Stillpoint

by Patricia Campbell Kowal

Sam Barsby tries to free himself from the grip of recurring dreams-dreams filled with birds, seemingly calling him on a mission. Shaken by a near fatal-heart attack, after a sixty-four year absence from his roots on a small Vermont dairy farm in New England and, shortly before his eightieth birthday, Sam leaves his adopted home in Australia and returns to the place of his boyhood. He finds himself standing in the family cemetery situated on a grassy knoll near a small body of water. Gravesites dot the small rolling hill. Sam is surprised to find the graveyard infested with geese-like the geese he sees in his dreams. And, he sees his father's gravestone for the first time. The current owner of the old homestead discovers Sam heaped over in the cemetery and becomes a link to the old man's past and future. The setting of the story is in the twentieth century and moves into the twenty-first, tracing Sam's life. WW1, the Great Depression, WWII and the terror of September 11th deeply impact his family and him. His alcohol-abusing father, Lewis, grief-stricken mother, Julia, older brother, Timmy and shorthaired pup, Shortie, imprint deep wounds on Sam's youth. Sam escapes his beset home-life, leaving behind his father and Auntie Katharine, his only remaining family. He rides the rails during the Depression , works in a forest camp in the Pacific Northwest and serves in the South Pacific in the Second World War. After his sevice, Sam immigrates to a small town in Australia to farm the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. Work, love and loss keep him locked in his unresolved pain until, in his maturity, he is called by his dreams to transformation. It is an indigenous man in Australia, Mono, who brings Sam to a stillpoint in his journey and Sam experiences a life-impacting change. Now, images of pelicans come to him and the symbolism of this intriguing bird tie together pieces of Sam's path. Ultimately, tragedy, then forgiveness, brings Sam to new awareness and connection with his life's meaning.

250 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005