The Coolness of History

I was researching the internet, looking for material to use in my new book, and ran into all kinds of neat stuff. It reminded me how cool history is.

I remember High School history classes. Most of my classmates hated history class. We had to memorize dates and learn all about people who died a long time ago. We read about things that happened way before our parents were even born. The only historical things that my peers paid much attention to had mostly to do with the Bible, which was no surprise since I attended a missionary school in Quito, Ecuador for five years. Also no surprise, looking back at that period, is that I never even heard about Darwin until I got to college. But I loved history class. It was my favorite, by far, and my favorite teacher was the history teacher, Mr. Frey. I am still a big history buff, which explains my fondness for paleontology and geography - to me, Earths' history goes back a long, long, long way. If I had it all to do over again, I would have been an archaeologist, no doubt about it.

I hope everyone at least recognizes the importance of knowing history. The lessons of past should be used as building blocks for the future but, sadly, it seems we are not very good at doing that. I think a lot of young students get turned off about learning history because most courses start by covering things that happened way, way long ago - before iPods even - and then they start working their way to the present. It should be done the other way around. Start from yesterday and work back. The students will get into it, because they will have been a part of it. By the time you go back to events before their birth, they will have gotten into the hang of things and probably pay more attention. They will be able to follow the threads. So when they get to the Crusades, they might draw some parallels to the events of today - and learn from it.

Getting back to my research. The protagonist in my book - an explorer - starts out on his first adventure in 1929, so, among many others, I found the following site.

http://www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/worldhis/wor1929.htm

Some of the events from 1929 that were cool to me:

Jan 7 - Buck Rogers and Tarzan comic strips debut.
Jan 13 - Wyatt Earp US marshall (OK Corral), dies at age 80.
Feb 11 - The Latern Treaty creates the Vatican (world's smallest country)
Feb 14 - Saint Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago Illinois, 7 gangsters killed.
Feb 26 - The Grand Tetons in Wyoming is established as a national park in the United States.
Mar 23 - First telephone installed in White House.
Mar 28 - Democratic constitution goes into effect in Ecuador.
May 11 - First regularly scheduled TV broadcasts (3 nights per week)
May 16 - The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out its first awards
June 25 - President Hoover authorizes building of Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam)
Aug 11 - Babe Ruth becomes first to hit 500 homers.
Sep 11 - San Francisco Mayor Rolph inaugurates new pedestrian traffic light system
Oct 3 - Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes changes name to Yugoslavia
Oct 29 - "Black Tuesday" New York stock market crashes, triggers "Great Depression"
Dec 2 - First skull of Peking man found, 50 km out of Peking at Tsjoe Koe Tien.


Just the tip of the iceberg, of course, but very cool stuff.


Back to research and writing. Cheers.

The Greatest Explorer of All Time

My agent informed me the other day that my "epic" project - two years in the making - was ready to go to market. He's already sending the completed manuscript to editors and publishers. I have a sneaking suspicion that he has already been talking to them, but he's pretty mum about that kind of stuff. This, of course, is great news, and it comes on the heels of selling my first book to Bloomsbury Children's Books, so things are most definitely looking up.

This good news has injected a pulse of much needed adrenaline into my system. I can feel it mixing in with my creative juices. So I have spent most of the morning printing out copies of maps of every corner of the world. You see, the book that my agent is hitting the pavement with, it's special to me. It's full of adventure and discovery. I wish I could tell you all about it, but I have some constraints right now. I can tell you that it's a story-within-a-story. A famous explorer has found something astounding - something that will shake the foundations of science,  and the holy pillars of all religions, to their cores. Evolutionists will have to start again, and so will the religions. It's back to the drawing boards.

Why the maps? Well, it's like this. The completed book is mostly about the discovery, but it is also about how this famous explorer came to make the discovery. He traveled the world over. In that book, you get a sense for these journeys and adventures, but most of it is specific to the timing and places having to do with the discovery - not the rest of this cool dude's experiences. I have started to write a new book about the explorer's life - a fictional biography, written by his son, a respected archaeologist in his own right. That's where the maps come in. Since most of those travels took place starting in the late 1920's and lasted sixty years, I have a lot of history to get right. For instance, it starts in Africa. Do you know all the stuff that was going on during the time there? Do you realize how the map of that continent has evolved over time? The European powers were still fighting over it: the British, the Portuguese, the French. The explorer also travels to Asia, and right into a pre-WWII mess. In fact, he's in Mongolia when the war breaks out. I could go on, but now you know why I need the maps. They are already hand peppered with the significant world events that impacted each place the explorer visited. The research is daunting, but a ton of fun. So I'd better get back to it.

Avery McShane - A Sneak Peek

By now you know that I recently signed my first book deal. I'm not exactly sure when it will be published, but at least I know it will be. I talked to my new publisher and they agreed that I could give you an idea what the book is about. I thought that the best way to do this would be to post my original query letter. This is the one that piqued the interest of my new editor and eventually led to the contract. I toyed with the idea of doling it out in several posts, but ultimately decided that it wouldn't flow too well - so you get the whole thing in one shot. It is written in first person by the young protagonist in the story. Enjoy.

"My name is Avery McShane. I lived most of my growing up years in Campo Mata, smack dab in the middle-of-nowhere Venezuela.  Our oil camp was surrounded by El Monte, what most folks call the jungle. Back in the sixties, at least where we lived, we didn’t have TV. So most everything we did to have fun had something to do with El Monte and mostly it started at our tree house high up in the branches of a huge mango tree. Billy and Todd made up the rest of our super exclusive, no-girls-allowed-ever club called the Machacas, and our clubhouse was in that tree.

It all started when we went to sneak a peek at the dead body they’d just put on the concrete slab around back of the clinic. He was a young Venezuelan gaucho, a cowboy, who had been shot twice right through the heart; not nearly as gross as the guy who got smushed by all the drill pipe the week before, just two half-dollar spots of blood on his denim shirt. We didn’t make much of it until I saw the dead guy’s missing silver spurs at Pablo Malo’s banana farm a few days later. From then on things got a mite out of control.

That’s when Pablo Malo caught us trespassin’ and shot Todd in the butt with his shotgun full of rock salt and his demon dog, Loca came after Billy and me with her nasty fangs. We all got the heck out of Dodge and back safe to our tree house in El Monte, but we knew it wasn’t over. Then I found the note from Pablo Malo in my bedroom; “Next time no salt…” Guess he didn’t want us messing around in his business. Following day, at the hideout, we found all our comic books ripped to pieces and all our most prized possessions smashed and broken. Well, that was about it. He’d dealt the cards and we were going to play the hand he’d dealt - this was war.

After that things got blown up, folks got kidnapped, and there was a heckuva lot more gun play; just like in my favorite western novels. ‘Course we had to deal with the flood, gators, anacondas and other critters too. When the dust got settled, we’d figured out what happened to the dead guy on the concrete slab and a whole lot more that came out in the wash. Looking back, it was a pretty cool adventure, so that’s why I’ve told the story."

The Roundabout

THE ROUNDABOUT

By

G. Leigh Lyons

     

I did not know it when I reached it, but it was there, right in front of me. It was a metaphorical roundabout and I arrived there in my twenty year old beat-up jalopy of a career. I was on my way to a new career dealer, to Harvard Business School. At HBS I would buy a new career vehicle, a powerful one - the Advanced Management Program, model 167.     

So I entered the roundabout and followed the signs to the most hallowed of new career dealerships. There were four options once you entered the roundabout: the first one, to the right, would take me off in a new direction, but I’d still be driving the jalopy. The second, straight across from where I’d entered it, would take me to the dealership. The third was where I intended to go after buying my brand-spanking new career vehicle. And, of course, there was the road I’d just come from – back to where I’d been driving around for the last twenty years.

I negotiated the coughing and wheezing jalopy past the first turnoff. I was tempted, don’t get me wrong. If I went down that road, I would be in my element. My jalopy may not have been pretty, and it may have back-fired every now and then, but I knew it and it had always gotten me to where I wanted to go eventually. The jalopy hadn’t always been dented. It hadn’t always left a trail of blue smoke pouring out of the rusted muffler. When I first bought it, it was a cherry. I bought it in Santa Cruz, California. Powered by a state-of-the-art bachelor’s in Geology, it was fast. I got in the driver’s seat and peeled out on the straightaway of a new career. I screamed past streets with names like First Oil Well, Promotion to Management, and Vice-Presidency. Every now and then I would come up on a major intersection with a street light. At the beginning of my trip, for some reason, the light would always be green and I would just blast past. I’d barely have time to see the names of those major intersections in my rearview mirror – Year One, Year Two. Then the street lights started turning yellow and I’d briefly think about heeding the warning, but I never did. I just kept on barreling through them, like a teenager on his way with his girlfriend to Lover’s Lane. Year Ten Street, Year Fifteen Place flashed by in my peripheral vision.

And then? And then, the lights started turning red and I’d have to stop at the intersections. By now my vehicle was old and dated. I usually had to goose the un-tuned engine to keep it running while I waited for the light to turn green. I’d curse at it. I knew that it needed work. I knew that I needed to take it in and change the oil, maybe replace some parts. It was running hot all the time. People would laugh and point at it as they whizzed past me on their way to where I wanted to go, but they always got there first. By the time I arrived on the scene, the pickings were pretty slim. I was idling at Year Twenty Avenue when I saw the sign on the building across the street.

‘Revitalize your used career vehicle at our dealership – Come to Harvard Business School and drive away in a new 2004 AMP167.’

I had made up my mind, then and there.

And so I passed on by the first turnoff of the roundabout and took the second one; the one to the dealership. The salesmen were slick. They spent a lot of time with me. They introduced me to a lot of other people who’d come to trade-in their old vehicles for new AMP167’s. My old jalopy was easily the oldest and most beat-up of the trade-ins, and I felt vaguely embarrassed, but I loved that old junker. ‘Old Yeller’ had been there for me, through thick and thin, but it was time to put him down and move on. I drove out of the dealership in my shiny AMP167, filled with pride, full of vim and vigor. The world was my oyster. I headed back to the turnabout.

I entered the turnabout again and took the first turnoff, positive with my decision in every sense. I put the pedal to the metal and roared off in the fast lane of the Autobahn of the Future. I got to Venture Capital City in no time and took the off ramp to downtown. I drifted the corners. My tires squealed and left tire marks all over the place. The citizens noticed me and pointed at my new ride - thumbs ups and waving with smiles. I passed almost all the other vehicles being sure to wink condescendingly at the other drivers when I came up next to them. But things started to change in no time. Downtown Venture Capital had fallen on bad times. I started driving around honking my horn to get noticed, but there wasn’t anybody on the road anymore to take notice. Every now and then I’d see a pedestrian on the sidewalk, but they didn’t smile and wave anymore. Thumbs-up turned into finger-up. I wasn’t welcome. They didn’t want me. They had their own problems.

I went back to the Autobahn, tears of rejection running down my cheeks. My eyes were blurry with the salty water of failure and I missed seeing the onramp to Entrepreneurville and Small Businesston. Instead, I headed back the way I came from, in the direction of the turnabout. I got caught in a huge traffic jam and it seemed like it took me months to reach it. It gave me a lot of time to think, but try as I may, I really didn’t know which way to turn, where to go. At least I’d been able to gas up the tank, and the trunk was full of groceries, so my stay in VC City had at least given me enough to live on for a while. It wasn’t a total loss.

I finally reached the turnabout. Almost all of the vehicles before me had taken the turnoff directly across from me, and those that didn’t had headed back to the dealership to trade-in for new vehicles that could navigate the off-road conditions of the unknown beyond the Autobahn. I could see some of them now, in their new four-wheel drive, V-8, snorkel-fitted off-road career vehicles, headed for the wild frontier of a new economic reality. They headed in a steady stream, back up the Autobahn. Not one of them had taken the turn-off that led back to where it had all started. But I did.

I headed back down the road of my past life. I ignored the signs that said ‘One Way’, ‘Do Not Enter’ and ‘Wrong Way’. The Career Police started chasing me in their progressively vintage vehicles, but they didn’t stand a chance of catching me in my speedy AMP. It made me smile, mostly, when I passed those places I’d visited before. Awash in nostalgia, I zoomed back in time; past Year Twenty Avenue, Year Ten Street. I lost track of time, lost in my thoughts and my memories. Before I knew it, my AMP167 was bumping and bouncing over a puddle-filled dirt road surrounded on sides by the jungle growth of my childhood home in Venezuela. I knew exactly where I was. It all came back to me as if it were yesterday. I drove over the cattle guard and into Campo Mata, the oil field camp that had been my home for the first ten years of my life. I drove past the nine-hole golf course, the Commissary, the Clinic and past the Texaco offices where my Dad had worked. I pulled into the gravel driveway of my old home and parked the AMP under the open awning where my Dad used parked his 1965 Ford Falcon company car. I didn’t go inside the house. Instead I headed across the clearing behind the house, through the barbed-wire fence that marked the edge of the camp and the beginning of the wild untamed jungle that surrounded Campo Mata. I could not wipe the smile from my face. This was where I belonged. I had never wanted to leave in the first place. And now that I was back, I would never leave.

I walked into the jungle and down the path that I had used so many times growing up. That stupid monkey was still there screaming at me from his perch high up in the Kapok tree. The ferns were wet and the ground was muddy from a recent rain shower. I took my Gucci’s off and tossed them into the lush underbrush, followed by my argyle socks, my starched Brooks Brothers dress shirt and the keys to the AMP. I wouldn’t need those things anymore, not where I was going. My heart raced as I got closer to it. And then I came to the clearing and set my eyes on it for the first time in forty years - the tree house in the Mango Tree.

I climbed up the planks that Billy and I had nailed into the trunk those many decades ago and into the club house. Everything was there. The comic books stacked in the corner and the jars full of all kinds of jungle bugs and creatures we’d collected. The holsters with the cap guns hung from their nails on the wall. The Louis L’Amour westerns and even the old Playboy magazines that Todd had stolen from his parents were where we’d left them. Of course, the room seemed a lot smaller to me now, but it didn’t matter. It was just right. I sat down cross-legged on the wood floor. The breeze brushed through the single open window of the tree house, flipping the first page of a Spiderman comic on top of the stack next to me. I was home again, where I belonged, where I wanted to be.

I picked up the pad of blank paper, a yellow chewed up pencil, and began to write. It is what I would be doing for the rest of my life - my little foible. It was, I realized, what I should have been doing from the beginning. It’s just that it had taken me this long to figure it out. I had driven down the road of convention, headed in the direction everyone thought I should, including me. And then I got to the roundabout and the rest was history.

It's not that I don't like you...

First, let me clarify something I wrote in my first post. I wrote that "I get why people don't like the U.S." I got a lot of "so you don't like Americans?" feedback - that kind of thing. Not the case at all. If anything, I have a greater appreciation for this country - yes, and the people who live in it - than most. I am not alone, because there are many TCK's (Third Culture Kids) out there who share my perspective. I meant that there are lots of things not to like. Our sense of entitlement is one. Our centrist view of the world is another. One of the worst ones, is that we pass judgement on people and countries beyond our borders, without the proper level of education about them. I guess I do a little of the same, only in reverse. Which leads me to the plot of today's post. As usual, I will get around to it in a roundabout way.

What do I mean by education? It's not the formal, "I read all the books about them and follow the news" kind of education. It's more the "been there and done that" kind. College learning is great and it can certainly enhance your understanding of other cultures, but it cannot compare to the learning you get from living somewhere - and I'm not talking vacations. A week long stay at a resort in Cancun does not make you an expert on Mexico. A business trip to Frankfurt doesn't allow you to peg Germans either. On the other hand, if you have lived in a country for years, and actually interacted with the place and the people, you have received the kind of education I'm talking about.

One of my favorite quotes - it's even on my FB profile - is by Mark Twain, also known as Samuel Clemens:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

- Innocents Abroad 

As much as I like it, it isn't quite complete. I wish it had started with "Living in foreign places is fatal to prejudice..." It would better reflect what I'm getting at.

Don't get me wrong, again. Not everybody can have the privileged life I've enjoyed. It's just not doable. But wouldn't it be great if, instead of sending our troops to foreign countries to fight wars, we sent citizens abroad to live and interact with the local people? Send each person to say, two countries with distinct cultures. Maybe six months in Indonesia and six months in Bolivia - Peace Corp like. It doesn't have to be to do charitable work necessarily - although that would be nice - but to contribute, to really get into the mix. I'm no genius, but it would probably be more constructive than shooting them. Wars and fights, unfortunately, are  inevitable, but when we're taking a break from destruction, we could could try to make it up to them.

So the title of this post is "It's not that I don't like you..." - partly to segue into my earlier clarification, partly to get into one of the more insidious symptoms of being a TCK (technically, an ex-TCK, since I am only a kid at heart). That symptom is that I don't make close friends. I have lived here on the Puget Sound for almost five years. I have not made a single real friend - not one - and it's my fault. Strangely, I don't even really try.

Why? Not really sure. Could be that what's interesting to most people who have lived their whole lives in the States isn't interesting to me. Maybe it's a horrible thing to say, but last Sunday's sermon at church doesn't light my fire. The gossip about the neighbors and what they did the other day doesn't grab me. I do like to talk sports, especially soccer, but I don't need a friend to do that. An acquaintance will do, and I do have a lot of those.

The basic issue is that, to me at least, a friend is someone who comes from where you come from - more figuratively than literally. They don't have to agree with you, and the best ones will be sure to let you know when they don't, but they get you. You can tell them anything and they'll get it because they know. Of course, a lot of this is my fault, because they're out there, all around me I suppose, but I don't leave the door open wide enough to let them in. I'm too judgmental. Most people - way most - don't get me; don't get us, the TCK's. Don't feel sorry for me though. It's just the way it is.

And I have written, researched back-up for this friend malady. All TCK's should read the book 'Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds' by David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken. Don't have it? Buy it. Read it. It's bang on. Here's a snippet:

"We carry knowledge from past experiences - often including special knowledge of people, places, and processes - but none of that knowledge has use in this new place [insert, the U.S.]. No one knows about our history, abilities, talents, normal responses, accomplishments, or areas of expertise. Sometimes it seems they don't care..."

"People may now see us as boring or arrogant because we talk about things, places, and people they have never heard mentioned before. We feel the same way toward them because they talk about local people and events about which we know nothing."

I will try to be better about this whole friend-making thing. We'll see.

American in a Foreign Land called the U.S.A.

I am an American. I was born in the U.S., but I grew up in foreign countries, starting with Venezuela. I spent my first ten years or so growing up in an oil field camp in the middle of what the locals called El Monte; sort of a cross between the jungles of Brazil and the savannas of Africa. It was the 60's, and it was a different world. Back then I could wander around on my own without worrying my parents. No one was going to kidnap me and our camp was never under a terrorist threat. I spent a lot of time in El Monte with my buddies. We had a treehouse in a huge tree in El Monte, on the other side of the barbed wire fence that lined the perimeter of Campo Mata, which was the name of the place.

We were not exactly integrated with the locals. Just about everything in the camp had been shipped over from the States. I'm not sure, but I think that even the cinder blocks and concrete used to build our houses and office buildings were from the States. We had a golf and tennis club, and I know for sure that the bowling alley was from the States - I remember the Brunswick logo everywhere. The club had a pool and tennis courts and a big area with Texas-sized bar-b-que pits. The coolest thing about the club was the outdoor movie screen; a big concrete slab that towered up from a grass lawn. The kids used to play around in front of the screen before the movie started while the adults sat at tables underneath an open patio covered by a corrugated roof. They drank beers and smoked a lot - and laughed a lot.

It was a great upbringing and I will spend much more time getting into the details: the adventures, the dangers, the tragedies and, of course, all the fun. And I should probably let you know that we also lived for five wonderful years in Ecuador and another in Iran. I have also spent the majority of my career living and working in South America, mostly in Argentina and Bolivia. But before I tell all those stories, I want to state my reason for starting this, my first blog.

You see, I have never felt at home in the States. I mean, I'm an American and I am proud to be one, but I just don't feel like one, not in the traditional sense. I get why people in other countries don't seem to like us and, since I was raised in some of those same countries, I share some of those views. I'm just not comfortable in my American skin. It's like a African American guy who has worked with an Asian American guy for years at the same office and is invited over to the house for dinner for the first time. They are both American, maybe both of them are Baptists, and they know each other's likes and dislikes from chats around the water cooler and the office parties. They get along great. They pretty much know what there is to know about each other from working together for so long. But when he shows up at his friend's house for the first time it gets all weird. He can't really put his finger on it, but he knows pretty quickly that he isn't in his element. It doesn't matter that they have the same T.V.'s or drive the same kind of car, that their kids go to the same school and that they are both rabid fans of the same football team. There is something there that doesn't quite click.

You might argue that with some time and a few more dinner parties, the awkwardness - the foreignness - will dissapate and it'll be all peachy going forward. Maybe, and the anecdote I chose may not be the best, but after decades of trying, I still feel weird here in the States.

That's one of the reasons I started writing fiction and it has been a cathartic experience I guess, but I am still no closer to answering why I feel foreign here. I have written several books. I have a very respected literary agent in New York, and I just signed my first book deal with a well known publisher in London. I am especially happy about the book deal because, and this is no coincidence, the book is about the adventures of a young American growing up in Venezuela.

So, I will leave it here for a bit. The plan is to tell some stories of real-life experiences growing up as a 3rd Culture Kid. My hope is that somewhere along the way I will finally be able to figure out why I feel like a foreigner in America. If I find out why, I just might be able to do something about it...if I want to.