A certain spicy stew is a cooking staple in south Louisiana.  Sauce piquante was introduced to Louisiana by the Spanish.  It has been embraced by Cajun chefs and has evolved into nearly as many differing recipes as there are cooks.

The dish begins with a roux, combined with the sauce and almost any meat you can think of.  In Louisiana, there is chicken, pork, wild duck, turtle and even alligator sauce piquante.  Here is a recipe for chicken sauce piquante submitted by Mrs. S.J. Ardoin and included in the 1977 cookbook Hot off the Press – Good Cooking from the Pages of the States Time-Morning Advocate.

Chicken Sauce Piquante

1          chicken, cut up                         ¼         cup chopped shallots

½         cup cooking oil                         2          (8 oz.) cans tomato sauce

½         cup flour                                   1          cup water

2          large onions, chopped               1          cup Burgundy

4          garlic cloves, chopped              ¼         cup chopped parsley

1          medium bell pepper                              salt, pepper and hot sauce to taste

Make roux with cooking oil and flour, stirring constantly until medium brown.  Add onions, garlic, bell pepper and shallots.  Sauté until onions are clear.  Add chicken, tomato sauce, water, Burgundy, parsley and seasoning.  Cover and cook over medium heat for 30 minutes (stirring occasionally) or until sauce begins to thicken.  Serve over rice.  Serves six.

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For those of you that have spent time in the Old Absinthe Bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, here is a very interesting article.

Absinthe's Mind-Altering Mystery Solved - Yahoo! News.

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Frequent readers of this column know how superstitious I am.  Business took me to rural Oklahoma today and something I saw there gave me an instant case of the creeps.  Here’s a little background info:

My business partner, fellow author r. r. bryan and I recently bought an old oil well in with the intent of recompleting in a new zone.  Being oil promoters as well as writers, we turned a percentage to a man we know in Dallas named Pat O’Neil.

Today, I was in the county on other business.  A few miles from the well in question, I came across an old sign so I stopped to take a picture.  I was blown away when I read the inscription and this is what it said:

This land was founded by Jacob Derr in the land run on September 16, 1893.  Others making the land run of 1893 were C.B. Kirk to the southwest and the west, H.C. Swingle to the east, W.R. Whitaker to the northwest, B. Lowman to the northeast.  Pat O’Neil to the southeast.

I know, the name is fairly common and it could just be a coincidence.  Maybe, but I can think of at least two more possible explanations that involve reincarnation and the supernatural.  On the other hand, I am a fiction writer with a well developed imagination.  I’m posting the picture at the bottom of the page and fiction writer or not, I think you will agree that it’s still kind of creepy, and you can draw your own conclusions.

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The Oklahoma City Festival of the Arts began Tuesday with gray clouds and rain in the forecast.  The art show has gone on every year since 1967.  Every year except 1995 that is.

The Murrah Bombing happened on April 19, 1995 and I find it hard to believe that it has been thirteen years since the horrible event.  The Festival of the Arts was scheduled to begin shortly after the bombing but the city fathers wisely called off the event.

Every year I try to attend the week-long happening at least once.  The art is expensive but the food court is wonderful.  They also sell commemorative tee shirts and I almost always purchase one for my collection.

The other day while rummaging through a drawer I noticed a tee shirt that I hadn’t worn in quite some time, maybe never.  It was the Festival of the Arts shirt from 1995.  I had purchased it in 1996, never sold from the previous year because the event never occurred.

Today, as I gaze out my window at a cloudy sky and think about heading toward the City for an Indian Taco and a new tee shirt, I realize that life is a complex mixture of bitter and sweet, and that sometimes objects meant to commemorate celebrations become reminders of something quite different.

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It’s stormy in Oklahoma tonight and the gloom outside the window reminds me of a similar night many years ago in Vietnam.

I was in the Army with the First Cavalry, humping the boonies near the Cambodian border.  We came upon a Montagnard village beside a stream in the jungle.  It was late when we found it and we decided to stay there for the night.

The village was tiny, only a few destroyed huts.  The North Vietnamese hated Montagnards and always killed them - men, women, children and animals - and razed their villages whenever they encountered them.  We were in a free fire zone and sort of hoped they would try the same on us.

It was monsoon season and every night, just as the sun went down, it would rain.  It was the height of the season and heavy rain sometimes continued throughout the night.  My best friend was Gary Clark from Seattle Washington.  He was a poly-sci graduate from either the University of Washington or Washington State.  I can’t remember which.  I do remember that he was a political junkie and that his favorite beer was Olympia, unfortunate because the only kind we got in the boonies was Black Label in steel cans that were usually rusted by the time we drank the contents.

Many of us had air mattresses.  We would blow them up at night and make a makeshift shelter by attaching two poncho liners.  Clark and I had gone into the jungle the same day, from the same helicopter, and had started off sharing such a shelter.

It was perpetually wet and humid in the jungle so we kept our letters and personal belongings in M-60 ammo containers.  The containers were waterproof and there were always extras whenever we were re-supplied with food and bullets.

That night, it rained harder than usual – much harder than usual.  Water in my face awoke me from a Technicolor dream.  I was still lying on the air mattress but I was out in the rain, quickly floating away from the makeshift tent.  If I hadn’t awakened I would have ended up in the nearby stream that was now swollen, up to its banks.

The scene was so surreal that I didn’t know whether to curse or to laugh.  I think I did both.  The next morning I learned that the ammo containers weren’t perfectly waterproof as all my personal belongings inside were now damp, or worse.

Shortly after that rainy episode, I bought a hammock from a group of Vietnamese and spent the rest of my nights in the jungle hanging safely – well, at least out of the water – off the ground.

I lost touch with Gary Clark, much like everyone else I knew while I was in the Army.  I hope he’s safe and dry somewhere, watching the Democratic primaries and drinking an Olympia, or two.

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When I worked for Cities Service Oil Company my primary duty was sitting (staying on location, describing samples and calling for drill stem tests) drilling wells, mostly in Kansas.  After months of learning from other geologists, I was allowed to sit a well in Comanche County, Kansas all alone.  My first solo experience was quite traumatic.

The well was a wildcat (more than a mile from established production) scheduled to drill into the Arbuckle Dolomite, a very old carbonate that sometimes produces lots of oil and gas.  At Cities, the technique for describing and drilling a prospect was well defined but had many flaws.

The powers-that-be considered Cities a technologically advanced company and would not drill a wildcat without seismic control.  The geologist would locate an anomaly by doing subsurface mapping.  He would then propose a well and management would either agree or can the prospect.  If they agreed, the geophysicists would get involved and have a seismic survey conducted over the prospect.  If the geophysics agreed with the geology, then Cities would drill a well there.

When I started working for Cities, the Mid-continent Division had not had a discovery in more than ten years.  Part of the reason, I soon learned, is that seismic surveys never work perfectly.  My opinion is that they rarely work, at least in Kansas.  There are many reasons for this, most too technical to delve into in the space of a few hundred words.  I had an inkling of this fact the first well that I sat alone because I had already had discussions with other disillusioned company geologists.

Every well is different and only a trained wellsite specialist can tell you exactly where you are in the hole, and if you are running structurally high (very good) or structurally low (very bad).  There is a marker zone, the Heebner Shale, in Kansas that is almost always used to determine how you are running.  When we reached the Heebner, I knew exactly where I was in the hole and called my boss to report the information.

“You must be mistaken,” Don W. told me.  “If what you say is true you would be running fifty feet low.  The seismic map says you should be running fifty feet high so you obviously have a hundred foot error.”

I tried to argue with him, explain that I knew where we were and that we really were running fifty feet low.

“You’ve missed a correlation point.  Go up the hole a hundred feet and try again.  You’ll find your mistake.”

From that point, my daily report was in La La Land.  I knew where we were but my boss was becoming increasing confused to the point that he called me an idiot and threatened to send out a more experienced geologist to correct my obvious mistake.  At one point, he almost had me convinced that I didn’t know what I was doing.

We finally reached total depth and when I looked at the electric log I knew that I had been correct all along.  By this time we were almost seventy feet low to the nearest correlation point.  There was no email in those days or any way to quickly transmit the logs to Oklahoma City for the honchos to view.  It was four in the morning when I looked at the last log and realized that we had a dry hole.  In a near state of despair, I called Don, my boss.

“Calm down, Eric.  Everything will be okay.  Is there any possibility that you are miscorrelating the log?”

There wasn’t, but it hurt my feelings that he was still blaming the failure of the well on me – at least that’s the way I felt at the time.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Bring the logs to the office.  We’ll have a meeting first thing in the morning.”

Management cared little about their minions.  Another geologist, a close friend of mine, had rear-ended a parked semi on the side of the road as he headed for a remote well site in the wee hours of the morning.  He didn’t survive.  It didn’t matter that I had been awake for almost twenty-four hours.  I had my orders – drive all night and present the logs for management’s inspection the following morning.

I drove into Oklahoma as the sun was arising and made it to the corporate offices before nine the next morning.  Three of my bosses studied the logs, frowned and scratched their heads, finally dismissing me without so much as a thank you or well done.  Later that day, Fred, the older geologist that had taught me almost everything I knew, came to my office.

“Don’t worry about it.  It’s not even your prospect.”

“I just can’t believe that management trusts a tool that almost never works over the word of their geologists.”

A big grin spread over Fred’s face.  “Welcome to life as a geologist,” he said.  “When you drill a discovery, someone else takes the credit but you get all the blame for every dry hole.”

“But Fred, seismic sucks.  How can management continue to believe in it?”

“Eric, a geologist is nothing but a justifier, someone or something that gives the okay for a company to dump millions of dollars into the ground.  You don’t really know any more than the seismic tool whether or not there is oil where you are planning to drill.  We use the best science we have but once you are a foot below the surface of the earth - and you can take this to the bank - it’s all Mother Nature, and she doesn’t give up her secrets easily.”

Fred was correct.  I have drilled many dry holes in my career and I’ve worked with lots of people and many companies that have had their discoveries.  And sometimes when I wake up at night and stare into the darkness, I can hear old Mother Nature giggling to herself.

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Here is a pic from an old bridge in Noble County, Oklahoma, looking down at a creek, swollen by several inches of recent rain.  Note the debris on the bridge.  It is an indication of just how high the water has gotten at times.

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It’s late afternoon and as I glance out the back window at the thermometer I see it is almost eighty degrees.  This has been a strange year in central Oklahoma because temperatures were in the thirties less than ten days ago.

Marilyn likes winter and having a fire in the fireplace.  This past winter we burned nearly seven ricks of wood, not really for the heat but because a crackling flame warms the emotions and puts you in a mellow frame of mind.

Flowers have bloomed here since the last snow and today the irises, perhaps the last perennial of spring, began blooming.  Since Marilyn feeds the birds, our backyard looks like an aviary.  The same five wild ducks that lived here well into the summer last year have also returned and today the hummingbird vine began blooming in a burst of hundreds of trumpet-shaped flowers.  This is a signal that it won’t be long before our hummingbirds reappear.

Last night I cranked my hot tub to a hundred degrees, enjoying the water and my new gazebo enclosing it.  It was dark and I only had the faint glow of a fluorescent lamp to light the tub.  I wasn’t alone.  An ephemeral light danced across the surface the entire time I sat there, up to my neck in warm water.  I could pass my hand through it but I couldn’t touch it or make it disappear.  When I went back to the house, I kept hearing a mechanical noise coming from the living room.

Today I learned that my wild ducks prefer cat food over bird seed and they love Whisker Lickin’s and Pounce just as much as my kitties do.  I’m starting to believe that the money we spend on food and treats for the animals exceeds what we spend on ourselves.

I decided that the dancing light in the hot tub was a spirit, enjoying spring, rebirth, and the glorious hot water with me.  The mechanical whir is a different story.  I finally dug out Princesses’ favorite motorized rat from beneath her blanket.  Marilyn had turned it on earlier and that’s where it ended up.  It was still running, but like me sometimes - getting no place fast.

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A very creepy picture!

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We all have benchmarks in our lives that we recognize as signs of our moving in a positive direction.  For me, it has always been owning, or at least leasing, a hot tub.  I bought my first redwood hot tub in 1979, just before marrying Anne.  Since then, I’ve had four more, including the one that I have now.

Following the oil bust in the early eighties, the fortunes of Anne and I took an abrupt downward turn.  We lost out house on Ski Island and our three rent houses (yes, I know, we were over-consumers at the time).

The hardest part of curbing your lifestyle is finding a quick way of halting your monthly expenditures.  I’m talking about the house payment on your mansion and monthly car payments for your Mercedes and Jaguar (I know, I’m not eliciting much sympathy here!).

Anne and I reined in our lifestyle, still managing to maintain a comfortable existence until 1995.  The oil biz was hurting.  No one was buying prospects or drilling wells.  We found a little rent house and had just enough money left after the first month’s rent, deposits and everything to rent a U-Haul truck.

My nephew Kevin helped me move and we single-handedly transported years of our lives from a five thousand square foot house to a fifteen hundred foot house.  Well, not totally alone.  Later that night, I finally called my Brother Jack and Anne’s brother David to help us with the last load.  To say we were exhausted is an understatement.  To this day, I don’t think Kevin knows how much he helped me.

Anne and I lived in the rent house for two years - past the time we learned that she had lung cancer.  I finally sold a prospect and made a down payment with it on the house I still live in.  Anne died about six months later.

The house had a swimming pool but no hot tub.  The oil business dragged on for several more years and I scrapped by, making the house payments, buying groceries and little else.  I still wanted a hot tub and the entire time I plotted how I might acquire one.

Three years after Anne passed away, I saw an ad for an eight-foot octagonal hot tub in the Daily Oklahoman.  The party was asking two hundred and twenty five dollars.  I had the money, called and purchased the shell.  Three days later, the owner brought it to me and dumped it unceremoniously in my back yard.  It remained in the same spot, through more hard times in the oil biz, for three more years.

I did figure out where I wanted to put it and I began digging a hole in the ground, beside the oak tree where I had buried my nineteen year old cat Chani when she finally died.  The hole was long dug, half filled with rain water, and I still didn’t have the money to set the hot tub, much less get it plumbed and ready to use.

Two years ago, my financial fortunes took a turn for the better and I finally got the hot tub plumbed and working.  I took my first dip on the night of my birthday and surely it was a birthday present from someone that had gone before me.

Last week, my step-son Shane built a gazebo to enclose the outdoor hot tub and today I mucked it out after a winter of non-use.  This house is my little piece of Eden, Marilyn and I Adam and Eve.  If there’s a snake out there with an apple, well, hey, give me a bite.

When I finish writing the last words of this treatise, I’m going outside and give the hot tub a spring test.

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When I first started writing I didn’t know any other writers and I was eager to meet some and learn their secrets.  I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard it more than once that Oklahoma has more romance writers than any other state.   For the experience of meeting other writers, I signed up for a Saturday romance writer’s conference announced in the Sunday Oklahoman.

The conference was held at a hotel on Meridian Avenue near Will Rogers Airport and I had no idea what to expect when I arrived.  Romance writers are mostly females, but not all.  Of the two hundred or so attendees, I was one of less than a half dozen males.

My sex didn’t seem to matter and I had a great time listening to the speakers and seeing the displays.  Romance writers, I learned, are masters (mistresses?) at self promotion.  They all had slick, professionally designed postcards, bookmarks and business cards promoting their latest novel.  Promotion is vital in the romance writer’s ranks because the average shelf life (time on a super market’s magazine rack, etc.) is much less than thirty days.

All these women knew each other and they all were extremely supportive, plugging their friends books as well as their own.  This is only one reason why romance novels are the most popular genre in writing.

As most of you know, long-haired, bare-chested handsome men grace the covers of many romance novels.  Some of the cover models are celebrities, like Fabio, and have a following of their own fans.  Five of these professional models had flown in for the conference and the highlight was a male model beauty contest.

I was frankly blown away when the event began.  The women writers whooped and hollered like roughnecks or long-haul truckers at the Red Dog, a nearby strip club.  I even witnessed a few well timed butt pinches as the men paraded through the crowd of ladies from the back of the auditorium to the little stage in front.

The conference was my first experience meeting actual writers, a few quite famous.  I learned a lot about plotting, pace and promotion.  That was my first writer’s conference.  I’ve attended many others since then but I’ve never met another group that knew as much about the four Ps of writing (with this group I had to include pinching) or that had as much fun while doing it.

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I wrote this short story for Earth Day many years ago and I think you will agree that it gives a whole new meaning to the slogan “Go Green.” 

EARTHEN REMAINS

By Eric Wilder

The odor of salt and dead fish permeated air near the ocean’s edge.  A gull flying overhead screeched, and then plummeted into the water.  Its rigid body wafted in the water, then floundered in foamy surf before joining floating garbage already on the beach.

            Mahatma sat in the mud of the nearby salt marsh staring at yellowed saw grass withering in the sun.  He touched his neck and felt the sting of ripe blisters.  The ocean’s stench made him cough, and then gag.  His lungs expanded and he almost fainted in the thin atmosphere nearly depleted of oxygen.

            He glanced at the cloudless sky streaked with orange and yellow patterns.  The purple remnant of a recent chemical disaster billowed in the distance like a noiseless Technicolor explosion.  Summoning the remainder of his dwindling strength, he dragged himself up out of the mud.  Feeling like a beaten man, he knew if he didn’t move that he would soon join the bone piles bleaching in the sun.  Even though frail and light as a wisp of water vapor, he still sank into the stinking mud as he hobbled toward higher ground on spindly legs assisted by his antique oak walking stick.

            Mahatma had lived a long and depressing life, and had come to the ocean’s edge to die.  He had planned to wade into salty surf and let the steady undertow take him out to sea.  Instead, the force of waves continued to push him back toward the bank and he found himself lying in the mud, exhausted.  Hours later, he remained alive.

            Mahatma felt like a supreme loser.  He couldn’t even muster the strength to kill himself.  Still, he hadn’t lived to the comparative old age of eighteen by being a weakling.  He took the day’s events as a life sign and smiled to himself as he hobbled toward low-lying foothills bordering the salt marsh.

            Mahatma had pledged to kill himself before ever becoming so weak that he would succumb to tongue swelling thirst or stomach wrenching hunger.  Now, the ordeal in the surf had left him so weak he didn’t know if he had the strength to reach the Great Dump, or the power to dig for nourishment even if he did.

            He passed the decaying bodies of a fish and a large bird, and nudged the gull with his toe, seriously contemplating eating it.  The nearby bloated body of a dead rat, bloody saliva dribbling from its mouth, warned him it would be a poisonous and deadly mistake.  Singh, his lifelong companion, had consumed a dead fish from the Great Sea.  Mahatma had watched helplessly and in horror as he died an excruciatingly painful death.

            Twelve hours spent in direct sunlight had reopened many of the sores and blisters on his bare head.  Bloody pus oozed down his face and into his eyes.  He rubbed them with the back of his arm.  Getting little relief, he finally gave up, and like his life he simply endured the murky discomfort.  Knots on his neck and arms had grown.  If he lived to be twenty, there would be nothing left of him by one great tumor.  Despite himself, the thought made him laugh.

            Many times during Mahatma’s tortured journey he thought he would join the fish, rat, and bird.  It didn’t matter.  He persevered, eventually reaching the Great Dump’s western flank.  The giant feature stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction.  Once a veritable storehouse of nourishment, the Great Dump had declined - picked over many times in the last fifty years by countless hungry foragers.  Still, Mahatma somehow knew that undiscovered pearls remained.

            Not knowing why, he chose a spot on the scattered garbage heap and began digging with his walking stick.  Two feet below its desiccated surface he found a treasure - a dozen unopened six ounce cans.  Removing the tiny can opener suspended from a chain around his neck, he opened one.

            Mahatma had no idea what the can contained so he dabbed his finger into the pasty concoction and touched it to his tongue.  The taste was like nothing he had ever experienced and he could think of but a single word - wonderful.  He allowed himself to eat only a small portion of the can’s contents, covering the rest with a plastic baggy and storing it in his gunny sack.

            An hour or so of sunlight remained before darkness and Mahatma knew he should stay no longer at the dig.  Thanking his lucky stars for his good fortune, he headed toward a sheltering ledge in the distance.  Halfway there, he realized his good luck had ebbed away.  Three withered men traveling together had spotted him and were already closing in for the kill.

            Strengthened by the food from the can, he hurried away in the opposite direction with a worried but steady gait.  The men followed after him but two were weak and quickly fell behind.  The largest man of the group was not so weak and began shortening the distance between them.  Mahatma could probably fight off one of the assailants, but knew he had no chance against all three men at once.  When he glanced around, he saw the big pursuer was rapidly closing the distance between them.  Finally, he raised his walking stick over his head and turned to face the man chasing after him.

            Mahatma had never met another ozomute as large as himself - possibly the reason for his longevity.  The man he now faced was larger, a head taller and ten pounds heavier.  He was also grossly deformed.  Mahatma had never seen anyone so large or so ugly and the steely taste of fear filled his mouth and swept over his lips and tongue.

            “What is it you want?” Mahatma demanded.

            The man didn’t answer but his piggish eyes narrowed even further.  Pulling a long knife from his belt, he stepped toward Mahatma.  What was worse, the other two men, not quite as ugly as the one staring at him, were catching up to them.  With no time to waste, Mahatma attacked the big man, landing a glancing blow to his head.  Before jumping back from the non-lethal blow, the man slashed Mahatma with his knife.

            Wounded, Mahatma swung away with his cane, laying himself open for another vicious slash to the arm.  Sensing his dilemma, he backed away, tripping in a pothole as he did.  The ugly ozomute, smelling blood, raised his blade and lunged at him.  With little time to react, Mahatma shoved his cane between the man’s spindly legs and gave it a violent twist.  Screaming as his leg snapped like a dry stick, the ugly ozomute fell backward in a moaning heap, the other leg also breaking beneath his falling weight.

            “Help me,” the man pleaded.

            Mahatma stared at the helpless man, guilt cleaving his soul.  At that moment, guilt played no role in his decision to turn and run.  The other two men closing on their position had already decided that for him.  Listening for footsteps and expecting a knife in the back, he experienced neither.  Glancing around, he saw why.

            The man’s two companions had sliced his throat with his own knife and were now squatting on the ground beside him, happily devouring him.  Feeling repulsed, Mahatma started again for the distant sheltering ledge.

            Deadened darkness engulfed the Great Dump as Mahatma finally reached the overhang.  Falling exhausted to the ground, he lay there without moving, listening for sounds of danger.  He heard none and soon sank into a listless stupor, too bone-weary to sleep.  Gazing at distant celestial bodies barely visible through swirling dust, he lay there, until sounds disturbed his thoughts.  He gazed around, looking nervously for the two men.

            Again the sound - a whimpering cry of pain.

            Mahatma raised himself to his feet and began searching the expanse of bare rock beneath the overhang.  Dim vestiges of light caught his eyes.  Blinking away the gloom, he looked again.  Something or someone had enlarged a hole beneath the overhang and he saw the flickering of light coming from it.  Bending forward for a closer look, he gazed into the hole.

            None of his experience prepared Mahatma for what he saw.  Sitting with her back to the earthen wall beside a small fire was a frail female, one of less than a dozen, including his own mother that he had ever seen.  Even more amazing, she clutched a tiny infant to her shriveled breast.  He stepped through the stooped portal and stared.

            Recoiling in fear when she finally saw him, the woman placed the infant behind her and grabbed a knife hidden beneath her garments.  Mahatma held up a placating palm and shook his head.

            “I won’t harm you or your child,” he said softly.

            His words didn’t matter.  Abject horror had washed across the woman’s face and she began to shake so violently that she could hardly hold the knife.  When she finally spoke, her words quivered with emotion.

            “Then why are you here?”

            “The light made me curious.”

            “If that is all, then leave us now.”

            Mahatma nodded.  Stooping, he started back out of the portal but the woman shrieked and grabbed her chest before he could make his exit.  He watched as she slumped over in the dirt, apparently too weak to support herself.  When Mahatma tried to assist her, she slashed at him with her knife.  Grabbing her wrist, he took it away from her.

            “Do what you want with me but spare my child,” she pleaded.

            Mahatma raised her, cradling her head against his chest.  “When did you eat last?”

            The woman didn’t answer but continued to convulse in his arms.  As she did, he studied the emaciated female.  Like him, she was bald - almost.  A single golden lock occupied the top of her head.  Her eyes were pale blue, a color he had never seen before in another ozomute.  Her right foot lay cocked at an absurd angle.  Broken, he knew without asking.

            Propping her against the wall, he removed the gunny sack from his shoulder.  He placed a glob of food on his finger from the open can and gently poked it into her mouth, holding it there until the food dissolved, and then for a moment longer because the touch of her lips sent inexplicable waves of pure pleasure through his finger and entire body.  He continued until she had consumed the can’s entire contents.

            “My baby,” she said.

            The infant lay asleep beside her.  Mahatma touched it, then picked it up and handed it to its mother.  Soon, the last flickering ember of the small fire died away and he went to sleep against the cave wall.

*    *    *

            Mahatma awoke to the gentle pressure of the woman cleansing his two knife wounds and the broken blisters on his head.  He savored her touch, feeling an emotion he had never experienced during his adult life.

            “What’s your name?” he asked.

            “Melinda.  And yours?”

            “I’m Mahatma.  We’re not safe here.  Too many ozos roaming this sector.”

            A tear appeared in Melinda’s blue eyes.  “Where would we go?”

            Shrugging, he fished in his gunny sack for a second can of the wonderful concoction.  When he held it out to her, she smiled and licked it off his finger.

            “Are you thirsty?” she asked.

            “You have water?” was his response.

            Nodding, she crawled away into the darkness of the cave.  Mahatma followed, watching as she filled a vessel with water from a crystal pool.

            “Where does it come from?” he asked..

            “Artesia,” she answered.  “That’s all I know.”

            “Is it pure?”

            Touching the vessel to his lips, she answered only with her smile.

            “If there were just a source of food, this would be paradise,” Mahatma said.

            Melinda motioned to a spot behind her.  Several scrawny plants grew in a row beneath a small opening in the cave’s roof that provided a little direct light.  A stunted red fruit grow on one of the plants.

            “How?” he asked.

            “Seeds I dug out of the dump.  Someone threw them there long ago.  I ate some but saved enough to plant.”

            “Amazing.  Are there more seeds?”

            “They are rare.  The ozos eat them.”

            “You have a broken foot,” he said.

            “I haven’t been able to forage for many days.”

            “I can set it for you, but it will be painful.”

            Touching the broken skin on his forehead, she said, “I trust you.”

            Mahatma helped Melinda back into the other chamber.  She never winced or cried as he set her foot and then bound it tightly.  When the baby awoke and began to cry, she crawled to its side.  It was then that Mahatma heard something from outside the mouth of the cavern.

            It was the two remaining ozomutes from the previous night.  Strengthened by the flesh of their companion, they were moving up the hill toward them, their knives drawn.

            Mahatma glanced across the barren expanse of the Great Dump.  Food and water had strengthened him and he knew that he could easily outdistance the two ozos.  It didn’t matter.  He wasn’t going to run away.  Something had strengthened his resolve even more than the taste of pure spring water and sustenance from the can he had only ever dreamed of.  Hearing the crying infant behind him and Melinda’s comforting voice, he eased himself out of the cavern’s mouth.  He raised his cane and walked toward the two approaching ozos.  He was about to live, or perhaps to die.  Either way, he had something for which to fight.

END

http://www.ericwilder.com

I was incensed when my oil company went belly up at the end of the last oil boom.  I had never before faced total failure and I felt emasculated, both mentally and physically.  Anne and I had an IBM AT, the state-of-the-art personal computer at the time, and an early word processing program called Framework.  Unable to save my ailing oil company, I began writing an expose instead to tell the world what we had endured.

Within ninety days I completed a novel of a hundred and twenty thousand words.  The book, a total disaster, still resides in my trunk.  I’ve read it since and it is still horrible, but it taught me one thing - I truly love to write, even if I never make a penny doing it.

Realizing my shortcomings, I began reading every writer’s magazine I could buy, and every how-to book of writing that I could find, or check out from the library.  One day in the Daily Oklahoman I saw an announcement for the annual Oklahoma Writer’s Federation Inc. (OWFI) meeting.  Anne and I barely had money for groceries at the time, but she somehow scraped together the money for me to attend.

The first meeting that I attended was at the Lincoln Plaza, defunct for perhaps the last ten years.  It was going strong at the time and there were probably two hundred writers in attendance, including Clive Cussler the keynote speaker.

After registering on Saturday, I went to the main hall, like everyone else, to hear the President of the OWFI launch the conference.  I found an empty chair at a large table.  I was the only man at the table and I got my first lesson in Writing 101, learning that most of the authors in the world are females.  The women at my table were all romance writers and they all knew each other.  It’s a true but little known fact that there are more romance writers per capita in Oklahoma than any other state in the Union – I’m not making this up!

The ladies at my table were all wonderful.  When they asked me what I had written, I had to tell them, “Not much.”  It didn’t matter because they had all been there.  Everyone has to start somewhere and they were all supportive.

The chair beside me was vacant, perhaps the only vacant seat in the entire large room.  As I was talking to the women at my table, someone took the seat beside me, banging into my chair as they did.  I turned to see a slender man in a white shirt and blue jeans.  He was a good looking man with a trimmed beard and I could instantly see the attraction in the eight sets of female romance writer’s eyes when he spoke.

“Hi, ladies, hope I’m not disturbing anything.”

“Not at all,” the woman next to me said, almost poking out my eye as she reached across me to shake his hand.  “I’m Glenda so-and-so,” she said.

“Glad to meet you,” the man answered.  “I’m Clive Cussler.”

Every woman at the table practically swooned.  I never got a chance to speak but I’m sure that I was Cussler’s biggest fan at the table.  Having grown up with Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard, I had just finished reading Cussler’s wonderful adventure novel Cyclops and I thought that he was the second coming.

Later, when I listened to Cussler’s keynote address, I learned that nothing comes easy in the writing world.  He was in his forties before he ever had a book published, and then only after tricking an agent into representing him.  When he finally told his agent of many years what he had done, the man was so angry that he walked out of the expensive New York restaurant in a huff.

Cussler was rich and famous when I met him, but you wouldn’t have known it by talking to him.  He was humble, courteous and as down-to-earth as any long-haul truck driver.  Yes, he was a real gentleman and hey, the romance writers at my table liked him too!

http://www.ericwilder.com

We all know how music can evoke memories.  I realize as much tonight as I listen to the BeeGees on the stereo.  The group was