Excerpt from The Crazy Wisdom:
At some level, I knew he was offering me a handout. He wanted me to look like an upstanding guy, not some layabout supported by his hardworking obviously much smarter wife. But it wasn't exactly a plum. Would I get paid? I didn't even know how or when that would ever happen. A revenue stream would take a while to get going, naturally. Jon would keep money in my pocket, he said. But I mean, leather? Really?
"Nice stuff, good quality. The best. Not hippie leathers," he said.
By then I had known him long enough to know the mercurial Cody, the elusive Cody, the phantom you could never quite rely on, who set the stage and then exited the scene, leaving the audience he had by then invited onto the stage gaping at each other. So I knew what I would be getting into. And the fact was I didn't want to work another year on ski lifts, I needed a marketable skill (at the time it was still possible to consider leather crafting a legitimate trade), and the Winter Olympics were coming to Lake Placid. There, I figured, the influx of wealth would bring the kind of market I thought our work demanded. Maybe I could lend another level of creative thinking to the enterprise, move up there and open a branch in time for the games, train another couple of freaks to do the work, and spend all day writing novels and fishing.
So we agreed it would be fun for a while, and if it didn't pan out when winter came I could always go back to work on the mountain.
Excerpt from The Power Line:
“Well, I don’t know how much there is to say about Fran Germaine and how me and him met Jack Diamond and got into the bootlegging racket. It was a day I’ll never forget, though, I’ll tell you that.”
Lonnie Monroe twisted his face up into a weird mask, the kind he made to emphasize a point. He sat across from me in a booth at the Trap Dyke tap room in Lake Aurora, New York, in the Adirondacks. His blue eyes were watery and he hadn’t shaved that morning, so his white beard prongs stuck out in all directions from his leathery face. He was otherwise well turned out in his retired-old-timer garb of pressed tan Dickies, a felt Moose River hat and Russell moccasins with white wool socks, rolled down. I’m doing this to make you happy, he seemed to be saying. Now let’s just get it over with.
It was June, 1983. I had been pestering him for weeks to sit down and tell me about Fran Germaine and what happened at Donnelly’s Corners in the twenties, but he couldn’t get used to the idea of talking into a machine, of cementing into the deep past something he clearly viewed as a living reality. Much was hinted around here about Fran Germaine, but little known. Everybody’d heard fragments, but never in any coherent or very plausible form. Lonnie’s versions left a lot of holes. He was a known embellisher, but not getting any younger, and I hoped to get his story down on tape while I still could.
Finally, because of his affection for Germaine’s granddaughter, Sonja, he agreed.
“He was her granddaddy, so she deserves to know,” was how he put it. I hoped I could just keep him focused long enough to see if there was really anything there.
Excerpt from Sacred Monkey River:
Ancient traders, lumbermen, and modern recreationists had run the Usumacinta for centuries, down each of its half dozen major tributaries. Though it remained marginal and unknown, the region not only had been discovered, but had been photographed from space, digitized on GIS programs. In the grand scheme I was just another poseur aiming to "run the river X from its “source to its mouth”, a cliché of exploration literature.
All I could try to do was to slow and concentrate my perception, take in the basin-la cuenca-in its totality from top to bottom, at canoe speed, the speed of the ancients, and gain a sense of the step-by-step relations of distance and direction that undergird a basic knowledge of place. Along the way perhaps some adhesive element would draw together the pieces of the fabric, like a zipper, at least for the purposes of my own understanding, and show it to me whole.
I anticipated bearing witness to change and possibility, and hoped that somewhere in the Usumacinta's vast basin, its network of capillaries and backwaters, in a place where roads, deforestation, and speed had not distorted the relationships, I might find people who viewed the region as a cosmogram held together by canoes and river navigation and informed by the voyages of the ancestors. Only in this way did my purpose at all resemble the more scientific and fanciful ones of the real explorers, those priests, soldiers, and scholars who sought lost cities and uncontacted tribes, copied the inscriptions and stole the art, who catalogued its biological wealth and loss, or cased the joint for plunder.