Vernonia Mill

For most of 2020, I sat out the lockdowns right across the street from this place. I've got a lot of my own content to post up eventually, but that's all down on the task list a bit... Until then, this is a pretty decent video of the old Vernonia mill, aside from where he calls a holly bush mistletoe! Ha! Fair enough, we all oops some times!

Car Cougars

 

Back in high school, I was walking through a Pay-n-Save parking lot, looked over, and saw a cougar looking out a truck window at me. It was chained to something, just chilling and waiting in the driver's seat, and guarding the open can of Budweiser sitting in the cup holder. Got pics, but the prints are, sadly, long gone...

There was a small private zoo in town, and I think it lived there.

A preview of The General: A Tale of the Dead Wind

4. Samuel

Middletown, Connecticut

April 1, 1827

“So how was the old church? Looks like they spared you the tar and feathers!” Edward called from his chair on the porch as Samuel rode up to the old homestead.

“Barely!” Samuel laughed, tying his horse to the hitching rail in front of the old house. “From the looks of those folks, they just might have strung me up if I’d stepped into the church itself!”

He took a seat next to his younger brother and started rolling a cigarette.

“Silk and tea coming into Middletown, ginseng going out to China,” Edward said. “Oh, the scandal!”

“I wouldn’t laugh too much, Ed. You were pretty young when Dad died, too young to really know. The gossip around the church and the town was horrible. I think that almost broke mother as much as, well, you know.”

“Anyway, how’s our kin?” Edward asked, taking his brother’s cue, changing the subject.

“Healthy and handsome as always.”

Glancing at Edward, though, Samuel wished he could say the same about his brother. While his little brother was eight years younger, he looked shrunken, shriveled, and aged well beyond both of their years. Before leaving Canton, Edward had turned yellow and the color, while fading, still had not completely left his skin. He’d lost a quarter of his weight before leaving China and all of his strength, needing to be carried to the ship bringing them home. 

While he wasn’t certain, he strongly suspected that Edward had been poisoned by one of the Hongs trying to gain advantage in the competitive Cantonese market’s foreign trade against his friend and mentor, Howqua. By the time they arrived back in Middletown, Edward had at least regained the ability to stand on his own, though he had still needed assistance walking.

Off the ship and safely back at home, Edward’s condition improved quickly and he was soon back on his feet, though still lacking the endurance he had before. In hindsight, Samuel was surprised that the voyage didn’t kill his brother, but the fact that he improved on the ship only added to his suspicion of poison.

Once Edward was out of bed, Samuel made sure that he stayed on the homestead, out of sight. The rumors about their enterprises in China were bad enough already.

At least there hadn’t been a ruby involved, Samuel thought. If there had been, his brother would be dead and everything Samuel had spent his life building would have been doomed.

 After lighting his cigarette, he said, “George will be coming out soon, it’s time we bring him more into the fold, especially if you are convinced on abandoning me for New York.”

“Speaking of, I received another frantic letter from Elizabeth yesterday demanding that I return at once upon pain of death.”

“You married a fiery woman, I’ll say.”

“Aside from me missing her, as well, Sam, I’d best not keep Douglas waiting much longer. I keep telling you, he’s made me a very attractive offer should I see fit to return.”

“Insurance? I still don’t get it. Seems rather dour after all that we’ve built with Russell and Company. That’s your name there as well as mine.”

“All you’ve built. Canton almost killed me, and I’ll be more than happy leaving those midnight Huangpu runs to Sheldon. He has a flair and a lust for such adventure that I lack.”

“Even Jay is tired of that nonsense. While you were ill, I put him in command of one of the Turkish vessels. He’s young but he’s proven himself, I believe. But that is all the way around the world from here. I wouldn’t let you go back to Canton if you wanted to, but I could use you here. George is a good man, but you know the business better than he ever will after the last couple years.”

Edward laughed.

“Elizabeth would leave me before giving up the city for Middletown! We’ve discussed all of this too many times already. It’s been fun, and profitable, but I have no interest in making my fortune riding on your coattails. I’ll stay here until your ship sails in a couple weeks, but then I must make my way home.”

“Middletown is our home.”

“But Elizabeth is in New York.”

“Fine.”

Samuel extinguished his cigarette and started rolling a new one. 

“Roll one for me, will you?”

“Sure, but don’t let Frances catch you, she’ll have my hide and you might be on your way back to the city quicker than you think. She is certain that tobacco is toxic to those with weak dispositions.”

“I don’t have a weak disposition. If I did, I’d be dead.”

“Well, explain that to the one who was nursing you back to life the last few weeks.”

Samuel rolled out the two cigarettes and they sat smoking in silence, looking out over the overgrown yard that, Samuel, at least, had spent precious little time playing in when he was a kid. While the town had moved in closer since their Great-Great-Great Grandfather settled here back in 1688 after being ordained as the second pastor of Middletown’s 1st Congregational Church, the property still retained the feeling of being deep in the country. Over the next century, the family had built that initial spartan homestead up into a solid, working farm with a large, two-story house that generations of Russells grew up in.

For the homestead, though, things took a turn for the worse when their Great Uncle came of age and took his divinity degree from Yale while his father still remained hale and healthy behind the pulpit of the church. Accepting ordination elsewhere, never to return, the farm passed down to Samuel and Edward’s Grandfather, who decided to pursue his fate and fortune on a ship instead of in a church.

While eventually rising to the point where he was the captain of his own vessel, their Grandfather was rarely home, and rarely sent back more than a meager few coin from his travels while his wife and children desperately tried to keep the farm running just to keep from starving.

The situation only took a darker turn when Samuel and Edward’s father, John, swayed by the largely fictional tales he'd heard from his father on his few visits home decided to follow in his father’s footsteps. While John quickly achieved command of his own ship, after landing in port with a particularly lucrative cargo then gambling all his earnings away, he came home one last time to see his increasingly desperate family before hanging himself in the barn.

Through the years that the old homestead had been in Samuel and Edward’s line, it had fallen to pieces. The livestock was long gone, the expansive gardens became overgrown, reverting back to a forest once again, and the once grand house was near the point of collapse by the time Samuel had earned enough to begin paying for repairs on it.

As if to prove the point, Sally, the mare Samuel had ridden into town that morning, neighed and pulled against the hitching rail, trying to reach a tuft of grass growing just out of her reach. As she leaned hard into her tethers, the posts cracked loudly and the whole rail took on a new and troubling slant. 

“Ed,” Samuel said calmly. “If I forget, remind me to have Hubbard take care of that when he comes out this afternoon to work with Frances on the new house. The yard too, and soon. It would be nice to sit here for the next couple weeks not having to look at all of this mess, to get some real landscaping work done out here.”

“Sure enough,” Edward said, puffing at his cigarette. “Wetmore’s coming too, don’t forget about that. You have a full afternoon. George, Samuel Hubbard, Samuel Wetmore, Samuel Russell. Too many Sams in one house for me. I’ll pay my respects to Wetmore and then go for a ride, I think. I think it’s time to get back in a saddle.”

“Hubbard is no bother, he’ll mostly be working out the details on the new house with Mary, and Wetmore can fuck all the way off back to New York, for all I care. He only came here to hound me about relocating our Middletown operations down there or to Boston to save on costs, but our ships are helping keep this town afloat and I won’t do it.”

“I know you don’t forget, but Wetmore was like a father to me for a lot of years when you first left. Raised me like his own son, in his own house, and you, Sam, wouldn’t be worth a dime if he didn’t help get you started with Carrington.”

“I don’t forget. That is why I still put up with him.”

One of the farmhands Samuel hired wandered into the yard from behind the house. Seeing Sally tied to the rail, he called out, “Should I get her squared away, Mr. Sam?”

Samuel just nodded, flicking his cigarette butt into a spittoon next to him. He started rolling a new one as the boy led the mare away to the recently refurbished barn.

“George is taking his time. I don’t like it,” he said. “As you pointed out, I have a busy afternoon.”

“You know, you could always just stay here,” Edward suggested. “Things are solid in Canton. Cushing is more than capable of handling the details of the merger with Perkins.”

“Ed, if it were only that, I’d stay here and never look back. Unfortunately, there are some aspects to our business with Howqua that I must resolve before I’ll be free to return permanently. Aspects that you are glad you are unaware of and that you should forget I ever mentioned. Until then, there will be no restful retirement for me.”

The front door swung open and Frances came out, glaring at them playfully.

“Look at you two, sitting out here like a couple of tramps while I’m in there fending off assaults from both your mother and your boys!”

While his own wife was very attractive, Edward couldn’t help but to admire his brother’s wife’s unique beauty, even while looking haggard from dealing with his mother’s difficult needs and his rambunctious nephews all morning. Frances was in her early thirties, with long, curly red hair that she left flowing around her long neck and shoulders, piercing green eyes, and a fit and firm figure. She had an ageless air around her. Like her husband, she looked much younger than her age but, also like Samuel, she had the same faint lines around her eyes that betrayed her actual age, and she carried herself with the experience and wisdom of a woman much older than her years.

She was the younger sister of Samuel’s first wife, another remarkable beauty. After they married, the three of them took up residence in the old homestead with Edward and Samuel’s troubled, aging mother, Abigail. Originally, everyone figured that Frances would soon find a husband of her own, but when her sister died while giving birth to her second son, John, in 1819, just months after Samuel first departed for China, she’d stayed on to raise her nephews and to look after their grandmother.

A couple years before, the last time Samuel had returned from China for a visit and a break, he and Frances married. It was done with the utmost discretion so as not to further enflame the lingering rumors drifting about the town of a possibly unnatural relationship occurring at the old homestead before Samuel had first departed for Canton.

Frances and her sister had always been close, being orphaned young when both of their parents died under mysterious circumstances in Jamaica. While not technically orphans themselves, both Samuel and Edward felt great sympathy for the sisters since, when they lost their father, they essentially lost their mother, as well. Even before her sister’s death, the two of them had been so busy with the first baby, taking care of Abigail, and trying to get the dilapidated house and farm rebuilt that Frances had little interest in courting, contributing to the town’s seemingly unbridled lust for scandalous rumors.

Even Edward himself, one night after putting down a bottle of rum with his brother, couldn’t help but to jokingly pry into the subject.

“You know what the stories are about you three.”

“Of course, let them wonder. We’ve been through these things before. It will blow over in time.”

“Of course, but... Well?”

Samuel let out a sly chuckle.

“I will go to my grave before I ever validate that question with an answer.”

While Edward felt a little chided by the response, he still noted that his brother did not deny the accusations.

Frances pulled a stool over to join the brothers and pulled the cigarette out of her husband’s hand, taking a long, satisfying drag from it. Realizing that she wasn’t giving it back, Samuel started rolling a new one for himself.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Frances cheerfully scolded. “Put your pouch away, I’m taking a break. You’re the one who gave Harriet a few weeks off after Ed quit loafing around in bed, saying you wanted to spend some time being a father and a son, so get in there and get to it. I’ve been stuck here on my own all morning! Abigail’s been asking for you, so Ed, go find your nephews and do some uncle stuff with them.”

“Remember Frances,” Samuel said with a sly look in his eye. “Duties are ours, events are God’s.”

“And your duties, not mine, Sam, are upstairs with your mother.”

As they were walking into the house, Edward chuckled, “I wasn’t the only one who married a firebrand!”

“What was that, Ed?” Frances asked, winking at her brother-in-law.

“I love you, Fran,” he called back as the brothers escaped into the house and went about their duties.

 ***

Upstairs, in the room she’d slept in for all the years she’d been married into the Russell clan, Abigail sat in her rocking chair, trying to figure out who the stranger was who’d just walked in and sat on the foot of her bed. Then she felt like a silly young girl, wondering how she could be so confused.

“John, you are home!” she happily exclaimed. “I wasn’t expecting you at all! I’ve missed you so, come over and kiss me and tell me all about, oh, where was it this time? London?”

“No, Mother,” Samuel said sadly. “I’m Samuel. Your son, Samuel.”

Abigail’s excited look changed to one of relieved gratitude.

“Oh, Samuel. It is so good to see you. Eddie has been such a handful. I just can’t keep up with him anymore now that Sam’s left us. It feels wrong for me, but I am so grateful that he can stay with you. Just for awhile until I am feeling more myself. I feel like just a little rest is all I need, then Eddie will be home again, and we’ll be right back to where we need to be. But I do worry about his brother. He’s got the same bug that plagued both John and his father, but he does seem much more sensible than the two of them ever did. He’s started a big firm in China, you know? Imagine that, little Sam being such a big man all the way over there in China!”

Samuel was concerned. While she had never been mentally well, her growing senility had settled in even deeper since his last trip home, and where she used to have long periods of lucidity between spells, since he returned, she yad yet to recognize him once. Even worse, as her mind drifted through her memories from year to year, her recollection of the past was becoming even more jumbled and disoriented. Edward had moved out on his own from Wetmore’s years before the start of Russell and Company in Canton.

He rose from the bed and knelt down at his mother’s feet, wrapping her frail hand in both of his own and looking deep into her eyes.

“Mother, I am Sam, not Mr. Wetmore. Eddie is here too, down with your grandchildren. We’re all together here, for now, all of us back home.”

His mother just stared down at him with sad, uncomprehending eyes. After some time, it was more than he could take. He rose, kissed her gently on the forehead, and retuned to his seat on the edge of her bed. At least she wasn’t suck in the barn. Too often, her mind carried her back to that horrible moment of discovery and the dark days that followed.

“All right, Ma,” he said. “Tell me, what is new and exciting in your life right now?”

A sly look came over her face.

“On the way home from church yesterday, I saw the most handsome boy. I know it is not entirely proper, but I made up my mind to go introduce myself to him. I’d never seen him in church before, never seen him anywhere at all, and I would have remembered. Mother stopped me though. She was aghast, and said, ‘I won’t have it, not with that scoundrel John Russell.’

“But, oh my, that just made my heart flutter even more. How exciting, he was a scoundrel!”

“Yes, Abigail. I believe he was. In fact, I am sure of it.”

There was a quiet knock at the door and Frances stuck her head in.

“Both your cousin and Mr. Wetmore have arrived. They are waiting for you downstairs. Edward is going to take the boys riding with him, so I can sit with her for a while. She’ll be ready for her nap soon enough. There’s some fresh coffee and sandwiches in the kitchen, if anyone will have them.”

Down in the parlor, the two men were sitting on the sofa as Samuel came down the stairs and as Edward was ushering the boys out to the door.

Samuel waved his cousin over. 

“Boys, this is another Russell, our cousin George!”

“Really,” his oldest boy said, eyes wide. “My name is George too!”

George laughed and shook his hand while Samuel knelt down and fake whispered in the boy’s ear, “You know, I’ll tell you a secret, only the finest of men are named George!”

John gasped, “But what about men named John!”

Samuel winked at him, “Johns have a bit more to prove.”

“Dad!” the boy groaned, realizing that his father was pulling his leg.

Laughing at the whole exchange, George announced that all he saw was two of the finest boys ever, who were sure to grow up into very great men, if they were anything like their father.

“Now, off with you, go have an adventure,” Samuel said, pushing them toward the door. “And Edward, do me a favor, stick to the river road. It wouldn’t do to have you seen in town right now.”

“Don’t worry about that. I moved away a long time ago. You are the one who wants to move back here, not I.”

As Edward followed the boys out the front door, Samuel turned to his cousin and said, “Speaking of fine young men, William sure has grown up. Aiming for West Point, is he?”

George sniffed somewhat dismissively.

“I’m not sure that he’s sure about much of anything yet, but he has taken well to the Academy.”

“He’s come a long way from since I saw him at our wedding in New York all those years ago.”

“That he has, for sure.”

“It’s your call, but as far as I am concerned, we’ll always have a position open for him, if he is looking for a place to land after he graduates.”

Samuel beckoned for Wetmore to join them and led them to the dining room.

“Since all of our business today is the same business, let’s sit down together in the dining room. I believe that Frances has prepared a bite to eat for us if either of you are hungry. As for myself, I am famished.”

A Low Fire in the Night: An Episodic Novel by A. F. Litt (Me!) on Kindle Vella

 

Photo by A. F. Litt

For the last few years, I've been so buried in other projects that I really haven't had the time to keep up on this blog much.

As some of these projects start coming to fruition, though, it's time to re-up my blogging game. Jason Roberts and I, a collaborator on several books recently released, with more coming in the fall, recently declared the rest of the summer to be "Heavy Content Summer" for both of us, so here I go!

hot girl summer is over it's time for the fall of society

— maura quint (@behindyourback) August 7, 2021

For this first update in far too long, I'd like to share my new project on Kindle Vella. This is a new service by Amazon that works around the episodic posting of chapters of longer works. 

For me, this project is mostly about playing around with the new service and getting to know it. Also, it is kind of fun! I'll be writing it in "real time," one or two chapters at a time before it goes live, a way to get a book out in bite-sized chunks for me, with at least one new episode a week coming out from now until it is done. While I am not currently lacking for writing or editing work, this side-project does accomplish something very important for me, it's getting a story set in the world that I've been building for years and decades out into the public.

It is a prequel to both The Properties of Dust novel from NaNoWriMo 2019 and to Against the Dying of the Light from NaNoWriMo 2012! Now, this probably begs an important question, why start a completely new novel when you have a rough draft of Dust and 3/4 of a draft of Against already in the can!?! 2012, dude! That one's been sitting around for almost a full decade?

There are many complex answers to those questions, one of them being, in fact, dude, that one has been sitting around for almost a full decade! And I haven't read it front to back, well, ever! While Properties is newer, in a sense, and already more of a third or fourth draft as opposed to Against, being the third incarnation of a novel that I've been working on in one form or another since the 1990s, it also suffers from having just a bit too much time collecting on it's dusty pages. 

The lead time on getting either of those projects back up and running was too much for the nature of the project I was looking to start with Vella. Those are both very complex novels that will take a lot of work to start up and to complete. For this first story on Vella, I was looking for something I could crank into quickly that was a bit less complex, though still fun to read. 

Also, this is a completely new service from Amazon that I am completely unfamiliar with, as it is for everyone else reading and writing there right now. I wanted to hedge my bet with a more, um, disposable novel before getting locked in there with other manuscripts that I've been working on for years and years.

If this experiment goes well, perhaps the first drafts of those next books in this series will debut on Vella. Or not. We'll see how things go.

Finally, and this was the biggest motivation for me on starting a new story instead of picking up one of the old ones... I am not sure if you noticed, but the over the years since 2019 and, wow, since 2012, a lot has happened in the world.

Against the Dying of the Light was set about 50 to 75 years out from 2012's future, as best as I could predict for my fictional purposes then. It was set after a soft-apocalypse in a community making some decisions that would decide whether it survived and rebuild or collapse further into darkness.

The Properties of Dust was set about 30 years from 2019's future in an increasingly dystopian America, just before the events that eventually kicked the U.S., at least, over the brink into the world we see in Against.

While it's only been a little less than two years since my last go at the Dust manuscript, what a two years it has been!
 
More than anything, for me, A Low Fire in the Night is a chance for me to reset this series in a world based on where we are now in 2021 without having to rework a lot of elements in those other manuscripts, then having to deal with all the continuity issues that would be brought up by those revisions. To put it bluntly, those houses were pretty solid, but their foundations were destroyed by the events of the last few years. Sometimes it is better just to start with a completely new house.

Those books are still on my "production calendar" for a little further down the line. Before then, I also have another novel I've been working on, my main project right now, in fact, that should be meeting the world this autumn, set in Jason Robert's Dead Wind universe, then there are two projects I'm editing for Jason that are his "break" projects before his third book in the main Dead Wind trilogy, and after all that, of course, there will be third Dead Wind trilogy novel, which will be as massive of a project as The Yellow Painted Man and Tres Castillos, starting up for both of us, for me as story editor, this winter after our "break" projects are finished up.

Aside from all of that, there's over a year's worth of updates due on the Recreating the Columbia River Highway website that need to be done. A lot of folks have been doing some amazing research on that subject while I've been off editing and writing fiction, and I very likely will be sneaking out a book relating to that content sometime next spring (big knock on wood, there, and not the big book that those folks have been waiting for, not quite just yet). Early drafts of that may be another Vella project or something I manage through Patreon.

So there is a lot of very exciting stuff in the works, and a lot of exciting stuff has happened since the last real post on this blog. 

Stay tuned! 

A big part of Jason and I's agenda for the next couple months is closing out the season with that "Heavy Content Summer" theme, and I've got a couple new posts in mind for here that will be much more interesting than this sort of self-indulgent naval gazing, but actually exploring some interesting stories and what not from history and this strange world we live in!

Finishing up for today, if this is your first time visiting Rubble, while I do stick this sort of project update post in here from time to time, this blog is really devoted to actual content, a smorgasbord, really, from weird dives into old sci-fi and some creative writing, to my 2016-2017 National Parks Project (also coming back soon in a revamped form, focusing more generally on public lands) and just all sorts of history and exploration of interesting stuff locally in the Northwest and around the country. It's called Rubble for a reason! 

Click on some of those links or tags over on the right (if you're on a computer, at least) and dive in!

Links

A Low Fire In the Night: https://amzn.to/3Aj0k2g

The Dead Wind Series by Jason Roberts (edited by A. F. Litt):

Wolpertinger:
https://jasonrobertsonline.com/the-wolpertinger (Free to read online)

The Yellow Painted Man (2nd Edition):
https://amzn.to/3670o8v (Kindle, Audio Book)
https://amzn.to/3weUywr (Hardcover, Paperback)

Tres Castillos:
https://amzn.to/3hb9vLu (Kindle, Hardcover, Paperback)

Ocean Falls, BC

2020 Fundraiser: Rebuilding the Columbia River Highway Website

Elowah Falls, June 16, 2015
Filming for #recreatingthehcrh

To help rebuild the website, please visit: https://www.gofundme.com/f/recreatingthehcrh

Originally published on Recreating The Historic Columbia River Highway: The Blog

With new construction of the State Trail on the horizon, and the new research coming in from Kirk Poole's awesome Past and Present Views Along the Columbia River Highway Facebook Group, it is time to return this much appreciated resource to a usable state.

Originally, I built this site while I was a stay-at-home father and had a lot of time to work on it, but now it is a very part time job and, at the current rate, documenting new research and repairing the old pages, it will take about two years to complete this work.

Because of this, I've decided to try a bit of crowdfunding to speed the job up. My day job work is very slow right now, and this would be an ideal time for me to work full time on the website for several weeks. 

So, my fundraiser is going to be for covering time and expenses for full time work on the website, and to help fund some new research. How much I can get done and how quickly will depend on the response to the campaign. 

If fully funded, I plan on getting the site fully restored by the end of March. However, any contributions will help. 

Overall, this project has been a seven-year labor of love and I have resisted seeking donations in the past, but as circumstances change, I am realizing that I need some help to get this work done.

Once the site is rebuilt, I will also be able to focus more on research and video production, on new content instead of just repairing old content. While I am not sure if a feature length documentary and book are still in the works, time will tell, I do want to resume producing video shorts and fleshing out the history of the highway in more detail on the website.

If you have appreciated the content on the website, the associated Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/RecreatingTheHCRH), and the YouTube Channel in the past, I'd ask you to consider contributing to this fundraiser. Any amount will help, and I thank you for taking the time to consider helping with this cause.

One way or the other, work will continue on the site and I look forwards to continue sharing the history of the highway with everyone!

To help rebuild the website, please visit: https://www.gofundme.com/f/recreatingthehcrh

Hello 2020: Work on Recreating the HCRH Resumes!

Columbia River West to Ruthton Point
Ruthton Park. Hood River, Oregon.
April 25, 2013

Originally posted on the Recreating the HCRH blog:

It's Saturday, I've been down with the flu for a week and a half, and I've got a lot on my plate that I want to accomplish today with the HCRH project, but before diving in I wanted to do a quick overall project update (mostly to help sort out my own thoughts on how to move ahead).

Looking back at the videos from 2015 (a half-decade ago!), you'll see that there were ambitions for this project that were clearly never met. Without going into detail, let's just say a lot of life happened right as I was gearing up for production on the feature-length documentary in late 2015 and those next few years were difficult years, to say the least...

Very little creative work on anything was possible during that time, and there were a lot of setbacks involving the work already completed on the film. Data loss on the website, requiring the rebuild I am currently working on, lost footage and stills, which may be recovered in the future, the fate of those hard drives is still undetermined... Heartbreaking, since a lot of that material is irreplaceable due to construction of the HCRH State Trail in the Gorge and to the general passage of time. There was also a significant loss of gear and equipment that made further progress on the film impossible at the time...

Anyway, life is much better now and, while I was unable to meet the 2016 goal for the movie and the 2018 goal for a book, I did get a book out in 2019! It just had nothing to do with the highway, was fiction, and was written by someone else! That work took almost all of 2019 to complete, further delaying this project, but it is work that I am very proud of.

Upon publication of The Yellow Painted Man last year, after a brief break, it is now time to return to the highway. This return has been further motivated by the excellent work Kirk J. Pool and several other folks have been doing recently documenting the Lower Highway (including the first decent explorations of the Bagby Loops that I know of!). Their work can be followed on the US 30 Remnants from Astoria to Eastern Oregon group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/483015922488601). It is an excellent group and definitely worth joining if you enjoy the exploring the history of the highway.

So, now it is 2020 and I've started rebuilding the website. For now, that is going to be my primary goal. Movies, books, whatever... It all needs to start with getting the site back up and running, so that is all that I am going to worry about at the moment. After that, we'll see what life holds.

Recreating the HCRH: "New" Website
January 18, 2020
https://sites.google.com/site/recreatingthehcrh/home

I will say, this project started with researching a planned short film on the original route of the highway (filming on that was mostly completed by the end of 2015), and I really do hope that is where this leads in the end. Whether or not that happens may depend on if the old footage is recovered along with several other factors. Losing that footage is not necessarily a deal breaker, though. Any hesitation I have at this point in declaring the film alive (or, at least, undead) really comes from being a bit gun shy after the setbacks a few years ago.

As for a book, well, that might actually come before the movie now. We'll see how things go. But, as I said, first things first: it all starts with rebuilding the website, a pretty significant project all on its own.

The first stage will be reformatting for the new platform while rebuilding the dead photo links. That, in and of itself, will be a fairly sizable project. I had to do that once before and it took about six weeks of eight hour days to complete. Today, the site is much larger and more complex than it was then and my "free" time to work on this labor of love is much reduced, so just completing this stage of the work may take months.

While rebuilding, I will also be updating the site with new material as it comes up, so there will be some forward motion this year, it all won't just be rebuilding what's been lost.

The second stage, surely occurring, to some degree, concurrently with the first step, will be filling in gaps in my research and "completing" the site per my original goals for it.

After that, we'll find out what seems to be the best way to proceed.

This project has always been a fun adventure, and I look forward to moving ahead with it, whatever the future may hold!

NaNoWriMo 2019: The Properties of Dust

Not the poetry book, this is something "new", if you can call reworking a bunch of stories and two novel manuscript fragments written over the course of 30 years new, but it is what it is.

I'll write more on it later...  But this is looking like a solid NaNo win this year, already close to 50k words on the current draft, but a long way from finishing the damn book, which is my goal for the month.

The Yellow Painted Man is Done!

So, the book we were slaving away on is out! I am very excited about this! I hope folks enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed helping Jason out with it.

The book description:

In 1863, as war rages in Mexico and the United States, another millennia old conflict is escalating. Fueled by the whims of an eldritch intelligence, all of mankind is subject to its sway. Samuel Sheldon is a chosen heir of the Trust, an enigmatic and gold obsessed cabal with origins seeped in the secret history of the world. When his prisoner, Mangas Coloradas, is murdered on Sheldon's first assignment, an unpredictable series of events threaten to upset the Trust's flawless designs. Determined to prove his worth, Sheldon is tasked with recovering a vast horde of missing gold; an endeavor that swiftly spirals into a supernatural odyssey of violence sprawling from the siege of Richmond to the wastelands of Mexico. Obstructed by treachery and confronted with the strange secrets of his employers, Sheldon must decide if the rewards of power are worth the price.

KINDLE: https://www.amazon.com/…/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p…

PAPERBACK:
https://www.amazon.com/…/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p…

From Jason Roberts:

The time is nigh! I promised a big announcement this week and so I shall deliver! Today I announce the publication of my first novel, The Yellow Painted Man, now available for sale on kindle, print, and soon to be audible! It’s been a difficult but rewarding process, filled with humbling but educational experiences. I have to give a shout out to A.F. Litt Creative for the dogged determination to see this project through and to my wife Kim for her encouragement along the way.

See my author page here:
https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B07ZQMYSW1…

Or my website here:
http://www.jasonrobertsonline.com