I Should Have Been Named Colton McCabe

I should have been named Colton McCabe.  Wayne Ryder.  Swanky Toughpants.  Anything but Victoria Elizabeth.  Sounds like I’m a frail little princess.  Here I wrote a wilderness survival story, filled with raids from warring rivals, jealousies, sacrifices, and monumental grief, as well as humor and a love story, and I don’t get to put Colton McCabe on the cover as author.  Well, I could, but I want to use my real name.  I just wish my real name was something else.

The book, Only the Mountains, originally started as a story of a white captive woman living with Crow Indians in 1846-48.  I loved researching it, traveling the Oregon Trail, camping out alone, and sans cell phone.  It wasn’t that I was trying to be daring—we didn’t own a cell phone back then, and camping was cheaper than motel rooms.  The wide windy plains, the miles and miles of dry tumbleweeds, the steep climb into the Blue Mountains, and the drippy trees of Oregon were great times to write in my head.  Coming around the back of Mt. Hood on the historical Barlow Trail, I got stuck. Oblivious to my danger, chopped through an obstruction, went on, got lost on a forest road, and found my way out in spite of May snow.  I’m not sure my husband knows about that part.

I visited with the Crow Indians, got a Crow-English-Crow dictionary, interviewed tribal members, and prowled around the reservation.  Spent hours in the library, spent hours online went to pow-wows, visited lots of museums featuring Native American artifacts.

Probably the best research was going on annual wilderness canoe trips and the many backpacking trips with my brother. He’s an insistent hiker, and who can say no to his zeal?  Off we’d go, and it is great fodder for writing about exhaustion, determination, rain, cold, and hunger.

After sending out vast numbers of query letters, attending writers’ conferences and interviewing with agents, I was able to send the book itself off.  They said they liked it, but could I change it? “Historical fiction does not sell well,” they said.  So I fast forwarded the time of the book to 500 years from now, after the apocalypse and the pandemics, when the population is down to 5% of what it is now.  The world has plunged into a more primitive setting, and civilization in New America is clustered on the two coasts.  Seattle is the new capital.  What population there is lives in little towns and tries to eke out a living by farming.  Southern America is a desert.

However, the Native Americans, especially the Dakota Sioux and the Crows, have done well.  The Crow, influenced by Mennonites who had lived near them before the apocalypse, decided to return to their own roots and live a purified Native American lifestyle, as did the Dakota Sioux.  They believe their traditional lifestyle has made them able to resist the pandemics, but unknown to them, they have in inherent resistance. The Crows, now called the Wrocks, and the Dakotas, now called the Dackos, have grown to two huge populations, controlling most of the central north section of North America.  Feared by city people, who believe the Wrocks and Dackos to be cannibals, violence is common. Internal tribal strife has risen as well. The elders want to hold to traditions, while the younger men want weapons more powerful than their enemies.  Meanwhile, city people from both coasts are encroaching on their territory, and once again history is repeating itself.

But above all else, this is a love story.  A young city woman is captured by a raiding party of Wrocks when her airship crashes. A Wrock man in the raiding party seeks her out.  When sex traffickers raid the tribe, the Wrock man and other tribal leaders have to take off to rescue them. Friendless now, with winter approaching, the city woman has to make decisions that will change her life forever.

I suppose I have a pretty good name for writing romances. Such a prim and proper name, let me pour you some tea.  It might be spruce needle tea rather than Darjeeling, it might be served in a horn cup rather than bone china.  Although when you think about it, Victoria and both Elizabeths were long living and powerful queens. 

Toughness and bone china to boot.

Expectations

Husband and I were driving through some mixed-income housing yesterday and pondering how to get our tenants down in another city to take care of the yard.  So how does the government take care of this housing?  It looked pretty nice.  There were businesses on the ground floor, and condos above.  Central play areas, bus stops and a nearby school made it attractive.  But then it was rather new and there was probably a gardener.

A lot of what we plant at our rental in the way of landscaping dies in the summer due to lack of water.  The front yard was knee-high in dandelions and weeds, the back had turned into dirt and a few hardy conifers. 

With presidential race huffing along to the finish line, candidate Mitt Romney made a statement that 47% of America expects the government to help them out.  Husband and I continued on our drive, talking about these expectations, as well as our expectations of tenants’ desire for a pretty place to live, and their expectations of what they could do. They seemed worlds apart. 

Just yesterday in the mail I got a newsletter from a school for Native Americans that I donate to from time to time, St Labre in Montana.  I’ve watched them grow for the past 15 years, and was quite impressed with the accomplishments of recent students.  It doesn’t seem that long ago that every newsletter I got was pleading for help to overcome poverty and alcoholism.  Those problems still exist, to be sure, but the news coming from the school now is about eye-popping successes. 

There are probably lots of reasons for this, but to me what really stands out was a letter to the school’s director years ago.  It decried the constant plea for money and was disenchanted that nothing ever seemed to get better.  The writer of the letter said he felt like he was flinging his money down a hole.

St. Labre listened.  They began featuring the successes of the students.  Not long after the letter, we heard about 3 high school girls who designed a project for making houses out of hay bales that won a contest and got them a trip to Washington, DC.  I started reading in the school’s newsletter about their high school graduates and the colleges they attended. They featured a young alumnus who became a nurse and returned to serve the area, students who won art contests, and spotlighting successful students and their dreams.

Expectations rose.  College entrance exam scores became impressive enough that Ivy Leagues were interested.  This year, the entire high school graduating class headed off to college.  Every single one. High school alumni are attending MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Mount St. Mary’s and Dartmouth, as well as state universities and a prestigious pharmacy school in Minnesota.  For the last six years, three St. Labre alumni have completed degrees at Dartmouth, which is a 100% graduation rate from one of the most prestigious colleges in the nation, including young Velma, who lost both her parents in separate car accidents in the span of fourteen months during her college years.

In spite of a forest fire this summer that nearly burned St. Labre down, local poverty and other challenges, why is this school able to turn out such successful young men and women?  The newsletter, The Morning Star, says: “Teachers expect the very best from their students and students expect the same from the teachers.” They also credit their donors from believing in the students and faculty.

Expectations.

Our daughter, the teacher, has had a lot of success in expecting her students to succeed.  She teaches at a school near the low income housing we were driving through, and many of her students come from a challenging background.  She believes they deserve every chance to succeed and that they CAN.  Her school’s test scores were second in the district recently, nearly opposite on the scale of income.

These times seem so full of expectation for our family.  One daughter is expecting twins, one is waiting to head off to Army Officer Candidate School and begin her career.  I hope that the alchemy of expectation will infuse them with success.  With belief in infinite possibilities, what might they accomplish?

Go, baby, go!