic.
UPDATE: Finished university, started her career in medicine, got married, living large.

As I think back on the past 23 years, I can pinpoint a few things I did that might have helped raise this baby to adulthood. But there are just as many other things I did about which I have no clue. Maybe they helped, maybe not. Only my grown child can tell. I'm pleased, even proud, of how this googly little bundle of joy overnight became this awesome adult who vaguely resembles me in appearance and words and behavior. 

So for now, I must pass the reins to my protégé. No longer do I need to concern myself so much with me doing great things and achieving this and that and telling my child about, you know, the things I can boast about. Now it is time for me to boast about my grown child, to note what this new adult is doing, and praise the new things, the new deeds, of this adult - to praise and be proud of what my child has done more than being happy at what I have done. I've actually inserted this idea into the thoughts of my protagonist dad in EXCHANGE. Oh, I will still write books, of course - until the keyboard is ripped from my cold, dead fingers. But now it's no longer all about me. It's about the generation we produce and what they will do as we fade gently into that good night.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.