QUAKE
AND
SNAKE
Author Biography
Author biography indeed! From a literary perspective, it’s almost non-existent.
After taking freshman English in 1954, I never again took any course of study that
might prepare me to be a writer.
Accordingly, writing has been a bootstraps operation for me. I rambled
through life – first a cook, then a sailor, then an accountant, and
lastly a teacher – without seriously thinking about writing.
I retired from teaching in 1988, sold off what I owned, drove to Puerto Barrios on the east coast of Guatemala, and became a partner in a used clothing business. I bought a concrete shell of a house on a muddy road with jungle outside my bedroom window. I soon became uncomfortable making money on the backs of people whose income averaged a tiny fraction of my own, so I used my equity in the clothing business to pay off what I owed on my home. Then I sat, staring at the breadfruit trees and bamboo across the road, wondering how best to avoid suicide by boredom. A troop of feral pigs would occasionally storm down the road to gnaw at my date palm stump that produced dates at ground level. I developed a symbiotic relationship with the boa constrictor that occasionally prowled the area between my drop-ceiling and my roof. I provided it with a home, and it took care of my rats, mice, bats, and other pests.
I often traveled around Guatemala and Honduras – and as far south as Managua, Nicaragua – with Pawnee Brown, now deceased, a good friend of mine and a retired US soldier. One morning, near San Vicente Pacaya in Guatemala, we were showing how bold we were by approaching an active volcano. Too close – it blew, and we retreated at warp speed, our throats burning from the sulfurous fumes. A million ideas, it seemed, came cascading over me simultaneously. I’d never had such an experience. I had to write that novel that just about everybody intends to write someday. My novel would be about a volcano.
I looked around for research materials. I never found a place where I could buy a book – any book – in Puerto Barrios. And this was before the Internet, remember. I drove to Guatemala City, 180 miles distant, and found a good bookstore near the university, but it didn’t have what I needed. I couldn’t let go. I sold my house to Pawnee, lock, stock, and barrel, and drove back to California. I became a virtual recluse for the eighteen months it took me to write Golden Gate Volcano.
I was never able to get my novel published – but I was a bona fide writer, and that was all that mattered. And I had an idea for my next novel. Soon after I arrived in Puerto Barrios the yardman at our clothing store had killed a 12-foot boa constrictor in the weeds out back. We gutted it to check on a curious lump, and discovered a very large, partially digested iguana. The experience stayed with me. OK – I’d write about a snake. A big snake. Big-big, even. Hmmm. Why not a snake that ate people?
I took a Greyhound bus from Sacramento to Brownsville, Texas, switching from bus to bus until I finally arrived in Belize City. For six harrowing weeks, I rode all over the country, crawling jungles, riding in chicken buses, climbing pyramids – even having my life threatened. But I survived, amassed vast quantities of photographs and research material, flew home, and wrote Anaconda Among Us. OK, so there are no anacondas in Belize. I explain this paradox in the story.
Well, I’m a genealogist, too – I have been since 1946. Even as a teenager, I faithfully kept all of my correspondence and identified every photo given to me by elderly relatives. Until I set up the website for my novels, I never thought about assembling my notes and photos for publication. But the website would be a perfect vehicle for preserving a lifetime of genealogical research, wouldn’t it? So, I zeroed in on my favorite ancestor – John Pio, my great-great-great grandfather, an immigrant sailor from Madeira. I researched his descendants and compiled pedigrees for everyone researchable who married into the blood line. The result is not for the faint of heart; neither is it for the casual reader. John Pio Came to Maine incorporates every scrap of information I could find on him and his descendants. It contains hundreds of photos and genealogical charts.
From 1998 to 2002 I spent six months, off and on, in Costa Rica. I seriously thought about relocating there. But then, at age 70, I met a fascinating lady, Cecilia, a professional clown. All thoughts of a life in Costa Rica evaporated, and we took our vows in 2004. It’s never too late.
So, I arrive at today. In denial about my age, I ran 7.5 miles on my 75th birthday in June, 2007. I had graduated from high school in Portsmouth, NH, in 1950; served on a destroyer 1951-1954, and graduated cum laude with a degree in economics from the University of New Hampshire in 1958. Too late, I discovered that I hated economics. I was a bookkeeper for a laundry supply company in Durham, NH, and was an accountant at the Shell Oil refinery in Martinez, CA, 1960-1963. Then, without ever having taken an education course, and with only one semester of French and one year of Italian in college, I was hired out of the oil refinery to teach French and Spanish. I was weighing oil trucks on a Friday and teaching school the following Tuesday.
What next? Well, I have always been interested in the US Supreme Court. How nice and how different it would be to write a novel about that august institution. I bought two dozen books on the court, and have about three of them left to read. With my website redesigned, and with my genealogical book completed, I will have all of the time in the world to write that Supreme Court novel. I have the plot in mind. There’s no working title yet.
Al Newman