Pamela Foster's Blog, page 17

Campfires and Stained Glass Windows

We who believe in the unexplainable, the unknowable if you will, seek each other out. It’s a need shared by true believers of every stripe. We gather together on the fringe and share stories by the campfire, or meet in congregations in buildings with stain glass windows.

I KNOW this.

Yet,

I wrote a novel set in Humboldt County (the epicenter of Bigfoot activity), a book rich with both skeptics and characters who belief deeply in a large, hairy mythic creature who roams the forests of the Pacific...

Hysterical Blindness and Other Good Holiday Cheer

There’s a flow to the seasons.

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving was when Grandma and Grandpa arrived at daybreak with my uncle and their wormy dog. Which was also the morning mom cracked the cap on the cider she’d hidden beside the refrigerator to ferment on Halloween.

Here are a few memorable moments from my childhood Turkey Days:

There was the year Mom told Grandma the dog had to stay in the car and Grandma went blind in the middle of the turkey dinner. (There is no way anyone could make this st...

Wrestling Bears, Drunken Dentists and Celestial Greeters

Family legend says Grandma’s oldest brother was the handsomest man in the logging town of Freshwater, California.  Also the strongest.  So when a traveling circus came to the little logging town in 1897 and offered $10 to any man who could win a wrestling match with a caged bear, well, it was pretty well ordained that Jerome would take a crack at the challenge.

The story is that Jerome won the contest, or at least managed to stay in the cage with the animal for the allotted time.  Being a personable fellow, he bought drinks for the whole town with his winnings.  Evidently $10 was a LOT of money back then, because three days later, still staggering from the booze, Jerome decided to use the last of his windfall to pay the town’s barber to pull a molar that had been giving him trouble for a while.

The barber, being one of Jerome’s drinking buddies, felt this was a wise use of Uncle’s remaining money and promptly sat him in the swivel chair and pulled the offending tooth.   Jerome staggered home, lay down on his bed and never woke up.

I was eight when I first heard this story.

On my way to have a molar filled.

Even at that age it occurred to me that Jerome’s three day drunk or perhaps, just a child’s thought, the earlier fight with a four hundred pound wild animal might have had more to do with Uncle’s death than a drunken dentist.  But, poking at family legend is more dangerous than wrestling a bear, so I kept my mouth shut.

Jerome is important to our family, not just as a cautionary tale about avoiding dentists, but because it is Jerome who, like a celestial greeter, welcomes our family to the great Walmart in the sky.

Great-grandpa Coltaldi was pronounced good-as-new after removal of his appendix Jerome paid him a visit and two hours later he was dead.  Grandma sat up in her hospital bed after being virtually comatose for weeks, extended her hand, spoke Jerome’s name and passed on the next day.

Ten years back and I had the good fortune to be able to talk to my dad on the phone just minutes before he died.  I knew he was dying, but didn’t know if he knew he was dying.

I wanted badly to ask him if he’d seen Jerome.

Instead, I told him I loved him.

And, really, isn’t that Jerome’s message?

That, no matter our bad choices in this world, despite drunken dentists or caged bears, love transcends time and space, love brings us back for those we love.

Monkey Fur Coats and the Tears of Old Men

My paternal grandfather’s sister, Mandy Foster, was a madam in Eureka, California during prohibition.

Family history says she worked out of The Vance Hotel, but this is highly unlikely and honesty requires me to confess that I come from a family of notorious liars and storytellers.  I’m not apologizing for this genetic trait. On the contrary, I’m thankful for the tendency, but I have learned to fact-check before I put something on paper and claim it as truth.

So, on a recent trip to Eureka, I spent a few hours at The Humboldt County Historical Society in the hopes of coming up with proof of family legend.  Linda DeLong, the gracious and helpful curator of the genealogy room, pulled collections and books on that era of Eureka history.  There was even a booklet specifically about prostitution in the county.  A thin collection of newspaper articles and personal accounts to be sure, but good information and, really, prostitution might be the oldest profession but it’s never been one written about or recognized by polite society.

Unfortunately, the only reference I found to Mandy Foster, was her obituary.  And, as you might suspect, the family did not see fit to supply the newspaper with information about how she earned her living.  She died, by the way, in a sanitarium in Petaluma.  The newspaper doesn’t report that she died of syphilis, but that’s what I’ve always been told.

So, while I did find entertaining articles about Mandy’s grandfather, Merritt Curtis Foster, the stage coach driver and early settler in Freshwater, California, I found no written evidence of my Aunt’s line of work.

It doesn’t matter.  I have proof.

You see, as a young woman, I resembled Mandy.  Looked enough like her that, four or five times in my twenties, rheumy-eyed men approached me with the same tired line.

“You look like someone I knew a long time ago.”

Now, even in my twenties I wasn’t THAT gullible and the first couple of times it happened I asked, “Ah huh.  And who might that be.”

The answer was always a variation of, “A beautiful, generous young woman name of Mandy.”

At that point I would share my maiden name with the old guy.  Three of the five times it happened, tears actually ran down the wrinkled cheeks of these old men. They always bought me a drink or two, three of them kissed my hand graciously before saying goodbye.

The second proof of Mandy’s profession is the monkey fur coat that was reportedly a gift from Tom Mix.  No, we don’t still have the coat in the family.  It was cut into squares and made into throw pillows. (Yes, that’s right, we’re the family on Antiques Roadshow that paints over the Rembrandt and reupholsters the priceless chair)  My mom had one of the pillows on our coach when I was a kid.  It smelled like pee and Dad’s dog, Tricksy, ate it.

So, while I did not find written confirmation of the family stories that my great-aunt Mandy was a madam on the Eureka waterfront during the wild and wooly days of prohibition, I do have tears of nostalgia in the eyes of old men and the clear and smelly memory of a monkey fur coat.

Really, what more proof could I want?

True Lies

A good fiction writer lies in order to tell a deeper truth.  She creates an entire make-believe world for the sole purpose of wrapping words around one true essence.

When I returned to Humboldt County for my annual fog-fix last month, I visited The Shanty a couple of times.  The Shanty is the bar that inspired the primary setting of my novel, Bigfoot Blues. (If you want more information on this book, click the link at the top of this page) Oh, I stole the name of the bar from Eureka’s old Vista Del Mar, better known as VDs.  But the essence of what I tried to portray in the book is The Shanty, that’s the bar I had in my head while writing.

But remember, the mind of a fiction writer is markedly different from that of your ordinary truth-teller.  The ‘real’ Shanty is in a small, windowless, one story building with a fenced area out back known as The Courtyard.  The bar runs along the left side of the room as you enter from third street.

The bar in Bigfoot Blues has two windows, one looks back at Humboldt Bay and the second gives a view of First Street.  Yes, that’s right I moved the entire location two blocks west so that my main character could see the bay from her upstairs bedroom windows.

And, I tacked on a second story and added two more rooms, and sort of merged The Shanty with an old brothel I toured in Tombstone, Arizona in order to accommodate all my main characters and a back story that includes my real-life great aunt who actually was a madam on Eureka’s First Street in the mid-1900’s.

What else?  I covered every piece of furniture I could get my naughty fiction-writer’s hands on in gold glitter plastic, stuck animal heads on the wall like visiting relatives and tacked a framed photo of Roger Patterson’s Bigfoot, Patty, over the bar.

So, what then remains of the actual Shanty?

The essence, people, the true essence of the bar.  The down-home, straight-forward, you-don’t-mess-with-us-and-we-don’t-mess-with-you essence.

Oh yeah, and the bartender, Staci.  Hell, I even kept the name the same for my main character Samantha’s wise and funny and beautiful side-kick.  How close did I stick to the truth in describing Staci?  You’ll have to wander on into The Shanty and see for yourself.  And, oh yeah, you’ll need to read the book.

http://www.northcoastjournal.com/news/2011/09/22/best-bar/

Littlefoot Lives!

Big Lagoon

Monday I had the pleasure of visiting Big Lagoon School up in Northern California.  I told the kindergarteners the story of my grandpa seeing Bigfoot.  Began the tale with me riding shoats (that’s baby pigs to you city folk), wove in the pancake eating contests Grandpa and I had on the rare mornings he was home and not out logging near Peckwan, and ended with Grandpa and Bud Ryerson’s Bigfoot encounter.  Since I wasn’t sure how much a five year old knew about Bigfoot I began the story with a question.

“How many of you know who Bigfoot is?”

Eyes lit up, almost every hand in the room shot into the air and waved frantically.  Stories poured from little mouths.

Now, I admit, the audience was salted a little.  Some of these beautiful children were from the small, wooded towns of Klamath and Orick, most of the kids’ parents troop around the woods hunting and fishing, some undoubtedly pursue this interest around Hoopa and Weitchipec.

But, still, that ought to tell the doubters something.  It sure as heck ought to tell the publishing world something!  Hint!  Hint!  Hint!

People love the legend of Bigfoot.  In a world where everything is politically correct and we’re required to fill out a form as long as Bigfoot’s arm in order to hunt and fish in waters that belong to We the People, a wild critter roaming the woods, a creature almost exactly like us, except with more fur and much more freedom?  Why that’s simply intoxicating.

My novel, Bigfoot Blues, isn’t just about Bigfoot, of course.  Not really.  But, boy, oh boy, is it ever about people believing in the freedom of wilderness, about each of us finding our own unique way in a maze of judgement and expectations.  Not stepping carefully into the wide, deep prints of those who love us and have foraged ahead.   No, not following blindly.  But neither disregarding the path cleared by those who’ve gone before. Bigfoot Blues is about discovering our own way through the forest of life.

Looking into the faces of those children, I couldn’t help but believe that with the help of their wonderful school and its committed teachers and principal, with the love and support of their parents, those Kindergarteners will blaze a new trail that lights up the woods.  I hope some of them become writers.  I really want to share that journey.

Big Feet, Big What?

This sign used to be the emblem for Bigfoot Gas.

That’s quite a log, eh?

People complained, the sign was changed.

Instead of his lovely log, Bigfoot now packs a tiny gas can.  No, I don’t have a picture of that.  I can’t bring myself to drive to Mckinleyville to see the emasculated ole guy.

Really, people?

Have we lost our sense of humor to the point where a picture of Bigfoot must be careful not to offend?  I find this censorship, this timidity offensive.  My God, this is the neck of the woods where half the population,  including me and all three of my sons, have pictures posed under the giant balls of Babe the Blue Ox.

Loosen up, folks. It’s just wood.

Western Short-Short Story

This Saturday I’m riding down to historic Fort Smith with my friend Ruth Weeks to attend a book signing by the great-grandson of Rooster Cogburn.

How cool is that?                              

Last night, at the NW Arkansas Writers Workshop, Dusty Richards told us about the contest being sponsored by Cogburn and High Hill Press.

A four sentence western.

Now I don’t usually write westerns, but as a kid, I sat next to my dad through every John Wayne movie ever made and I can’t help but be inspired by horse sweat and six-guns.  So I figured I’d give this western short-short story a try.

Here’s my story.  If you’d like to give it try yourself, scroll down to bottom of the page and hit the first link.  It’ll take right to the contest.

Here’s my story and, oh yeah, Greg Camp, keep your fingers off the edit key until the end and then, yeah, I really would appreciate your expertise.

At the ridge-line he reined in the mare, bent low over the sweating neck of the horse so that the winter branches of hickory and pin oak framed the small form silhouetted in the open door of the cabin in the hollow below, the woman looking up the hill exactly as if she’d been there waiting patiently for him through all these endless months of the joining of folks in marriage, the burying of a baby in the rocky soil of the Ozarks, the uplifting as the spirit moved over a tent revival while folks leaped in joy, hands raised to the heavens, glorying in the holy ghost as another poor sinner was knocked flat to the ground with the devil plum defeated by the abundant power of God, as though the woman at the open door had stood right there through every star-filled night, while he huddled around an open fire and watched the stars turn in the sky and imagined her just like this, watching the horizon for his return, patient even as he tarried.

The bay side-stepped and tossed her head, and the saddle-preacher gathered the reins and spoke low, his words forming a silvery fog that hung in the motionless air for a moment before floating wraith-like to join a shimmering cloud of cooling sweat rising from the horse. Winter-robbed of all but palest gold, dawn’s fingers crept over the eastern rise and glinted cold, blue light from the woman’s hand–a deep, lethal-blue flash the preacher knew all too well as the gem-like color of a tiny, husband-killing bottle of arsenic, no bigger surely than the first seed of sin born in David’s heart when first he looked upon Bathsheba.

The snarling voice of the woman’s husband boomed into the morning air, floated up the hill and roused the preacher to spur his horse down into the hollow even as he watched the woman bring the blue bottle to her mouth, her head thrown back, her tender, white throat exposed as she swallowed his dreams drop by drop, condemned him to hell for all eternity.

http://www.brettcogburn.com/blog/the-greatest-western-never-told/

http://truthsbyruth.blogspot.com/

http://www.dustyrichards.com/

http://nwawriters.org/

Heritage: Madames and Bigfoot

 

My great-great-grandfather Merritt Curtis Foster founded the town of Freshwater (Northern California) and my great-aunt Mandy Foster was a well-known madame at the Old Vance Hotel (Eureka, CA) during the days of prohibition. My grandson is a seventh generation Humboldt County native.  I’ve been out from behind the Redwood Curtain for almost twenty years ago now, but  go back each year to visit family, and my love for the area manifests in my novels.

       My newest book, Bigfoot Blues is set in Humboldt County.  The novel follows the adventures of a bigfoot hunter’s daughter as she finds her own path through the culture into which she was born. The story is humorous in parts, but it’s layered with issues of faith and love of family and the difficulties of becoming your own person without rejecting the people who raised you.

When I was a child, I spent a couple of months each summer with my grandmother and grandfather who lived on the edge of the Indian Reservation out beyond the little town of Peckwan.  Bigfoot was a part of that world in much the same way that Jesus is a part of the world of a fundamentalist Christian.  He was an entity whose existence was taken for granted.  Some people felt closer to him than others, some individuals encountered him on a fairly regular basis, some heard the sound of his movements through the woods on dark nights, some knew him only through the stories of others.

My grandpa, Fritz Brockmueller, was logging partners with Bud Ryerson.  Anybody who knows the history of Bigfoot in the Humboldt County area knows the name Ryerson.  Bud’s sighting was the first report of bigfoot in the local Times Standard.  Th newspaper article appeared in 1967, but the encounters had been going on for at least fifteen years prior to that first public report.

I know this for a fact because it was 1954 and I was four years old when my grandpa returned early from a logging trip with the story of how he and Bud’s road building equipment had been destroyed, cement pipes that weighed well over five hundred pounds tossed around like Lincoln Logs, a road grader pushed sideways and the seat torn off.  White faced and shaking, grandpa told about how there were footprints everywhere.  Giant, bare feet that left deep impressions in the mud.

A fictionalized account of this encounter is in Bigfoot Blues.

Living for a few weeks a year in a culture that accepted Bigfoot as a neighbor and being present when my logical, straightforward grandfather stumbled home with this tale definitely left a lasting impression on me.  And, of course, being the grand-niece of the town’s madame left its own imprint on my psyche.  The fun, as a writer, is watching how these two heritages play out in my novels, how my brain twists and turns history into a fictional account that tells the truth.

Do you have peculiar bits and pieces in your family history?  If so, how do you rearrange that past into your own truth?

War and Dementia

My husband is an old warrior.  A Marine. A boots-on-the-ground grunt who served in Vietnam, though who the hell it was he served over there in that hot, green jungle, I can’t tell you.

But, I can sure tell you with certainty that he has never recovered from the experience, never really come home.

I can tell you with no hesitation whatsoever that his overwhelming Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has intruded on every day of his life since they flew him home after he disarmed a landmine the Marine Corp way–by stepping on and detonating the little bomb.

But all this is old news.

What I want to talk about today is the little known fact that veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder have twice the chance of developing dementia than those without PTSD.  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100831073805.htm

My husband is one of those old warriors who, after forty years of living with PTSD now lives with the diagnoses of dementia.

Let me give you an example of what this means.

This past weekend we traveled a few hours up the road to Springfield, Missouri. We stayed at a motel just over a mile from where, on Saturday morning, I talked to a wonderful group of writers at Sleuth Ink. http://sleuthsink.blogspot.com/  My husband did his best all weekend to be helpful and supportive.

On Saturday morning, I drove one mile down highway 44, from the motel to the library, left the truck with my husband.  He was to return to the motel, hang out a couple of hours and then return to meet up with me at about 1:00.

He got lost.  Tried to enter the freeway on the exit ramp. Which frightened and further confused him.

When I finished my meeting with the writers, he was sitting on a bench in front of the library.  He’d lost the keys to the truck.

Here’s what I want to share with you.

Love is complicated and I’m beginning to understand that God tests those he loves most.

And here’s another gem of wisdom.

War sucks and then it sucks some more and then it gets worse.

For the love of God, isn’t it time we figured out a way to resolve our differences that doesn’t involve blowing each other up?