May15

Horses Along the Yukon

by CSasser on May 15th, 2012 at 10:26 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

During a lifetime of ranching, riding and roping, I thought I’d done everything with a horse that could be done. Until big-game guide and old friend Les Cobb asked me to help his wranglers move a remuda of twelve horses through some of the most primitive country in Alaska to a moose-hunting camp north of the Yukon River—150 miles.

Half the horses were veterans of moose, caribou and bear hunts. The other six were 3-year-olds barely green broke. Wranglers Bryan Parker and Chad Bembanek, both young hands in their 20’s, and I split the colts among us to complete their training along the way.

Doc, my main pony, was a brown 10-year-old gelding with the personality of a wet blanket. My colts were War Paint and Blue Steel. Ride one, lead the spares daisy-chained behind.

The trail ended at an old gold-mining camp. From there on, we climbed through conifer timber as thick as dog fur, into the uplands, then across high-country tundra toward the Yukon River, which we planned to cross with rafts we built. A cold, wretched drizzle fell daily, soaking leather, clothing, skin and morale. In between rain showers, fog settled so densely that we appeared and disappeared in and out of the mist like ghost riders in the sky.

Moose and bear barely gave us a second look; chances were they’d never seen horses before.

While we were leading horses one at a time down a steep drop-off scabbed with dense timber, old landslides, and washouts, War Paint lost his footing. The two of us plunged to the bottom of a ravine. Paint’s iron-shod hoof came down on my foot in the melee to untangle ourselves. Only soft mulch prevented its being snapped.

At the Yukon, chaos erupted when Chad’s pale horse Dakota, Les’ Jasper and another colt broke loose in a plot to go back home. The trio stampeded along the rocky bank, leaped into the Tozitna River where it mouthed into the Yukon, and began swimming hard for the other side. We would be days combing them out of the bush—if the grizzlies didn’t get them first.

Wranglers vaulted astride mounts and rode beans for leather in an attempt to turn back the deserters. Bryan and his mount made a beautiful dive into the river. As the wrangler slid off into the current to let his horse pull him across, he lost his grip on the saddle and floundered in the icy water. A lot of Alaskans never learn to swim, Bryan among them.

Chad urged his palomino into the stream after Bryan. I hit the ground running and threw off my boots before I dived in. The water was so cold I thought I was having a heart attack. Les cast a long loop toward Bryan as, struggling and on the verge of being sucked under with the weight of his boots and clothing, he was being swept into the Yukon.

Chad reached the drowning man first. His palomino towed them both to safety on the far side of the Tozitna.

Camp that evening was wet. Steam hissed from saddles, pads, clothing and other gear arranged around a bonfire to dry. Although my old bones had taken a beating, I felt warm and at peace with the world.

Picketed horses rested at the edge of the firelight. Somewhere, a pack of timber wolves created original theme music for this wild and beautiful land. There are so few places left in the world where riders can take off through unspoiled country as our frontier forefathers had done in that other Old West a century ago.

 

Enter the drawing for a free signed copy of Charles W. Sasser’s A Thousand Years of Darkness, called by critics “the most important American novel since Atlas Shrugged.” E-mail entries to charlessasser@msn.com. Drawing will be held May 30.

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May03

The Trick Rider

by CSasser on May 3rd, 2012 at 10:06 am
Posted In: Adventure

A professional rodeo bareback bronc rider, I was busting mostly Christianson Brothers stock in Washington, Idaho and Oregon that season. This little trick rider with roan-colored hair and riding a chocolate-colored pony caught my eye. Every show, there Linda was in her short red skirt putting that pony through its paces. I was one smitten cowboy. Dashing too, I thought, with my red chaps and the peacock feather in my hat.

I finally girted up enough nerve to saunter up to her. “Say, girl, you and me. We could show ’em something at the rodeo dance shindig tonight.”

“You ain’t been showing ’em much riding barebacks,” she said, turned in her little red skirt and walked off.

I was nothing if not persistent. I knew the girl liked me, other cowboys said so, but her papa thought I was just another circuit bum going nowhere.

Finally, I won Pop over. Linda and I made our first date for the dance after the Saturday night show in Moro, Oregon.

It was September, the end of the season, and starting to get cold. I drew a horse called The Mop, a name that turned out to be prophetic.

Barebacks are the first event of a rodeo. I was first rider out in the first event. It was spitting rain when I eased down into the chute on top of The Mop. The announcer was going through his spiel from above the chutes. I looked up as I pounded my gloved hand into the bareback rigging handle and winked at Linda where she was watching from the shelter of the announcer’s stand. She gave me the sweetest, most promising smile.

The chute gate swung wide—and The Mop mopped up the arena with me. That was one bucking cayuse. He threw me so high I got a nose bleed before I hit the ground. And when I did hit, ol’ Mop was waiting for me. He tattooed four hooves from my spurs all the way to my gloves.

The Mop moved on, kicking and bawling with triumph and passing wind every time his front feet hit the ground. I lay where I lay, unable to move. That beast had stomped both arms and both legs and I was paralyzed, couldn’t move anything except my head. I thought I was some messed up.

As they will, cowboys ran out and hoisted me up to take me to the waiting ambulance. One cowboy had one leg, another the other leg. That was when I noticed to my chagrin that my jeans were split open all the way at the crotch, exposing everything private or not. And Linda had climbed up on the fence gate as the cowboys carried me past—and the look on her face!

“Put my legs together!” I pleased, humiliated totally.

I ended up in The Dalles hospital, with bad bruises and no permanent injuries. And Linda. . .? I think she must have gone to the dance with a calf roper.

 

A Thousand Years of Darkness by Charles W. Sasser predicted the May Day violence. Want to know what comes next? Enter to win FREE signed copies of A Thousand Years of Darkness by e-mailing charlessas@msn.com. Drawing will be held on May 30.

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Apr23

The Tool Shed

by admin on April 23rd, 2012 at 6:55 pm
Posted In: Adventure, The Writing Life

We built our new house in the meadow in a single day: an 8×16-foot plywood structure with a tin roof. I drove the last nail well before sundown. My wife Kathy ran out of green paint and finished the back and one side in melon. I grinned as I stepped back to admire my work.

“No 30-year mortgage on that masterpiece of modern architecture.”

There in the “tool shed,” as we called it, I would fulfill my dream of becoming a full-time freelance writer. The day before, I had been a big city police homicide detective. I quit cold—and now Kathy, our two-year-old son Joshua, and I began homesteading in the woods while I wrote.

Friends took a skeptical look at our home and exclaimed, “How can a family live in that closet?”

They were closer to the truth than they realized. The door was salvaged from a closet.

Decorating was in Early Poverty. A full-sized bed fit snugly across one end. Joshua’s smaller twin ran from the head of our bed along the wall opposite the door, which we had located on the long side facing sundown in the valley. A wire strung across the foot of our bed served as a closet. I arranged shelves between nearly every stud to hold our belongings. A kerosene lamp occupied a throne of honor below the window.

The “kitchen” consisted of a Coleman camp stove on a broad shelf next to the door, with shelves below to serve as a pantry and cabinet. We conducted most of our socializing, entertaining, bathing and dining outside al fresco.

My writing desk—a door laid across two file cabinets—took up one end of the shed. I constructed more shelves to contain essential books; the rest of my library remained in storage.

The three of us, plus a baby goat and a St. Bernard pup, slept, quarreled, loved and grew close in what our friends insisted on calling that “silly closet in the woods.” We had planned to occupy the tool shed for a maximum of six months while I built our real house using only hand tools. I got up at four a.m., lit the lamp, and wrote until noon. I spent the rest of the day working on the real house.

Six months stretched into nine. Failure was not an option. I wrote and sold dozens of magazine articles. My first book, a police novel called No Gentle Streets, was published. Copies of it, if you can find them, sell for more than $800 on the internet.

I even obtained an agent—and my career was off. We moved into the real house before winter, bringing with us a certain nostalgia for life in the tool shed.

Since then, I have published more than 50 major books and novels, written thousands of magazine articles and short stories, and been a full-time writer for 32 years.

And it all started in a tool shed in the woods—or at least this last stretch of it did. The first stretch began when I was seven years old and promised myself I would be a writer. I try to keep promises.

 

“If we understand the mechanism of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.” From Charles W. Sasser’s latest novel, A Thousand Years of Darkness.

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Apr02

The Zoot Suit

by CSasser on April 2nd, 2012 at 2:34 pm
Posted In: Adventure, Travels

Rooms at the Fowler House where I lived in Miami, Florida, were occupied by an odd assortment of alkies, day laborers and old people unable to afford anything better. About what you expected from skid row. My room was six feet wide, ten long, and furnished with a twin bed and a rickety dresser. The rent was six dollars a month. I needed a job desperately.

The Miami Herald ran a full page ad to recruit Miami cops. The city had the highest crime rate in the nation. Fighting crime and evil sounded like my kind of glamour job.

I took the Civil Service Exam and came out top of the list. Everyone at the Fowler House offered advice on passing the various boards and interviews that followed.

“Dress nice,” counseled Grace, the housekeeper. “Cops are conservative. Wear a suit.”

I had never owned a suit and I was almost broke. I went to the Salvation Army and bought one for two dollars. I selected a gray one, because Grace said gray was conservative. She made sure my borrowed tie was on straight.

The roomful of captains and majors and assistant police chiefs fell into a stunned silence when I walked in for my Board. They stared at me standing in front of them staring back. What was the matter? Didn’t all their applicants appear in business suits?

Finally, somebody cleared his throat so loudly I flinched.

“Boy, where’d you get that suit?”

It never occurred to me to lie. I was a mountain boy from the hills of Oklahoma and Arkansas raised to tell the truth, look a man straight in the eye, and keep your word when you gave it.

“Salvation Army, sir.”

There I was, a skinny kid with short, curly hair, a big honest backwoods grin, and a gray zoot suit that had somehow survived the Roarin’ Twenties in somebody’s closet. It had shoulder pads that filled a doorway, lapels the size of desk tops, and baggy trousers with big pleats.

Everyone laughed so hard the secretary from next door stuck her head inside the room to see what was going on. She looked at me and laughed too. I laughed along with them, although I wasn’t quite sure why we were laughing.

The Oral Board was supposed to take fifteen minutes; I was in there for an hour telling stories about my various travels on a motorbike across the U.S. I knew I had passed.

Years later, after I had moved on, the Miami Police Academy was still telling recruits the story of the hillbilly kid who arrived in Miami on an 80cc Yamaha motorbike, lived on skid row, and came to his Review Board wearing a zoot suit. The entire Fowler House of drunks, ageing retirees, day labors and assorted other riff-raff showed up for my graduation from the police academy. Chief of Police Walter Headley made a special point to shake hands with each of my unorthodox guests. It was truly the first time Skid Row ever came to a police graduation ceremony

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Mar19

The Odyssey Year

by admin on March 19th, 2012 at 10:03 pm
Posted In: Adventure, Travels

It was one of the last years, I think, that a young man on a motorcycle could travel America like a knight riding the kingdom in search of dragons to slay and maidens to rescue. I set out in the spring from Whidbey Island, Washington, on an 80cc Yamaha motorbike, the Odyssey. Just like a real motorcycle, only smaller. I packed everything I owned on it. Loaded, it topped out at 35mph on straightaways.

I traveled for a year living in a tent and working odd jobs. People asked me where I was going.

From here to there, I replied.

In Idaho, a cowboy on a bay horse rode up to my tent and dismounted to roll a smoke.

“The West ain’t gonna be like this much longer,” he said.

Some drunks near Salt Lake City ran me off the highway. I fry-cooked at a greasy spoon until I earned enough money to repair Odyssey.

In June, I lived on the Navajo Indian Reservation at Four Corners, in a two-room adobe with a family of eight. George Rose was the Indian father.

“There ain’t no place anymore for Indians,” he said bitterly. “By God, Indians owned this country first.”

I traveled throughout the South all fall. One freezing night in Arkansas, I came upon an old-time tent revival in a field. The country preacher’s fiery words slashed through the dreadful night.

“The Lord is comin’! It wouldn’t surprise me if he comes walking right through that door tonight!”

With my helmet, goggles and coat crusted with sleet and ice, I walked through the door like some unexpected Ice Age monster. There was a long silence.

Black sharecroppers in Louisiana found me camped in the cold and took me home with them, to a four-room shanty with a yard full of kids and chickens and an old tire swing.

“Gran’pappy was a slave right down yonder at the ol’ place,” Papa Lee Henry said.

A hurricane menaced New Orleans. An old girlfriend from Seattle and I motored Odyssey up and down Bourbon Street leaving pools of water on dance floors.

In Mississippi, I camped in the yard of an abandoned church. Soon, a threatening mob of locals headed my way while a giant hog rooted around nearby for hickory nuts.

“Boy,” said the most surly of the lot,” that old sow could eat you up tonight and nobody’d ever know what happened to you.”

Afterwards, I learned federal agents that night arrested a sheriff and others in nearby Meridian for the slayings of three Civil Rights workers. Folks in front of my tent thought I might be another Civil Rights protestor.

“Son,” attested a fat woman in Georgia, “in all your travels you should take the Holy Ghost with you.”

I had been on the road a year when I reached Florida. The Yamaha was starting to smoke and show its miles. I stopped at every tourist trap along the way for free orange juice. Limping my way across the Everglades, I arrived in Miami with eight dollars in my jeans.

I rented a skid row room and paid a student Cuban barber fifty cents for a haircut. He promised such a splendid cut would surely get me a good job after my long and brave odyssey from the farthest northwestern corner of the country to its opposite southeastern corner.

He was right. I became a Miami cop.

***

New Books here of coming this year by Charles W. Sasser: THE WAR CHASER (thriller, Deadly Niche); BACK IN THE FIGHT (Iraqi war, St. Martin’s); SANCTUARY (SciFi, Mischievous Muse); A THOUSAND YEARS OF DARKNESS (Deadly Niche). 

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