IT'S HERE!

I'm incredibly pleased and proud to announce the publication of my second novel, Through the Night and Wind. From concept to completion has been an almost two-year labor of love. I've had help from so many wonderful people along the way (you know who you are--your names are in the back of the book) and I feel truly blessed to present this work to the world.

You can buy Through the Night and Wind at two online retailers (for now; there are many more coming in 2010):

1. Infinity Publishing

and

2. Amazon

(Either one works, although Amazon's shipping time is a little speedier.)

Once you have the book in hand (or you're simply curious), check out the Reading Guide, with online links to encyclopedia entries, YouTube videos, full texts of plays and poems, recipes and much, much more.

I hope you enjoy Through the Night and Wind. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it!

k.

Review of McCoy Tyner at UCLA's Royce Hall

Incredible. Just incredible. Here's my review for the Register.

Review of Widespread Panic at the Orpheum

Some good points, some bad points. Loved "Driving Song" into "Disco" and the encores.

Review of Hanson at Club Nokia

Yeah, they're still touring. Doing a pretty decent job of it, too. Here's my Register review.

Review(s) of Phish's Festival 8

I wrote four pieces for the Orange County Register: a preview and single reviews of each day's show.

Here are all four in one fell swoop:

Preview

Friday, 10/30

Saturday, 10/31

Sunday, 11/1

Review of Darius Rucker at Club Nokia

Saw him belt out Prince's "Purple Rain" as an encore. It was awesome. Here's my review for the Register.

Review of Yo La Tengo at the Avalon

Read my write-up of YLT for the O.C. Register here.

Review of Brad Paisley/Dierks Bentley

I got my honky-tonk on in Irvine for Go Country 105's Go Fest yesterday. Here's my review for the Register.

Review of Pearl Jam at Gibson

Last night I was fortunate enough to tag along to my second Pearl Jam show. Here's my write-up for the Orange County Register.

Inherent Vice

As I was reading Thomas Pynchon's most recent (and by far most accessible) new book Inherent Vice towards the end of the summer, this passage jumped out at me as being a fantastic representation of late '60s Los Angeles:

"Doc took the freeway out. The eastbound lanes teemed with VW buses in jittering paisleys, primer-coated street hemis, woodies of authentic Dearborn pine, TV-star-piloted Porsches, Cadillacs carrying dentists to extramarital trysts, windowless vans with lurid teen dramas in progress inside, pickups with mattresses fully of country cousins from the San Joaquin, all wheeling along together down the into these great horizonless fields of housing, under the power transmission lines, everybody’s radios lasing on the same couple of AM stations, under a sky like watered milk, and the white bombardment of a sun smogged into only a smear of probability, out in whose light you began to wonder if anything you’d call psychedelic could ever happen, or if—bummer!—all this time it had really been going on up north."

Through the Night and Wind excerpt

With only a few weeks left until the release of Through the Night and Wind, I've selected a few more excerpts to share. The following is from the eighth chapter.

We hauled ourselves up onto the swimming platform and sat there for a while, watching tiny schools of minnows and sunfish dart here and there, mostly ignoring our presence just as their brethren had at the Baths and the Caves. My dad’s chest glowed a bright crimson and looked as though he’d been out in the sun without sunscreen for days on end. I poked him with my index finger, watching as the spot flashed bright white, then slowly faded from a pinkish hue to red again.

“You okay?” I asked, laughing as I recalled the look on his face the instant before he hit the water—a mixture of subdued terror and casual indifference as he likely realized there was nothing he could’ve done about it at that point.

“Nothing a cold beer won’t cure.”

“Bad news,” I said. “We’re almost out.”

“Lucky for us we’re less than a hundred yards from a veritable cornucopia of beach bars. What do you say?”

I didn’t hesitate: “Let’s go.”

We spent the next few hours bar-hopping along the white sand beach. Some of the places were relatively upscale establishments, with air conditioning and wait staff; others were how I imagined Bomba’s would appear—rundown little shacks that appeared as if they’d blow over in a stiff breeze (or even a gentle one). We’d taken the dinghy ashore, paid our mooring fee and enjoyed bottles of Red Stripe at Rhymer’s Beach Bar, then criss-crossed the beach, stopping at The Big Banana Paradise Club and Stanley’s Welcome Bar. We sipped Bushwhackers while reclining in lounge chairs, watching a trio of surfers negotiate the rocky reef off to our right at the bay’s eastern point. Observing them paddling out, catching a swell and cutting back and forth across the waves’ faces was certainly impressive; it reminded me of the Pacific. I knew that I’d be back in Santa Barbara in two days and was eager to enjoy the familiar pleasures of home.

The more thought I gave it, the more I realized that when I thought of “home,” that same mnemonic slide carousel dropped in images of Santa Barbara, not Naperville. It showed me the sun rising over Stearns Wharf as I paddled into the brilliant yellow aurora of daybreak; it showed me cruising north on the 101 through wine country; it showed the same fiery ball sinking into the violet Pacific, leaving an impressionistic ruby sky in its wake. It didn’t show me the impeccably groomed outfield at Wrigley or a blurred visage of an El train whizzing through a blustery, inky midnight. In the past week I’d grown to accept the fact that just as my father had left Illinois behind and cast his lot here (or wherever he was destined to wind up), I was growing accustomed to the fact that after two years in California, I had begun to think of it as home—and not just home in the sense that it was some other folks’ home, a place that I was simply passing through on my way somewhere else, but my home.

Note: here's a photo of Cane Garden Bay from one of the aforementioned beach bars.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt

With only a few weeks left until the release of Through the Night and Wind, I've selected a few more excerpts to share. The following is from the fourth chapter; it picks up right where the previous chapter 4 excerpt leaves off:

I’d been so immersed in observation that I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I stepped onto the sandy beach and my stomach growled angrily. Ken emerged from the ocean a few minutes later, and I could tell by his expression that he was feeling similar pangs. We slipped off our flippers and re-moved our sandals from a mesh bag that he’d been wearing as a backpack. The walk up to the restaurant was strewn with pointy rocks (a lesson he’d learned the hard way on his last trip) and shoes were quite a blessing. I stuffed our snorkeling gear back into the pack and shouldered it for our hike to the summit. The sun beat down on our bare backs, but even the mid-90s heat felt nourishing and merited on my shoulders.

For all the ocean’s beauty and splendor, however, I still couldn’t avoid the tangy grit of the salty water. Our snorkeling equipment was far from the top of the line, and multiples times I’d needed to re-adjust my mouthpiece, inadvertently sucking in huge mouthfuls of ocean water. Fortunately my mask was adequately airtight and I’d avoided eyefuls of saltwater, but my mouth was still awash in a briny bath that I couldn’t escape. It was like being ten years old again, except at 26 I wouldn’t have the same excuse for crying and pouting that I did back then. I bore my salty cross stoically as we marched up the hill, thinking about something—cold beer, soda, anything—to get the taste out of my mouth.

That something came in the form of a great feast at Top of the Baths, the restaurant perched quite literally at its namesake. Its patio, complete with freshwater swimming pool, offers 360-degree views of the surrounding islands, which, in the crystal clear noonday sun, were nothing short of breathtaking, as beautiful a view above sea level as we’d just seen below. Even though we’d only left the ocean 15 minutes earlier, after we placed our order my father and I slid into the pool, where our waitress brought us ice cold concoctions called Bushwhackers, local libations consisting of Amaretto, Bailey’s, Kahlua, vodka, rum, Coco Lopez, and freshly grated nutmeg (thankfully, they held the kitchen sink). The drink was noticeably stronger than the Cooper’s Dreams yesterday, and my dad laughed as I winced my way through the first sip. While it wasn’t a drink I’d order on a regular basis, it did a hell of a job of getting the taste of saltwater out of my mouth; I only wondered if I’d be conscious enough to swim back to the boat after I finished it.

Lunch consisted of crab fritters (rolled balls of crabmeat and breadcrumbs, fried golden brown), hamburgers adorned with juicy slices of fresh pine-apple, and gazpacho (which truly hit the spot on such a scorching day). Exiting the pool as our food arrived, we sat in the shade under a large awning, grateful for even a brief respite from the sun. We’d both earned some color in the past few days, but thanks to Ken’s constant badgering to wear more sunscreen (which, in turn, came directly from my mother—whenever he ordered me to reapply it to my nose, I could hear her tone echoing in his voice), we’d avoided any burns. Instead my pasty, chalky skin was slowly growing to match my father’s bronzed tone. I hadn’t shaved since leaving Santa Barbara, and after a few days, the scruff accumulating on my face and neck was also growing to match his. I ran my hand over my patchy beard, wondering how Bridget would react to it. She was easygoing by nature (which was quite possibly her most attractive feature) and would most likely rib me good-naturedly—calling me the Mitchum Man or Grizzly Adams—but take it all in stride, much like the aquatic world I’d just swum through had for eons.

We bandied about more names for the boat as we lunched, re-hashing Pelican and El Draco and adding new ones to the list, like Cooper’s Dream and Angelfish. A long series of sports-themed names bubbled to the surface: Ryno, a reference to former Cubs second baseman Ryne Sandberg, one of my childhood heroes, 23 as a nod to the ubiquitous number of Michael Jordan, and Sweetness for Bears legend Walter Payton, one of the greatest running backs in NFL history. None really fit, however, and we decided to go back to the proverbial drawing board and wait for something to jump out at us, confident that when the perfect name reared its head, we’d both know it.

Note: here's a photo of the view from Top of the Baths for reference.

The Dogs of Winter

I finished reading Kem Nunn's The Dogs of Winter a few weeks ago and was struck by the beauty of this particular passage.

"At close quarters, it was an unnerving spectacle, and yet a thing to behold, full of terror and fluid beauty. The amount of water involved was such that it was like watching a piece of the earth become liquid, as if in some cataclysm, or at the hour of creation. The wave rose first with great mass, like a hill, but this hill was made of liquid, in constant flux, and even as you watched it, it would change its form, turning itself to a long dark wall as the face went vertical and then beyond vertical as the crest began to feather finally to pitch forward, to strike the water far our in front of the face—thus creating the vaunted green room of surfing myth—the place to be if you were to be there at all, on a board, at the eye of the storm, encompassed by the sound and the fury, bone dry in a place where no one had ever been, or would be again, because when the wave was gone the place was gone too and would exist only in memory, or perhaps, if the right person was there, in the right place, with the right equipment, it would exist on film—a little piece of eternity to hang on the wall."

Through the Night and Wind Excerpt (Chapter 10)

The following is an excerpt from the tenth and final chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

We breakfasted on bagels with cream cheese, apple slices
and mango jam. I then crammed my belongings into my great green backpack, caring little for my usual fold-and-roll routine; instead I stuffed and squeezed my dirty clothes in haphazardly with the worry-about-it-later mentality that often accompanies the end of a vacation. As I forced my gear into the bag, I realized that I’d seriously overpacked—in the week I’d been living on my dad’s boat, I’d worn a bathing suit almost all day every day (I brought two and alternated between them), and with the exception of the few times we’d gotten moderately dressed up to go ashore, I’d either gone shirtless or cycled through the few clean ones that floated near the top of my bag. I set out a fresh pair of underwear, cargo shorts and a Hanes pocket t-shirt, then figured I’d better bathe properly before I spent the next day crammed into the closest of quarters on three flights.

After packing, I ascended the stairs to the cockpit as the sun began its long, slow trudge over the verdant chains of islands and into the cloudless blue sky, before it scorched darkened locals and Coppertone-drenched tourists alike with its golden rays, before the light southeasterly breeze breathed life into starched white canvas sails, carrying long, slender boats across the glistening royal ocean and me, aloft in a shiny metal tube, into the nebulous heavens and north before sprinting across the amber waves of grain and purple mountains’ majesties, bound for another ocean, another body of salt water in which I could dip my toes and feel infinite.

Note: Through the Night and Wind will be available via Infinity Publishing's website as well as my own in October; it will show up at Barnes & Noble and Borders by the end of 2009.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 9)

The following is an excerpt from the ninth chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

Our driver pulled the cab to the side of the road and we dismounted, leaving the air conditioning behind and stepping back in to the mid-June Tortola humidity. Ken paid the fare, then ushered me toward the most dilapidated, neglected building I’d ever seen. Bomba’s truly was a shack—there’s no other way to describe it. Imagine if someone had collected every piece of scrap plywood and every tin roof from every condemned building and assembled (I use this term very, very loosely) it on the most picturesque white sand postcard beach with absolutely no regard for aesthetics, security or safety. Above the makeshift shanty myriad flags flapped lazily—the red-and-white divers’ flag; a green Heineken promo; the skull-and-crossbones Jolly Roger; the blue British Virgin Islands flag featuring the Union Jack in one corner and a central image of St. Ursula (the patron saint of the BVI, clad in white and flanked by a dozen golden oil lamps).

Across the dirt road stood a younger- and more sturdy-looking row of booths referred to as the vendors’ pavilion, where my father informed me we’d need to purchase tickets ($1 for 1 ticket) that we’d use as currency while at the Full Moon Party. Sidled up alongside the ticket booth were t-shirt and beer stations, all manned by friendly locals decked out in their finest carnival attire. All around us people were singing, dancing, drinking, smoking, carousing, flirting, swearing, puking, buying, selling, kissing, pissing, stripping, shouting in a dozen different languages all at once… and every few feet hand-lettered signs announced in bold, black letters: NO VIDEO. Apparently what happens at Bomba’s stays at Bomba’s.

We approached the booth and bought $20 worth of tickets, enough to get us a few beers and a plastic mug full of mushroom tea at the stroke of midnight. After procuring two cold Coronas, Ken gave me the dime tour of the rest of Bomba’s compound (meaning we took a short lap around the beachside clapboard shack); the most amazing part of the whole enterprise wasn't the fact that the building was still standing—I’d heard that every time a hurricane blows through, the locals all help Bomba track down the strewn pieces and put the thing back together—but the amount of flotsam and jetsam tacked, pinned, glued or otherwise stuck to the walls. It looked as if everyone who had ever visited had signed his or her name or left behind a photograph or some other memento of the visit. “We love Bomba” must have been scrawled a hundred times between rusty old metal beer signs and license plates, busted-up lobster traps, a discarded Coleman lantern, and even an abandoned 10-horsepower outboard motor wedged into the crotch of a tree.

Note: here's a photo of Bomba's Shack for reference.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 8)

The following is an excerpt from the eighth chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

Two pair of red-and-green buoys marked the entrance to
Cane Garden Bay, indicating safe passage between the smallish reef off DuBois Point to the north and the long, jutting reef extending out like a hitchhiker’s thumb from Windy Hill and Ballast Bay. I guided us through the short channel into what many regard as the most beautiful anchorage in the Caribbean, the “Jewel of the BVI”. It wasn’t difficult to see how it earned that distinction—a curling inlet where sparkling white sand dissolved into verdant green hills that rolled skyward toward the cobalt blue sky, dotted with cotton clouds that drifted lazily from right to left as if even Mother Nature herself had latched on to the languid island philosophy.

My father stood at the bow with the aluminum boat hook; I brought the Beneteau around the second red buoy and kept to starboard, keeping one eye on the depth gauge and one on the mostly-empty bay before me. I’d driven a few boats in my 26 years, but this was by far the biggest (and I’m guessing the most expensive), and especially after we ran aground yesterday, I was visibly nervous. I’d donned my Cubs hat to keep the sun out of my eyes and realized as I tugged nervously at the brim that I’d sweat through the cap, a combination of nervous energy and the stifling humidity. I promised myself that as soon as we were sufficiently moored I was as good as underwater again.

As I eased the 49-foot craft’s nose up to a spare ball, my father reached out and speared its mooring line, passing the bridle through the line’s eye and securing both ends to our bow cleats. His speed and efficiency were marvels to watch—in marked contrast to the way in which I consistently fumbled with the hook, line, and bridle. Although tying up to a ball was much easier on the helmsman and safer for the ocean floor (as it means fewer anchors scraping across it), I was usually the man manning the bow, and I preferred the no-nonsense approach of simply tossing the anchor overboard and letting gravity (and whomever was steering) do the work.

This time it went off without a hitch, however, and Ken gave me a merited high five as he dropped back into the cockpit. I stifled a yawn as I interlaced my fingers and extended my arms out above my head, letting go of the tension I’d built up since taking the wheel to guide us into the bay.

“We good?” I asked, rolling my head around in a big stretching circle.

“Yeah,” he nodded, looking around at the dozen or so empty mooring balls bobbing in the bay. If the Full Moon Party was all it was cracked up to be, I was certain they’d be full before too long. We’d been wise to leave Jost early; it was barely 2:00 and I surmised in another hour or so Cane Garden would be flush with tourists, cruisers and those simply there for the party.

By the time Ken turned back around, I was already out over the water in mid-dive—part celebratory gesture over my first successful Caribbean mooring, part primitive urge to escape the sweat seeping from every pore in my body. I quickly ditched my hat, sunglasses and soaked-through t-shirt haphazardly on the deck and launched myself out, up and over the aft railing, kicking both feet high above my head and straightening my torso to slice directly into the cerulean bay.

Note: here are a few photos of Cane Garden Bay for reference.

Review of Phish at Shoreline

I finally made it up north to Shoreline. Read my review for the Bay Area NBC affiliate here.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 7)

The following is an excerpt from the seventh chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

After a straight run to Tortola’s Western tip, we tacked and headed north, back towards White Bay, before the wind eventually hushed and then died completely. We hauled in the sails and secured a line off one of the rear cleats, then engaged in the same mad scramble that Jude and I used to whenever the sails came down in the middle of the lake—trying to strip off shirts, hats and sunglasses to see who could be the first into the water. I won by leaping low over the railing while my father climbed atop it for a higher dive, costing him precious seconds. The sun, hiding behind a grayish wall of haze, wasn’t nearly as oppressive as it’d been the past few days; the water was refreshing regardless, as we were still in the midst of mid-80s temperatures.

It was some 50-odd feet deep where we swam, making it fruitless to bother with the anchor; even though the wind was barely blowing, the boat was constantly drifting, although not so quickly that we couldn’t grab a hold of the line we’d tossed out to go along for the slow ride. I hoisted myself onto the swimming platform off the stern and remembered that I’d brought a tennis ball for this very moment. Soaking wet, I clambered quickly down to my berth, trying to drip as little as possible, eventually emerging victorious in the cockpit, little yellow-green ball in hand. I tossed it out to Ken, comfortably lazing behind the boat. With one hand fixed around the rope, he caught it easily in the other.

“Ready?” he asked, warming up his throwing arm. I climbed up onto the top of the cabin, standing to the port side of the boom and facing the water. He cocked his right arm back and counted “One. Two. Three!”

He winged it good, a high floater. I bent my knees and jumped, keeping my eye on the ball as it sailed toward me, although a little above my head. As I plunged into the ocean, I stretched both hands above my head, cupping them together into a basket for the ball to drop into. Instantly I went under, but felt the fuzzy ball slap against my left hand—I grabbed it tightly and held it aloft, above the water, as proof of my catch. I surfaced a moment later, still holding my prize atop the surface while wiping the salty water from my eyes.

“Nice grab,” he commented as he swam towards the boat for his turn. When he used to play these games of catch with me and Jude, we’d position two of us on one side of the boat and one on the other, then toss the ball back-and-forth like jugglers, trying to time our jumps and throws just right. Even describing it for you now makes the game sound ridiculously simple and a slightly pedantic, but it was one of those rituals that families have, like scratching the living room ceiling with the top of the always-too-tall Christmas tree (a mark for each year) or being the first person to say “rabbits rabbits” to the rest of the family on the first day of each month (it’s supposed to bring good luck). Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I missed our ridiculously simple and slightly pedantic game, though, and I found that familiarity comforting, like a soft, dry towel wrapped around my shoulders after a long swim.

Ken threw the ball back to me as I grabbed hold of the rope trailing behind the boat. I didn’t give him as good a throw, however, and the ball sailed wide, a few feet past his outstretched hand. He swam after the floating yellow sphere and the game continued for a while—leaping, splashing, swimming, throwing, catching, missing a few here and there. It was every American family’s backyard version of father and son playing a game of catch, only our backyard was now a turquoise stretch of tropical ocean instead of a green patch of suburban lawn. The camaraderie was the same, though, just as it had been when there were three of us playing the game, back and forth. We laughed and teased each other good-naturedly when someone threw an errant pass or fudged a catch off his fingertips.

After a half-hour of the game, I climbed atop the cabin for one last jump and noticed that Ken’s attention was focused on the horizon. I looked off to the west and saw what had caught his eye. Remember those amorphous low-lying cumulus clouds I described during the gorgeous sunset last night? Well, they were back—lurking hands curling into menacing fists, their color deepening from a frosted light gray to a tarnished, inky blue. All around us the sea flattened to an eerie glassy calm and I shivered as the temperature dropped; my dad swam quickly to the boat and pulled in the line behind him.

“I should’ve known when the wind died that this was coming,” he muttered, turning the key to fire up the engine. Rubbing the goose bumps back into the flesh of my arms, I climbed down into the cockpit and cautioned a look back at the giant anvil-shaped cloud sweeping toward us, already releasing its payload on St. Thomas, some ten miles away.

“You think we can outrun it?” I asked.

“I hope so,” Ken replied. “Just to be safe, why don’t you throw the sail cover on while I get us going.” I ducked below and grabbed the royal blue canvas cover, then hopped up and snapped it in place over the boom and the lower section of the mast as my father eased the throttle down, steering us back toward Jost Van Dyke and Great Harbour.

Note: I received my first proof from my publisher on Monday. Here's a mock-up of the cover:

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 6)

The following is an excerpt from the sixth chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

The westernmost harbor on Jost Van Dyke, White Bay is a shallow half-mile inlet guarded by a series of natural reefs running across its mouth. There are three entrances through the reef, although it’s highly recommended that incoming boats run between the two largest reefs; for guidance, red and green buoys mark the suggested entrance route. The list of do’s and don’ts also includes not anchoring in the channel (as to block it) or anchoring in the coral that comprises the reefs. Suffice to say the landing at White Bay was going to be the most difficult of our journey, and with that in mind I turned the wheel over to my father and stepped forward to man the anchor as we approached the reefs.

The bay was relatively empty, meaning we wouldn’t need to worry about dodging other boats as we set the anchor, a 25-pound hunk of pointed metal designed to dig itself into the ocean floor. The trick here was obviously to not only avoid the precious coral, but also to make sure that I let out enough line (so the anchor stays put) but not too much, which would let us drift with the wind and possibly swing us into another boat or the reef. As Ken headed the boat into the wind, he shouted up to me and I dropped the anchor into the shallow water (White Bay was 10 feet deep at its maximum; the depth gauge in the cockpit read that our location was about seven) and let first the anchor chain, then the tough knotted rope slide through my hands. The ideal figure is for every foot of depth, one should let out seven feet of anchor line; thankfully, the Sunsail folks had marked our rode at intervals of 25 feet with small orange tags. After one of the tags passed by, I stopped the line and tugged on the anchor and Ken reversed the engine to drag slightly on the anchor so it would set properly on the sandy bottom. I then let one more tag slide through my hands before I pulled a few feet of rope back in and tied the line off on the starboard cleat.

I stayed at the forecastle for a few more minutes, watching the anchor as the wind nudged us gently aside. It held, and as I maneuvered back to the cockpit, my dad was already preparing lunch. We grilled hamburgers and bratwurst and paired them with a garlic potato salad I’d bought from the Harbour Market at Soper’s. It was a blissfully low-key meal, and it did wonders to bolster my mood. Ken washed down his lunch with a Carib, but I stuck with bottled water, not quite ready to climb back on that horse just yet.

We spent the next hour tidying up the cockpit and cabin, then cleaning ourselves in traditional Algir family fashion: we took the bottle of shampoo and bar of soap from my dad’s mesh toiletry kit, dove into the water, and had a good old-fashioned Caribbean bath. As antiquated as it seemed, it was a huge improvement over wedging oneself into one of the cramped heads on the boat, angling the body and the shower nozzle for maximum coverage amidst minimum comfort. Sure, when we emerged from the ocean we still were dripping with salty water (the fresh water shower on the swimming platform was still out of commission), but considering the alternative, I didn’t complain. As my mother used to constantly remark, “For boys, wet means clean.”

After drying off (which didn’t take long in the 95-degree afternoon heat) we changed into fresh clothes and climbed into the dinghy for a trip ashore. White Bay takes its name from the mile-long strip of pristine white sand that runs the length of the harbor. Ashore, a pair of quaint-yet-enchanting establishments border the beautiful beach. At the western end of the inlet sits White Bay Sandcastle, a tiny resort with a dazzling menu (we made reservations for breakfast the following morning); attached to the Sandcastle is the Soggy Dollar Bar, named for the sopping wet payment that many people use after mooring their boats outside the treacherous reef and swimming ashore; at the eastern end is Ivan’s Stress Free Bar and Campground, which country singer Kenny Chesney immortalized in the video for his song “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem.” Given that Jost has been nicknamed “the barefoot island” due to its laid-back atmosphere, at least two-thirds of the song’s title seemed appropriate. (However, it occurred to me that bearing the reputation of being the most laid-back of a series of extraordinarily laid-back islands sounds like holding a diving contest and declaring one person the “most wet.” On Cooper I thought that no place on earth could possibly get more relaxed, yet here we were.)

Note: here are a few photos of White Bay for reference.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 5)

The following is an excerpt from the fifth chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

There’s a legend that alleges Robert Louis Stevenson used Norman Island as the inspiration for his classic Treasure Island. Part of the myth credits Stevenson’s uncle, a sailor, with regaling his nephew with legends of the British Virgin Islands. First sighted by Columbus in 1493, the mystique of the BVI certainly would’ve no doubt intrigued Stevenson, who crafted the first chapters of the book in the cold and dreary Scottish Highlands in 1881, nearly 400 years after the islands’ discovery. The story is augmented by the fact that not a half-mile off the coast of nearby Peter Island lies Dead Chest Island, but here the story grows murkier. It’s unclear whether the real-life island took its name from the sea shanty “Dead Man’s Chest” that Stevenson likely penned for the book or if he lifted the name from a book about the West Indies by Charles Kingsley, an English writer and contemporary of Stevenson’s.

I remember reading Treasure Island as a kid, one of those books that Jude and I raced through after our father consistently praised it as one of his favorites growing up. I mentally added Hispaniola, the name of Captain Flint’s schooner, to our growing list of boat names.

Norman has its share of actual history, too, from Spanish galleons transporting chests filled with silver coins to hapless fishermen braving a storm only to discover gold doubloons washed into their boat. No one’s quite sure where the name of the island originated, but another fable claims that Norman was the name of a pirate who laid claim to owning the island (legally or illegally) sometime during the 18th century. We would certainly find our share of interesting moments during our stay, and while I won’t fill up 34 chapters like Stevenson, I’ll attempt to do the famous island justice.

I awoke just in time to greet the dawn. I’d slept soundly in the cockpit, and awoke feeling as refreshed as I’d been since I left Santa Barbara five days earlier. It struck me that my internal clock was slowly growing adjusted to its temporary time zone, and I passed the time that Ken slept by first quietly cleaning up the dishes and garbage from the previous night, then settling back into the starboard-side bench with The Tempest, which I’d neglected since landing in Tortola. I chuckled knowingly in Act 2 as Ariel’s song floats the stranded Italians off to sleep and Antonio comments that it is “the quality o’ th’ climate” that causes their strange drowsiness—I could certainly appreciate the sentiment. The quiet morning didn’t last long, however, and as soon as the sun rose and burned off the slinky morning haze, the Bight sprang to life with boats leaving their moorings, others quickly snapping up those vacated, and frantic worker-bee dinghies motoring away from their vessels, off to fetch provisions or dump garbage for their queens.

Our trash would need to be disposed of sometime today as well, but considering we’d been cleaning our plates the old-fashioned way (either by devouring our meals or sharing scraps with the fish), we had little more than some food wrappers, dirty paper towels, and empty beer cans and bottles in our wastebasket. Early that morning a company wittily named Deliverance brought its boat around the Bight, the two long-haired white kids at the helm looking like they’d just stepped off their longboards at Leadbetter Point in Santa Barbara. They delivered any and every type of amenity from fresh ice to birthday cakes, and they took away our just-barely-full bag of trash for $2.50. My instinctive read of the two young men proved accurate, and we talked for a few minutes about surf conditions in the BVI before they motored on to the next boat. I learned that there were indeed a few good beach and point breaks in the islands, centered mostly around Tortola, but with so many dangerous reef bottoms (both exposed and hidden), they suggested I stick to snorkeling.

Note: here's an aerial photo of Norman Island for reference.

Review of Faith Hill at the Hollywood Bowl

With the Bowl Orchestra. Read my review for the Orange County Register here.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 4)

The following is an excerpt from the fourth chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

The wind held, we made excellent time, and after an hour of snorkeling the Baths, we hiked up to a tiny restaurant atop the island for lunch. The Baths—a series of naturally occurring tide pools, underwater tunnels, rock arches and scenic grottoes—line the white sandy beaches of southern Virgin Gorda, a little over a mile from Spanish Town, the island’s main hamlet. Columbus’ “Fat Virgin” was at one point the capital of the BVI, and American philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller even built a hotel and harbor on the island in the 1950s. Just as the Rockefellers were instrumental in establishing and maintaining national parks in the U.S., a number of spots in the BVI had also been designated as National Parks in an effort to preserve their natural beauty.

Trust me: natural beauty was something these islands had in spades. The Baths were like nothing I’d ever seen—an anomalous formation of huge boulders, creating beautiful pools where the ocean creeps in between the rocks. The enormous slabs of granite (some nearly as large as our 49-foot boat) point to Virgin Gorda’s volcanic past, where superheated magma cooled into giant molten slabs, which over the course of tens of thousands of years, eventually eroded into the labyrinth of geologic wonder that was now called the Baths.

Because dinghies aren’t permitted on the beach, we couldn’t motor in and haul the small raft onto the shore, like we’d done at Cooper yesterday. Luckily, we didn’t need much besides our snorkeling gear and money for lunch, so after securing the boat to a buoy, we plunged into the tiny waves lapping at the sides of the boat and swam in. We spent just over an hour exploring, and though the Baths were crowded, we made our way to Devil’s Bay, the next inlet south, and found ourselves amid far fewer humans and amongst a breathtaking mélange of varying kinds of ocean life: bristly sponges that resembled desert cacti; waving green sea fans; multi-colored jacks with black stripes along their dorsal ridges and brilliantly regal black-and-yellow angelfish drifting and darting along the coral ledges and caves.

I’d never seen anything quite like it, and although I stayed far closer to the shore than my father did, I couldn’t help but marvel at the unspoiled splendor. As the pristine white sand gave way to a mottled light brown that melted into borderless gradients of cyan and sapphire, nowhere did the aquatic life seem bothered by our intrusion; the fish and plants simply went about their daily activities as if we were merely other big mammals swimming overhead. There’s a life lesson in there somewhere, perhaps something about ecological symbiosis, or maybe just the permissive idea of going with the proverbial flow that nature accomplishes so well and humans emulate so poorly.

Note: here are some photos of The Baths at Virgin Gorda for reference.

Review of Old 97's at the Fonda

What's so great about the Barrier Reef? Read my review for the Orange County Register here.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 3)

The following is an excerpt from the third chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

I walked unsteadily down the dock towards the boat,
suddenly aware that the entire marina was bustling: engines spit and sputtered, halyards clinked and clanked, people drawled and droned. After two years of teaching, I’d grown to be a morning person, but considering my internal clock read just after 5:00 AM, it took me a while to come around. As I took in the boats refueling, dockhands loading and unloading gear, and finally my father, clad only in a pair of khaki shorts, hanging over the port side of his new boat, attempting to reach the waterline with a sudsy sponge… with all the activity and energy surging around me, I couldn’t help but awaken.

“That’s got to be easier from the water,” I called out. With the flick of his wrist, the sponge sailed through the air and landed at my feet.

“If you want to swim in this marina water, the job is yours,” he said, hoisting himself into a sitting position atop the cabin. He looked as if he’d been up for a while, working. He was skinny, like me (and like Jude), and a deep, weeks-old Caribbean tan made the tufts of gray-and-white hair on his chest stand out even more than usual. He brushed a few stray sweaty hairs from his face and smiled at me, a wry, lopsided grin like the one he offered yesterday when I first saw him striding down the dock; the kind of genuine, benevolent smile exchanged between family members like a secret handshake or an heirloom passed down from generation to generation. He was letting me know that everything was going to be okay, even if it was abundantly clear that he didn’t wholeheartedly believe it.

We spent the next hour checking and double-checking the boat’s vitals: making sure the sheets were coiled and knotted where they should be coiled and knotted and loose and unencumbered where they should be loose and unencumbered; inspecting the gauges on our gas tank and fresh water to ensure we’d have plenty of both; running the bilge pump to flush any stray ocean water from the lowest part of the interior hull below the waterline. Following my father’s lead, I’d shed my shirt and worked bare-chested in the glimmering mid-morning sun. For the first time in months, I was engaged in real manual labor—lifting and stretching, bending and pulling—and the soft, tensile ache in the muscles of my shoulders and back—as well as the sweat that wicked away my sunscreen—were physical manifestations of my efforts, and I wore them proudly.

After our inspection, my father fired up the inboard Yanmar 76-horsepower engine, and as it idled, I climbed over the starboard rail and onto the dock, releasing the docklines but hanging on to the rail to guide us. With my dad’s go-ahead, I walked the 49-foot boat forward out of the slip, waiting until the last possible moment to leap on board, swinging around a stable halyard.

As I gazed out beyond the reef to the Sir Francis Drake channel and the coruscating Caribbean, my heart swelled with lofty pride at my—no, our—undertaking. I looked back at my father behind the wheel, and behind his mirrored aviators, I sensed the same feeling of elation, of freedom from the world around us. He looked comfortable, he looked at peace, he looked… natural, as if his whole life had been leading up to this one singular moment, when everything he owned was under his control and everyone he cared about was on board—he truly was the captain, and my admiration for him had never been greater.


Note: here's a photo of a Beneteau 49 for reference.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 2)

The following is an excerpt from the second chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

As we drove, I learned that my cabbie, Berihun, had lived in Tortola nearly all of his 40-odd years, the British diacritic a result of his birth and rearing in South Africa. His father had served as a police officer on this, the largest of the islands, after bringing Berihun and his mother to the BVI in the late ‘60s. He proved to be a treasure trove of knowledge of the islands, and by a serendipitous stroke of dumb luck, he was my initial guide to paradise.

Leaving the airport behind, we crossed a small two-lane bridge connecting Beef Island to the primary mass of Tortola. According to Berihun, the new bridge had been dubbed Queen Elizabeth Bridge during the British Monarch’s visit to Tortola in 1967, the same year Berihun’s family arrived. So the legend goes, prior to the bridge, people crossed from Beef Island via a small wooden raft, just large enough for one car, that operators pulled back and forth between the two islands. A cross-breeze gusted through the windows of the makeshift taxi and I silently thanked Queen Elizabeth and Terrance B. Lettsome for replacing the raft-and-pulley system with this concrete causeway, which, although not nearly as romantic (at least in the Hemingway sense of the word) as its ancestor, felt far safer and imminently more reliable.

I glanced down at my watch, surprised that there wasn’t much traffic for just after 11:00 am on a Thursday. Then, remembering my pledge outside the hotel in San Juan, I slid the watch off my wrist and stuffed in it my small backpack with my cell phone. I made myself a small promise that I’d take them back out when I landed in JFK on the return flight (and not a second before). Berihun narrated as he drove, pointing and gesturing out the window with his left hand as we passed Buck Island, a tiny glob of greenery a few hundred feet offshore. Apparently Buck is a private island, and when its former owner began building a bridge connecting it to Tortola proper, he discovered that under BVI law, the bridge would’ve legally enabled the public to use the island’s beaches, so he abandoned the project.

“Some people very territorial here,” Berihun mused. “Most everybody very friendly, but some folks just don’t want to see nobody. They build big houses on the hills…” he waved his right hand at the foliage outside the passenger side windows, creeping straight up in a wall that towered high over the two-lane road. “They isolate themselves from the world.”

“I can understand that,” I replied.

“You one of those?” he asked.

“Sometimes.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s no way for a man to live. People need other people. You listen to Simon and Garfunkel?”

“Sure.” I was practically raised on Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor and John Prine. My parents had a ton of vinyl, but my dad only had half a dozen cassettes in his car, and when we’d go on road trips, he’d listen to the same tape over and over and over, never caring that he’d just heard the same songs 40 minutes before, and 40 minutes before that.

“You know that song, ‘I am a Rock’?” Berihun asked into my memories.

“Yeah,” I answered, pretty sure I knew where my guide was taking this line of questioning. “A rock feels no pain and an island never cries,” I sang poorly. Berihun laughed out loud, but I took no offense. I knew I was a terrible singer, and my blurting out the lyrics was more for his value than mine.

“You got it,” he said, honking the horn as he rolled the cab to a gentle stop behind a beat-up pickup truck idling in our lane. “It’s actually John Donne,” he added, without looking back at me. I didn’t hear him clearly, so I asked him to repeat what he’d just said. Instead, Berihun leaned his head out his window to see what was holding us up and nearly had it taken off by a car speeding past in the opposite direction. He hooted and ducked back inside quickly, returning to our discussion as if he hadn’t just nearly been decapitated.

“John Donne. 17th century English metaphysical poet. He wrote ‘No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ Nobody is an island. You, me, we’re no islands; we’re part of the main. You’re not an island, are you?”

“I guess not.”

“You a rock?”

“That depends,” I said. “Sometimes being a rock is a good thing.”

“Like when?”

“What about Saint Peter? Christ told Peter that he was his rock. Upon Peter he’d build his church. That’s a ringing endorsement if I’ve ever heard one.”

“That’s true,” Berihun agreed, laying on the horn until the pickup finally lurched into motion, hiccupping its way up the winding flora-bordered road. “I suppose it can be a good thing. You know what I’m saying though, right?”

“Yeah, I get it,” I assented. Berihun rounded a bend, and as the tall trees parted, I caught a glimpse of the sandy reef, the three long rows of docks, and the big red-roofed buildings. I had arrived.

“Hodges Creek Marina,” my driver announced as he flicked his left turn signal and swung into the small parking lot. “Home of Sunsail.” I swallowed heavily and with some difficulty. Here I was, after a couple days on the go I already felt like I’d been gone a week or more. Leaving Santa Barbara was a distant memory already, and I still had another week ahead of me. Berihun shifted into park and retrieved my bag from the rear hatch. I was so lost in thought that I didn’t move; I just sat there, staring through the front windshield at the front (or back, I wasn’t quite sure) of the building before me. This was far and away the most impulsive thing I’d ever done, and even a few fated feet from the door, I still wasn’t sure I had the courage to go through with it.

“Hey, Saint Peter!” Berihun rapped on the roof with his knuckles.

“Thomas,” I replied, shaking myself out of my daze.

“No sir. Saint Thomas about 20 miles west.” He pointed off in the distance, towards what I had to believe was the west. “You are in the land of the turtle dove, named by Christopher Columbus himself.”

“Sorry,” I said as I climbed out of the back seat. “That’s my name: Thomas.” I paused for moment—hearing my full Christian name out loud for the first time since my mother passed, standing at the threshold of a great adventure (or an epic disaster), my head was swimming.

“Tom,” I corrected.

“Well, Tom, it has been a pleasure serving you.” He stuck out his hand and I reached for my wallet, not realizing what his gesture truly meant.

“No, my friend,” Berihun said again. “Handshake first. Pay later.”

I palmed my wallet with my left hand, meeting my right hand in his with a firm, gracious shake and a smile. Upon release, I paid my new friend and thanked him for his help. (I hadn’t bothered to ask how he knew so much about 17th century English metaphysical poets.) As I walked gingerly toward the main building, he climbed back into the cab and rapped on the roof again.

I turned and he pointed at me. “Remember,” he said, “no man is an island, including you.”

I tried to squeak out a “thank you,” but could only wave as Berihun pulled out onto the highway, the little car’s horn bleating plaintively as he drove away.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 1)

The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

My mother died last month.

I know for a fact that it was exactly one month ago: Monday, May 15th—a week after Mother’s Day. I got a phone call from my father: “Tom, it’s dad. She’s gone.”

Grace Elizabeth Algir had been diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer nearly two years earlier, right after I moved from Illinois to California. I had been out of college for two years, during which time I’d worked briefly at a magazine in Chicago, then gone back to grad school to get my teaching certificate. It felt like some ridiculously absurd joke that she got sick as soon as I left; for a while, I even blamed myself, but she never once made me feel guilty for leaving. “Follow your dreams,” she constantly told my brother and me as we grew up, so I did. The only problem is that my dreams took me approximately 2,078 miles away from my dying mother.

I don’t know the exact scientific name of her disease other than that it was lung cancer and it was terminal. (At first my dad didn’t tell me about the terminal part.) I’m sure the doctor told me at some point, but I was so spaced out most of the time I visited the hospital that I’d be hard pressed to remember. I didn’t really want to know then and I’m still not 100% sure I want to know now; it’s probably some kind of defense mechanism—denial, surely—that allowed me to keep her disease at arm’s length. My father and I genuinely thought she could fight it and win (I especially believed this, given that he’d neglected to tell me that she was, without question, going to die). When the diagnosis was eventually revealed, her cancer had already spread beyond cure. Her fight was to live as long as possible, which wound up being nearly 20 months.

You could tell she knew, though. During the last few months the spark that was my mother’s once indomitable spirit had been extinguished, like someone had licked his fingertips and pinched it, her smile and the gleam in her eye the lingering smoke that slowly drifted out of the room, leaving nothing but a charred wick, the shell of a vital, effervescent woman. So out went the candle, leaving us darkling. Incredibly kind and compassionate, insightful and observant, loyal and devoted—my mother was more than I can put into words, and now she’s gone.

For 28 years she taught kindergarten in my hometown of Naperville, Illinois, a now-bustling suburb about 30 miles southwest of Chicago. Grace was a fervent reader, and devoured just about anything—novels, magazines, newspapers, poems, short stories, biographies, essays, criticism… you name it, she read it. Her passion for the written word no doubt sparked my own, and toward the end, when her body was confined to a hospital bed, she wrote dozens upon dozens of letters to just about everyone she knew. I received the lion’s share of these, and they’re stashed away under my bed with one of my most prized possessions: a leather-bound of copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that she gave me the day I left for California. I haven’t been able to bring myself to reread any of the letters since she died, although in the past few weeks I’ve once or twice dug out the New Balance shoebox in which I keep them. I’ll lift up the sheet that overhangs the edge of the bed and slide the box along the carpet; I’ll even begin lifting the lid, but I don’t have the courage to open it. The gaping hole in my heart has yet to heal, and reading those letters would be like pouring salt into that wound.

In the month that followed the funeral, my father and I spoke on the phone far more frequently than we ever had before, but in truth we said very little. My girlfriend Bridget and I flew home for the funeral, of course, but my dad and I didn’t say much to each other during those few days I was home. It wasn’t that we were angry or upset with each other; we just didn’t really have anything to say (even though there were hundreds of things we should have said). Sure, we discussed sports as usual—standings, box scores, draft picks, managerial blunders—it was the first thing that we’d bonded over when my brother Jude and I were young and was still often the first topic broached. But we didn’t talk about anything; it was more like we talked around everything, artfully dancing around the subject of my mother as if we were careening through Tchaikovsky.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You want to know about the boat, right? I’m getting to it.

In the month after mom passed, my dad sold the house I grew up in and his and my mother’s cars, unloaded their mutual funds, IRAs, and anything else that had any sort of attachment or connection to her—furniture, clothing, even family photos and heirlooms—and boarded a plane at O’Hare, flew to Miami, connected in San Juan and finally Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, where he took possession of a 49-foot, six-inch long Beneteau sailboat that displaced nearly 14 tons in the water.

My father, a 55-year-old retiree and widower named Ken Algir, was now the proud owner of an ocean-going sailboat, and was determined to sail the ocean. The ocean comprised of salty, salty water.

And lo and behold, I was going to join him.

Review of The 88 at the Key Club

The 88 tackled Bob Dylan's classic Highway 61 Revisited on Thursday at the Key Club. My review is here.

Review of the Allman Brothers/Doobie Brothers at the Greek

With guest appearances from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bruce Willis. Read my review here.

Review of The Dead at the Forum

Read my first contribution to the Orange County Register here.

Links

For your perusal:

My official home page.

City Museum, my indie rock band.

The Low Countries, my country band.