This Time the Dragon Wins

As I munched on plates of fajitas with my friends the Minnesota Twins pitcher and his family who happen to staying next door, the talk, unaccountably, turned to dragons. Or maybe not so oddly at all, given a week that for me was filled with visions of a Komodo dragon in Florida—a literary nightmare.

 A female Komodo dragon has made her debut on the New York Times bestseller list thanks to the recent publication of Deep Shadow by Florida novelist Randy Wayne White, starring the nerdy but resourceful marine biologist Doc Ford. Madame Komodo is accompanied in the story by a royal court of lesser monitor lizards, who at six feet or so, are startling enough, as I happen to know, having once encountered one in my own sedate Fort Myers backyard.

As I consumed more than my share of my neighbor’s wonderful fajitas, she recounted how she took her tots, ages 3 and 7, to see a very cute new DreamWorks release, “How to Train Your Dragon.” The following morning came a wire story in the Fort Myers News-Press announcing that a new monitor lizard has been identified, lurking in the canopy of the dense northern forest of the Philippine Island of Luzon.

I also happened to be working a weekend book event with my friend Sandy Lender, author of the amazing Choices Meant for Gods and Choices Meant for Kings fantasy novels where a scaly, bird-sized dragon by night turns princely lover by day. “Sometimes you just want the dragon to win,” is Sandy’s mantra of her work, and I believe Sandy has neatly pegged our passion for—and wariness of--assorted denizens of the reptile tribe. The dragons in our literature, not to mention those in our zoos and nature preserves, are at least as endearing to us as they are appalling.

On a Pacific crossing with my husband in our sailboat back in the mid-seventies, I once spent my watery weeks afloat in the deep ocean devouring In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents by the Belgian French naturalist Bernard Heuvelmans, father of the science of unknown creatures, which he dubbed ‘cryptozoology’. Heuvalmans’ compelling accounts of Komodo dragons, bizarre but documented sightings of strange creatures at sea, and the possible identity of the Loch Ness Monster, took on deep meaning; we’d had a very close encounter with a monster whale at the time, and so I very much empathized with Heuvalmans’ reasoned attempts to sort sea myths from reality. Consequently, once I realized Randy Wayne White’s novel starred put a Komodo dragon in a starring role, I lapped up his novel in a couple of all-night readathons.

Deep Shadow takes us beneath Florida’s fragile surface, honeycombed with underground rivers and unstable limestone caves. Doc Ford and his friends dive into a sinkhole of a central Florida lake in search of a plane gone missing in 1959. The B-26 in question is rumored to be loaded with Cuban gold. The lost plane is one of four cargo planes bearing the contents of the Cuban national treasury that ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista supposedly sent from Havana to Tampa, the better to finance his exile. Meanwhile Fidel Castro assumed the dictatorship of a bankrupt country. This might explain why Fidel, sans gold, has been left to dress in nothing but serviceable khakis to this day.

As for Doc Ford, the treasure hunt proves to be the least of his problems. His buddy and polar opposite the bud-addled Buddhist, Tomlinson, and a tough Native American teen with a cool head are trapped in an underwater dive accident when a limestone bridge collapses. This pair eventually claw their way to the underside of a fetid lair of a creature you definitely don’t want to meet in the dark—or the daylight for that matter, a Komodo dragon. The world’s largest lizard, known for halitosis of epic proportions and a lethal bite, is a holdover from the dinosaur era. The two desperate divers with empty air tanks take turns sucking in the stench of the Komodo’s nest, in no position to complain about air quality at that particular moment.

The Komodo dragon is named for the remote Indonesian island where its tribe thrives to the tune of some six thousand critters; all of Komodo is now a wildlife park. As White points out, a Komodo monster might well flourish in Florida’s lush and swampy countryside. Fortunately, outside the pages of White’s thriller, Floridians have yet to see a live Komodo in the wild.

 We make do with such cheap thrills as a monster Burmese python some sixteen feet long, weighing in at some four hundred pounds, seized from its owner in the Central Florida city of Apopka after it got loose once too often. The town of Marathon, sprawled the length of a half dozen Florida Keys, has its own python patrol doing its best to keep down a burgeoning Burmese python population hailing from the Everglades to the north, where some 30,000 of this non-native species threatens the ecosystem, though the population may have been decimated due to the record breaking cold winter Florida suffered through.

Meanwhile, back in the menacing world of Deep Shadow, murderous characters of the human variety arrive at the dive site. As darkness falls, weird hissing noises arise. The high powered lights that the superbly equipped Ford has brought along paint a pack of carnivorous monitor lizards against a background of gnarly cypress trees. The monitors are stalking the humans, looking like “pit bulls with scales.” The eyes glittering in the dark send chills down the spines of all the two-legged observers, the good guys and the evil types alike. Not to mention the reader’s, I might add.

Monitor lizards in Florida are one of the non-native species turned loose in roadside ditches by pet owners or animal traders who perhaps tired of their feistiness, or maybe their feed bills. The monitors have multiplied, there’s no doubt about that. One such monitor that I met up close and personal was flashing his tail around our Fort Myers neighborhood last fall. Our cluster of condos situated on a narrow bridge of land between the Caloosahatchee River and a lake, is well stocked with various lap-sized pooches, which might, on a bad day, serve as a monitor’s appetizer. This is why our owners’ association sought a judicious way to get rid of him.

If you’ve ever watched a three inch gecko on the finial of a lampshade, warming himself by light bulb as I have, then blow him up a couple of dozen times, turn him as green as the lakeside cattails, that’s what our “Monty Monitor” looked like. In the peaceful daylight of a Florida morning, “Monty” appeared to be just about as menacing as a beanbag monster straight off the shelves of Toys R Us. Unfortunately, however, Monty was having a grand time flaunting condo rules. He refused to prance into the progressively larger traps set out for him.

One afternoon, an alarmed neighbor called, warning me that Monty was right outside my door. I found him lolling lakeside in broad daylight, as much at home as if he were paying the maintenance fees. A team of licensed hunters arrived in a pickup truck with the intent of moving Monty to a more suitable locale, which, I now realize, might well have been a sinkhole of a lake somewhere in Central Florida, the setting for Doc Ford’s encounter with Monty’s kin. Suppose Monty went wild and joined a pack of his ravenous cousins? By the light of our sunny morning, our Monty certainly didn’t resemble any pit bull with scales, but in the deep shadows of swampy darkness, who knows?

Monty’s thick skin warded off a tranquilizer dart that was supposed to have lulled him into submission. Monty became too agitated to let a snare loop his neck, whereupon the frustrated game handlers dispatched him with a round of shots from a light rifle, a twenty two caliber, if I recall correctly. The faces of my neighbors gathered to watch Monty’s roundup registered shock and dismay. All we wanted was our dragon to win—or at least to draw a new lease on life.

 In Deep Shadow, the monitor lizard pack soon takes a backseat to a truly scary creature, a Komodo dragon, a monster of some thirteen feet that swims like a heat seeking missile, has the snaggle teeth of a shark, and a lethal bite. Madame Komodo was perhaps given her size by dint of literary license, but White is a careful researcher. Doc Ford knows that an Indonesian Komodo at ten feet is a large one; however, if I recall my Heuvelmans correctly, there is a biological rule of thumb that a given member of a species may be half again the size of its normal members and is classified as a monster.

 Madam Komodo of White’s novel is a true monster, worthy of her adversaries—or at least of Doc Ford’s murderous enemies. Ford turns the Komodo’s ability to see infrared light into an asset, whereupon Madam Komodo becomes dragon turned defender, winning big time; or at least she gains a new lease on life.

As for that new Philippine dragon among us, it bears a royal sounding name: Northern Sierra Madre Forest Monitor Lizard. This six-foot black and gold lovely weighs in at about twenty two pounds. Sierra’s home at the top of the forest canopy explains how this elusive creature stayed out of the record books for so long; rumors of this new monitor’s existence swirled about in biological circles for at least a decade. Unlike the Komodo, and the common monitors such as Monty, Sierra happens to be a fruit eater. This beautiful creature is apt to show up as a cuddly beanbag on the shelves of Toys R Us, but, unlike Madam Komodo, is unlikely to star in a thriller anytime soon.

Ten Rules for Writing times Ten Fine Writers Equals...

You cannot love your writing if stuck with the income tax. Get an accountant and get on with it. That's one of the rules. Oooops. The Tax Man Cometh; I'm struggling with those bloody numbers "write" now. Yes I have an accountant, but the accountant wants stuff organized. She gets hissy if you hand her a shoebox full of receipts. At any rate, this chorus of advice on writing from famous writers gathered by The Guardian, UK is a bracing tonic, I find. One writer here says never write on any computer that is connected to the internet. That's excellent advice.

Join professional writer's orgs, says another, which I also recommend, and frankly, I'm blogging this courtesy of NINC, a prestigious org for multi-published authors, in which I managed to wangle a membership on the strength of my relatively paltry production. Most of the members have around twenty or so books to their credit and they'll blog around for awhile about stuff like tipping and serving lemons, and then post something great, such as:

Want to be a writer? Read this:

http://tinyurl.com/ygzq42z

Massacre Bay Bill--Aloha to a Friend and a Reader for All Seasons

Massacre Bay Bill was a fine neighbor and friend of Bill’s and mine on Orcas, one of the American San Juan Islands. Just south of Vancouver B.C., home to the Winter Olympics now splashing the grandeur of the Pacific Northwest all over TV—that’s where the San Juans happen to be, and as it happens there are so many Bills in my life that M.B. Bill’s devoted companion Anne and I couldn’t keep all the Bills straight. We took to naming our various Bills for pieces of geography. “Massacre Bay Bill,” our neighbor, was one of the “Bill” trio. The others are my husband, “Cayou Valley Bill,” and his first born son, “Negril Bill” in Jamaica.

“Massacre Bay Bill,” who passed away Friday, was a very accomplished person, who at one point arrived in California fresh out of college with a couple of buddies. Forty years ago? Fifty? M. B.Bill was a contemporary guy. He kept up with the times, and so it never occurred to me to ask. At any rate M.B. Bill and his pals were so broke when they arrived in Los Angeles that they managed to scrape together enough spare change to buy a can of soup, so they flipped a coin to decide who would eat it. I never did find out who won the toss, and now, sadly, I never will. By the time I met M. B.Bill, he’d founded a thriving business and passed it along to his sons. He enjoyed many successful real estate ventures and had successfully conquered some demons of his own along the way. What I appreciated most about M. B. Bill was that he was never far from his next read. If M.B. Bill wasn’t watching a ball game or out fishing, he could be found in his study engrossed in another book.

I’m one of those writers who thrive on input from readers and M. B. Bill was a reader of eclectic tastes, whose opinion I valued. After I finished a draft of my third novel, One Big Itch, I passed it along to him. When he didn’t volunteer anything about it, I figured I was in trouble. I finally asked him what he thought. Then came that little grin, the small laugh, and the bald statement of the facts: “I got lost in it,” he said. “There were all these suspects and I couldn’t figure out whodunnit.” That was another thing I valued about Massacre Bay Bill. He never minced words.

Well, if you’ve outsmarted a reader as sophisticated as Massacre Bay Bill, you’ve lost most of your audience, or so I concluded. I changed the story, naming the suspect early on, leaving the proof of the case as the mystery to be resolved. Now that I’m whacking away at that thicket of images that somehow has to be shaped into novel number four, I’m at a loss. Where’s Massacre Bay Bill? What would he say? Aloha, to you Bill, I’m forever grateful for your help and I pray that on those rainy days in paradise you’ll find yourself yet another great read.

Capybera Jerky - Not here in time for the Super Bowl

News Flash: The Latin American nation of Bolivia plans to export capybara jerky to neighboring Venezuela, which considers the meat of the world’s largest rodent something of a delicacy.

Capybara jerky is a Bolivian export plan to find a sustainable income for indigenous communities in the country’s eastern lowlands. A group called the Friends of Nature Foundation is spearheading this project. The Friends believe that somewhere between 200 and 500 capybara can be harvested every year while maintaining a sustainable capybara herd, or tribe, or whatever you call a bunch of oversized rats, so don’t figure on finding this delicacy in the snack food section of Walmart in time for Super Bowl Sunday.

However, the story reminded me of one of the tales told to me by Kathleen
“Misti” Wilcox. Misti is one of my editors and also a friend of many years standing. I was delighted that Misti took over the cooking in our household for the summer while she helped me launch my third novel, One Big Itch.

Misti arrived at our summer home base in the San Juan Islands with a truckload of gear, including her private stash of exotic spices and kitchen paraphernalia. Soon Misti will be launch her food blog, She Drives with Knives, a blog that can’t happen soon enough as far as I am concerned. Misti is full of entertaining tales. She’s a gutsy world traveler and a fine cook and Misti happens to be the only person I know who has not only eaten capybara, but cooked one.

A mature capybara weights about 130 pounds, Misti tells me, and it resembles an enormous shaggy guinea pig. Misti, whose former husband was a project director of the World Wildlife Fund operations in Latin America, was once faced with inventing a capybara stew in order to feed a passel of hungry scientists who were working in the forbidding lowland country of Venezuela, Los Llanos, a vast rolling lowland which lies at the foothills of the Andes mountain range to the west, and is drained by the Orinoco river. In the dry season, daytime temperatures hover around 110 degrees. The whole territory has the desiccated smell of one vast bouillon cube Misti says, which strikes me as the type of metaphor only a committed chef would come up with.

The rugged llanero people, Venezuelan cowboys, also have canoes outside their huts, Misti said, which she thought was totally bizarre, until she found out that in the wet season Los Llanos floods, the primitive roads disappear in the deluge. Canoes and--not horses-become the main transportation.

As for the capybara, these huge rodents spend half of their time wallowing in ponds, where they also choose to do their mating dance, Misti said. It was for this reason that in the 16^th century, the Catholic Church ruled that the capybara is a fish, allowing capybara consumption during Lent. Possible starvation of the native population might well have had something to do with this timely decree.

How to cook a capybara? First you have to get rid of the fishy taste, Misti said. “I learned from one of the native women to rub the meat all over with lemon juice.” Misti then winged it by putting the meat into an enormous pot, filling that with liberal quantities of beer laced with every kind of spice she could find, ginger, mustard, and Chinese spices, and stewing it for hours.

What does capybara taste like?

“Not like chicken,” Misti said, laughing. “More like pork. White meat, but mostly capybara tastes like nothing else.”

Except beer?

Lost Things

They’d been on the ground in Atlanta for an hour when he realized he didn’t have his wallet. There was the mad rooting through their luggage, the dash down the long concourse, clear back to the plane they arrived on.  Amazingly the plane they had arrived from Seattle on was still on the ground. There was the scramble to locate a stewardess to accompany them on board, and then the long trudge down the aisle of an empty plane. Ever notice how a big a plane is when you are the last one on it?

There was slide into the window seat at aisle 31 A. The reaching into the seat pocket, which turned up…nothing. Argggg. Embarrassed apologies to the stewardess. Then, a final feel around of the crevice of his seat. And? Success! Wallet found! Nightmare avoided. This time.

We’re fifteen minutes out of SFW. I’m driving, while reliving my son’s nightmare scenario. What a pain to lose a wallet: The lost I.D.? Can’t fly home without it? The ruination of a hard fought for and much needed Florida vacation?

“Not the first time you’ve done that,” I said. “Next time, all you have to do when you get off a plane is feel around for your wallet.” Cut off your tongue, Mama. Shut your mouth. Who are you to talk? Haven’t you been there and done that? Oh yes, which is why when I board a plane I count the bags I’ve got, and count them again every so often, then count them again before I get off.

As a way of commiserating I confess how I a cell phone once noty ten minutes from boarding a flight. I still can’t figure out how I did that. What is the body count on lost cell phones? I wonder. Where do airports put them? You can’t reuse a lost cell phone after all.

His fiancee giggles. I hope she never loses that endearing little laugh, so I entertain her with another tale from my vast store of lost stuff experiences: This hunky old SUV I’m driving? I’m down to one set of very expensive keys. The set that’s lost was the one that was supposed to stay in the car. Plan was, we’d use door keys to get in and out and the ignition keys would perpetually stay in the vehicle.

My son laughs. His fiancée laughs. At least they are not like Big Brother, who lost his wallet yet again last week. What a pain. Getting the I.D. all over again. New debit card and all that.

I thought about my own recent loss of this sort. I’d lost an car! Lost it in the parking lot at Publix. My ultimate humiliation came when a couple of my friends spied me me trudging around behind a grocery cart with what must have been a disoriented bag lady type expression on my face. After three trips through the parking lot I finally found this bus of a thing (this wasn’t some kiddie car I’d lost), faced toward the store, way I always park it, except it was one lane over from the one I routinely park in. The one I hadn’t searched because it was too far over. What was I thinking?  What was I losing? My mind?

No, I refuse to believe that I am any more or less forgetful than I ever was. We lose things when our thoughts race through the ten things we should be doing right this minute instead of going to the grocery store. We have so much to lose all the time. Right now we are losing the senior generation in my family. Last year my mom. Then the letter arrived. The funeral CD and the program. We’ve lost my 104 year old aunt. I can still see my aunt’s serenely sweet face from when I was six and she drew my name in the family Christmas drawing and sent me a tea set the following March.

Yes, we lose track of time. We lose weight, if we are lucky and altitude if we are not.

The things we hate losing most: motivation, direction, interest, time.

And then there’s that one thing I pride myself on never losing: hope, which brings me to the end of this woeful tale. The lost keys from the SUV? Gone since the week we bought the car off a used car lot?

The morning after the nearly lost wallet fiasco, the keys to the SUV turned up. My husband dangled them from his fingers, then teased them away, pocketing them, when I reached out.

“Where did you find them?” I said.

“You never looked,” he sneered.

Oh, but I did. I combed the entire car for them, more than once. “Where were they?”

“In the crevice where you raise the back seat.” He pocketed this new treasure, the lost keys, claiming dominion over my car. “I’ll keep them, since you lose everything,”

I wanted to hoot but restrained myself. I’d lost the battle but not the war. My husband never loses anything. Except his tools. Has anyone seen a table saw? A square bottomed spade? The electric tester? A box of screws?

Forget full Body Scans--How about a Few Brain Scans?

Only luck and the intervention of a heroic passenger--that was all that saved a jetliner from being blown up as it attempted to land in Detroit on Christmas Day. Young Mr. Terrorist has blabbed how he secreted enough lethal powder in the crotch of his underwear to blow the side out of a 747.  Fortunately, the powder failed to ignite. This latest close call has set off a round of soul searching about how we should all give up our privacy to step into a canister designed to reveal EVERYTHING--though masking our faces, the better to protect ourselves before we set foot on a plane.

The scanner makes front page news in the local paper, while President Obama's declaration that our supposed crack security and anti-terror system has failed us yet again is clear back on A4. Turns out young Mr. Abdulmutallab's own father, a prominent Nigerian banker, took it upon himself to warn the U.S. Embassay that he feared his own son was a potential threat to international security. This was back in NOVEMBER. Somehow, nobdody passed the word along. Ho hum. Shades of 911. Does anyone recall how the warnings from the FBI that a group of young Arabs were taking flying lessons in our own flight schools and skipping over the sections on how to land a plane. What needs to be done first is to find out why these warnings can't be taken seriously at the CIA (Central Incompetence Agency).

Before we start scanning the bodies of the rest of the airline passengers in the nation, I suggest we start scanning the brains of the powers that be in the intelligence community. Could it be that most of these people have no brains in their heads?

Sara Williams Discusses Novel "One Big Itch" | AHN

Sara Williams Discusses Novel "One Big Itch" | AHN