Rodger’s Top 5: Classic Rock Bands I Listen To When I Write

I just finished a rewrite of my upcoming book. It is the second in the Team Walker Series, with one of the title characters an aging spy, Thadius Walker, who is called out of retirement.

I’ve been close to Thadius for years, spending months in between my published books exploring his life in a series that remains unpublished. The series is out of the norm, and someday I hope to find the perfect literary agent who will know exactly where to place the books. Each time I open one of those draft books, I am taken back to the 1970’s where many of his adventures begin. To get in the mood, I queue up several of my favorite musical artists of that era. I thought I’d list the five I’m listening to now as I begin work on the third book of the series.

Creedence Clearwater Revival
This group broke up in 1972, but before they did, they introduced me to southern rock. Songs like Proud Mary and Bad Moon Rising took me back to the South, and a slower way of life. Their song Fortunate Son transports me to basic training in an anti-war era.

The Animals
This British, and later American group revealed a “white blues” genre that I never knew existed. We Gotta’ Get Out Of This Place paints a mood of frustration, and The House Of The Rising Sun, is perfect if my character is weary of trying in life.

Jefferson Airplane
No band can rekindle the awe and anger my characters felt during the counterculture movement of the 70’s. Grace Slick’s voice in White Rabbit brings back visions of the free love movement and raucous protests that tore at a nation more divided than today.

Linda Ronstadt
From her early career as the lead singer of The Stone Poneys to her solo albums including Heart Like a Wheel, Linda’s voice has an album that fits almost any scenario I’m writing about. Her later albums, including her Latin albums help me cross the southern border, sometimes into sweet family settings, but more often into rowdy or lonesome Mexican bars.

The Moody Blues
This British band was the first to layer classical music and rock, with albums that portray difficult but sophisticated situations. They are a perfect place to find a struggling hero’s emotional state as that character tries to use their intellect to overcome deep emotional trouble. For many Vietnam War vets, their anthem Nights in White Satin, was a tribute to American GIs coming home in body bags, although Justin Haywood, lead singer and writer swears it is an anthem to lost love.

The Moody Blues is my favorite band of the era, capable of leading me to the moods necessary to give my characters depth and also of lifting me out of whatever trouble I create for them.

Rodger Recommends: Authors Who Shaped My Fascination With Places And Times

This month I want to offer my recommendations on five early authors who shaped my fascination with places and times. My personal writings include historical adventures and thrillers; all crafted to take my readers to places they may never visit and into time periods and intrigues that molded a nation and its people. Like earlier authors, my stories glorify no superheroes, just ordinary women and men, often just kids who overcame enormous odds. Three of the authors are American and one British and one British Canadian. I say thanks and cherish their work.

James Fenimore Cooper was an author of the early 1800’s whose stories of early colonial life and adventure virtually created the genre of adventure fiction in America.

Favorite book…The Last Of The Mohicans

Robert Service was a British born Canadian whose stories of the north country at the turn of the 20th century presented the “frozen north’ of Alaska and the Yukon as real places teaming with scoundrels and everyday heroes, where the weather and wildlife became antagonists.

Favorite book…The Trail of ‘98

Ernest Hemingway was originally from Illinois but traveled the world looking for stories and adventures from the 1930s through the 1960s. His personal struggles always found a way into characters you care about.

Favorite book…The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest K Gann was an American who wrote of his two passions, aviation and sailing, taking his audience around the world, where life depended on the ability to deal with what broke or with pirates or bitter enemies. His settings were unique in that the story might be set in the middle of the Pacific during a typhoon or 25,000 feet in the air.

Favorite book…Fate is the Hunter

Patrick O’Brian was a British author who wrote of unique co-protagonists, one a Navy commander and the other a scientist and their adventures across the world and in mortal combat. He humanized leadership and elevated the lowest ratings on a ship to heroes. His unique pairing of seamanship and science were often critical to overcoming overwhelming odds.

Favorite book…Master and Commander

From Cooper I learned of early America and how people, indigenous and white pulled together. From Service I carried a childhood fascination of the north to a life in Alaska. Hemingway took me to war in Spain, fishing in Cuba, and on safari in Africa. Gann helped spike my fascination and lifetime involvement with aviation and exotic ports. O’Brian taught me about teamwork and persistence in the face of what might have been insurmountable challenges.

Note: Every book noted above became a major motion picture.

Rodger’s Two Cents: What Is Wrong With This Country Today?

Two of my books, Still Common Sense, and Awake, address the economy, our history, legal system, and political division. There are two themes in the books.

(1) You own you, in a (2) Imperfect but exceptional America

The country does not understand the historical environment around the nation’s founding.

The problems in our country are not a function of a dated constitution. Most have never read it, and we aren’t following it.

My novel Two Civil Wars, looks at how emotions drove the Civil War. Even stronger emotional disagreements drove the Mexican Civil War raging at the same time. The end of the war between the states was guided by forgiveness guided by constitutional norms. The nation healed. In Mexico the winners made new rules, and that nation continues to rumble with economic and political unrest more than a century and a half later.  Two Civil Wars is a love story and an adventure. It is a story of battle and brutality; of personal loss and joy. It’s a story of how love for our fellow man prevailed in the USA.

My fiction books include a thriller story and a love story, and all take a hard look at how this country overcomes challenges. In Enemy Patriots, I write about the racism against Japanese Americans and how so many of them were crucial to victory. I contrast that with racism rampant across the world. In The Opposite of Trust, the underlying conflict is how the people of the USA and of the Soviet Union both were faced with authoritarianism during the Cold War, and how each learned different lessons.

With these observations as background, what is wrong with this country? I don’t have the answers. For Rodger’s Top Five this month, I listed five of the quotations that I refer to when sorting out my own life. That exercise pushed me to think about similar quotations that might be helpful in sorting out America’s problems. Consider these two, in our Constitutional Republic.

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.” – H.L. Mencken

“Fight for the things that you care about. But do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” – Ruth Bader Ginsburg 

This country is imperfect. It is also exceptional. Personal success is driven by each of us owning ourselves. Each of us needs to step away from saving humanity and the world and pick specific issues that we can change and then engage others to help rather than scream about those with different views. Ghandi said, “Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.” 

One final quotation seems to offer advice. 

“You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.” – Winston Churchill

Rodger’s Top 5: Favorite Quotations About Life

“Do what you can with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt

“Don’t be distracted by emotions like anger, envy, resentment. These just zap energy and waste time.” – Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.” – Ernest Hemmingway

“The reasonable man adapts his life to the world around him. The unreasonable man seeks to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Never miss an opportunity to shut up.” – Will Rogers

Rodger That: Atmospheric Rivers And Bears

The nation has been captured by stories of atmospheric rivers slamming California. Extreme storms are unusual in the southwest but are a regular weather phenomenon in Alaska. Not this winter; rather we’ve been under massive high-pressure systems for months. The kind of brutally cold air mass that deflected our normal storms south, to the golden bear state. 

In last month’s post I wrote of my favorite rivers, with the top of the list, The Iliamna River in Alaska. Our family owns acreage on a bluff above the river and a rustic log cabin. We use the cabin for fishing, hiking, bear watching, and bird and moose hunting in the fall. When a massive storm rolls in, the river can go from thirty yards across to a quarter mile and from three feet of water to thirty. The rise can happen in minutes. Watching massive trees and sections of riverbank roar by is an amazing experience. The river can also recede almost as quickly.

I recall one instance when it rose so fast that it submerged an old dirt road and bridge over the river, leaving me stuck on the wrong side. I parked the old beat-up Blazer I was driving and waited near the roaring flood for some friends to run a boat over to pick me up. After a night of roughing it in the cabin with six buddies, listening to 100 mile an hour winds slam sheets of rain against the walls, we awoke the next day to clear skies. (By roughing it, I mean finding that we only had red wine to go with a baked salmon dinner.)

We watched the river recede all of the next day and about six in the evening I pulled on a pair of hip boots and headed to the river. Knowing the moose and bears in the area were all stirred up by the flood, I slung my rifle over my shoulder. With the water within an inch of the boot tops, I began wading through the floodwaters, determined to recover the vehicle as soon as I could drive it across the flooded road. Being careful not to go over the tops of the boots or trip on a rock or sunken log carried by the floods, it took a half hour to reach a stand of submerged cottonwood trees on the far side of the meadow next to the river. 

As I started through the narrow roadway between the soaring trees, a branch snapped to my left, and then several more. With water to my boot tops, and deeper water to either side, there was no place to go, so I slid behind a huge cottonwood tree and waited. The occasional snap became a steady crunch of breaking limbs. Unsure whether it was a brown bear or moose coming through the flooded forest, I slid my rifle from my shoulder and loaded a shell into the chamber. (Whether bear or moose is irrelevant as either can kill you if you get too close.)

For five minutes I froze behind my tree as something huge moved closer. Then only fifteen feet away a four-year-old grizzly broke through a brush line, headed straight for me. The half lunging, half swimming bear had no idea I was there. I put my rifle to my shoulder and prepared to shoot; even if the bear just knocked me down, I’d drown. The bear's nose slid around the tree and then the head. He looked at me and growled, a look of total surprise on his face. 

Given about two seconds to make a decision, I lowered the rifle and slammed the bear on the nose with the barrel. You would have thought a bulldozer was running amuck through the cottonwoods as branches, brush and even small trees were thrown up where the bear ripped his way out of the forest. I waited a couple of minutes and then waded to dry ground. Sitting in the truck, I watched the water recede and rejoiced in the outcome of the encounter. 

This winter, reading about the California situation, it occurred to me that if the early California settlers had given the bears a little respect, there might still be golden bears in the golden bear state. It also occurred to me that they, with some infrastructure rework, might be able to use a few of these weather phenomena. We won’t miss one or two.   

Rodger’s Top 5: Rivers

THE AMUR…The Amur River makes up the border between northern China and the Russian Far East. Every spring, in just a few days, it pushes blocks of Siberian ice the size of buildings downriver mashing and booming. It can be heard miles inland and is one of the most powerful scenes I’ve ever experienced.  If you are lucky enough to have someone take you upriver, you’ll find yourself in one of the world’s last complete wilderness forests.

THE SEINE…A beautiful clear river that drains the Paris Basin, the Seine flows gently through farmlands, small villages and cities of northern France. Unlike most rivers I love, this is an urban river, tame and peaceful. The riverfront cafes, where it flows through Paris, are perhaps the most joyous place in the world to sit for an afternoon sipping great wine with friends and lovers. 

THE MISSISSIPPI…My wife and I spend a lot of time in New Orleans. One of our favorite places is the promenade just north of the riverboat landing. In the evening you can sit along the banks, echoes of jazz drifting from the city, and watch ships from all over the world carrying trade in and out of the central United States. This powerful river helped build America and is the epitome of a river as a highway and way of life. It recharges my Huckleberry Finn. 

THE BITTERROOT…I’ve fished Montana rivers for decades and love the Bitterroot. It’s a tame river running through beautiful farmland. In the summer, the scorching sun makes early morning and late evening fishing the best. In the middle of the day, you can pick from dozens of clear tributaries and follow them into the mountains until you can drive no more. Those willing to walk a bit, will find themselves in narrow mountain canyons with the rustle of pines in the wind overhead, and pools of pan trout that will feast on a dappled grey-hackle fly. 

ILIAMNA…Iliamna Lake is the largest in Alaska, about the size of the State of Rhode Island. From the Iliamna River on the east to where the Kvichak River drains into Bristol Bay, the drainage is about 200 miles long. Home to the world’s largest Sockeye salmon run, literally millions of fish push up from Bristol Bay into dozens of clear streams. Before commercial lodges inundated the area and increased fishing pressure twenty times since the 1970’s, it was also one of the premier trout fisheries in the world. Where a few years ago a fishing guide might get a client into schools of huge char and rainbows, they now run the river just to spot a fish, and after the salmon come in, join the bears in fishing for them. Still, it is the most beautiful country I’ve ever been in, ranging from heavy forests on the slopes of volcanoes, to rolling open tundra where it finds saltwater. It is the Iliamna River that keeps me and my family in Alaska.

Rodger That: The Surveillance State

(Roger that is a phrase used by the military and pilots to confirm communications, in this case, it’s between me and my fans.).

The 1990’s Russian Intourist Hotels that catered to foreigners were large boxes, with a bar, restaurant, and rooms with narrow lumpy beds, worn furniture, and pale lighting. That is the environment that I brought my friend Paul into on his first trip to Russia.

An accountant, Paul was a child of the Cold War, a student of American dogma and journalism about the Evil Russian Empire. I’d invited him to help me with a business start-up at a time when Russia was trying to shake off its past and reinvent itself. It was my third trip to Magadan, the former headquarters of the Soviet era gulags and prison camps. The Soviet Union was gone. While Paul readily accepted the trip, he was so nervous on the Aeroflot flight that he couldn’t eat. “I’m not about to sacrifice my freedom so that some damned KGB operative can meet his harass an American quota,” pretty much summed up his concerns.

Our first day of business meetings started to put him at ease. My interpreter, a French woman, helped make the meeting meaningful and rewarding. A great dinner at a Georgian restaurant with our clients offered a glimpse beyond the decrepit culture Paul was expecting. The client’s presentation on the potential of a mining claim they were developing opened his eyes to the country’s wealth. We were on our way toward helping our client launch a successful modern company and Paul’s paranoia was fading.

The second day’s meetings were even more productive, and I couldn’t have been happier with Paul’s financial advice to the client. That admiration faded the moment we returned to the hotel where the manager met us with two burley Russian policemen. Paul was about to be arrested. 

“What in the hell is this all about?” I asked.

“That man went on a rampage and did great damage to his room,” replied the manager. 

“Before you arrest my friend, would you show me what he’s done?” Two minutes later we walked into what appeared to be a fully functional, by Soviet standards, room. 

“Look," said the middle-aged blond manager, pointing at a tiny fixture in the ceiling. “And look there,” she added as we walked into the bathroom. Both fixtures were smashed.

“Would you give me a minute with my friend?” With the manager and policemen waiting outside the room, I asked, “What in the hell did you do?”

“I wasn’t about to let the KGB listen in on my phone calls,” he replied. “Once I found those listening devices, I made up my mind that they had no right to spy on me.”

“Paul,” I said, “those aren’t listening devices, they are sensors for the fire sprinkler system. They are probably really hard to find since they were installed thirty years ago.”

We settled the matter Russian style, by Paul apologizing and counting out six hundred US dollars and handing it to the manager. She promptly shared a hundred with each of the policemen before all three headed down the elevator. 

I walked Paul into my room and closed the door. “Paul, no one is listening in on you. The Soviet era is gone. You need to relax and recognize that what might be a small problem in the states can turn into a big problem here.”

The next day, as we were checking out, a tall muscular man approached me. In flawless English, with a British accent, he offered, “You gave your friend some really good advice for a foreigner traveling in my country.” The man smiled and then headed for the elevator.

I was on the plane when it dawned on me, the only way he would know about that conversation was if there were listening devices in my room. “Anything wrong?” asked Paul.

“Nothing, I replied.”

Rodger’s Top 5: Recent Political Moments

THE NATIONAL ELECTION
Anyone who studies politics, given a few minutes to ponder, can tell you that there are two types of voter. One kind are people who follow the sport closely and elect candidates based on their policies. They favor candidates who favor their own political philosophy. A second kind, elect candidates based on their personality, favoring candidates they “like”, often without studying what the person deeply believes. But the majority of people have a set of favored political beliefs and vote based on those beliefs, unless the candidate who shares those beliefs comes across as arrogant, obsessed, unintelligent or worse, deceitful. Then this majority joins with the personality voters. In the last election, which should have been a bellwether election for conservatives, the Republicans learned that in most districts they need to reach the majority of people in the middle with likable candidates. If they run on views that the public does not believe, they usually lose.

THE EXTREMES ON BOTH SIDES
The far left of the Democratic Party and the right of the Republican party are the catalysts for change. I know that most of us favor the middle and see the extremes as unreasonable. But I believe that the famous playwright and political activist, George Bernard Shaw was on to something when he pointed out, “The reasonable man adapts his life to the world around him. The unreasonable man seeks to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” 

THE MIDDLE GROUND
Those who are not on the extreme edge of both parties, are the ones who will select the policies of what some see as the extremes and modify them and gather support for them and put them into legislation that can pass. This assures there is always movement in the country; slow, one degree at a time rather than lurches. Quantum sudden shifts are almost always reversed because they are too disruptive to our lives.

THE FIFTEEN ROUNDS OF VOTING FOR SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE
It astounds me that so many who advocate for compromise found the rough and tumble give and take of the recent speaker election a bad thing. The give and take of this process is exactly what all politics looked like back when we actually found a way to mold strong opinions into something that we could agree with. Progress often pushes us out of our comfort zone.

THE AWAKENING TO THE MEDIA 
I listened to an NPR reporter this morning who was interviewing a black Baptist minister in Atlanta. The subject was the police brutalizing of a black motorist. The minister’s disgust at what had happened was palatable and justified. I couldn’t agree with his political philosophy of universal victimhood but his concerns about the national media invading Atlanta and stirring the pot in an already volatile situation mirrored the emotions of a lot of conservatives who see the media turning every problem into a crisis. Feeding fear and anger to improve media ratings has become a terrible danger to our nation. Let’s see who in the media figures this out first. 

BONUS: If you recently became WOKE, welcome. Most of us have been AWAKE all along.

Rodger That: A Grizzly Experience

(Roger that is a phrase used by the military and pilots to confirm communications, in this case, it’s between me and my fans.).

Have you ever noticed that, somehow when you need it most, help arrives? Perhaps we are prepared. Maybe by surrounding ourselves with those we can trust. Often in our moment of need, or outright terror, we don’t recognize it, especially if that help isn’t even human.

I raised my family to be adventurous and fiercely independent. From the time they were infants my children had a constant canine companion, and somehow just the right one for the moment. One of our favorites was Red, a full-size Collie, and the perfect dog to watch over the flock especially while we were at our wilderness log cabin. 

The afternoon temperature was in the low 80’s, uncommon for Alaska. Out in the open, where a steady breeze kept the mosquitos at bay it was beautiful, the kind of afternoon that my daughter cherished. While she stretched out on a bench around our fire-pit, reading, her brother and I were working on a project inside the cabin. 

Someone had forgotten to close the door to the screened porch. Red, tired of the mosquitos that swarmed him on the deck, scratched on the heavy door to join us away from the bugs. I let him in, smiling, seeing my middle school daughter completely lost in her book; then closed the porch and cabin door. As Red curled up for a nap, I went back to the project.

An hour later Red exploded from a deep sleep, barking and spinning until, nose pointing toward the front of the cabin, he threw himself against the door. “Hold on,” I offered, “we’re almost finished here.” But Red wasn’t about to ‘hold on.’ He pounded on the door, barking insanely. 

“Okay,” I said, pushing him back long enough to get the door open. Before I could open the screened door, Red launched himself at it, ripping the top hinge free. I opened the latch and he literally ripped the door from my hand as he exploded by me. In four or five leaps he covered the thirty yards to my daughter and launched himself over both bench and girl, barking wildly.

A five-year-old Grizzly Bear stood twenty feet from her. As the bear rose up on his hind legs, Red smashed into the bear’s chest at full speed, cartwheeling the animal. In seconds Red was ripping at ears, then tail, then nose. Every time the bear would turn to face him, the dog would spin past him to tear at a new target. We watched, amazed as that 70-pound dog got that 500-pound bear spinning in circles and then the bear took off on a dead run, the dog at his heels. 

The problem for the bear was a steep bluff in the direction he was running, and the last we saw of him was when he went airborne, tumbling end over end down the bluff. Red stopped to watch, (his mouth proudly full of bear hair), as did the rest of us, then turned, duty fulfilled, and walked calmly back up the steps and into the cabin. I took a minute to calm my daughter before we followed. In less than two minutes from the bear encounter, Red was already asleep. Like I said, the perfect dog for the times, always watching over his flock even while sleeping.

Rodger’s Top 5: Loves

Family
I’m married with two adult children. My wife is in community philanthropy, my daughter, a theater grad works in environmental construction management and my son followed my dream and is a commercial pilot. I have three amazing grandchildren. All these people, their spouses, and a remarkable ex-wife are the focus of my life.

Outdoors, Especially the Wilderness
From the time I was five, I have craved the wilderness and places where I can be alone with my thoughts. From The Russian Far East, to Mexico, and the Yukon to Florida I have found special places where, if man has been there at all, it was with a gentle footprint. My favorite place is the porch of the family fly-in log cabin on Lake Iliamna in Alaska, a lake just about the size of the state of Rhode Island.

Fly Fishing
I am never happier than sitting on a rock watching a river run. From the Mississippi to Alaska’s crystal-clear streams, and dozens of other waters around the world, I often rise from my rock, string up a seven-weight fly rod and test the waters. If I catch something, great, and if not, that’s fishing. I love deep sea fishing in Zihuantanejo, Mexico and Southeast Alaska, but there is nothing better than running water and the flash of a leaping rainbow trout.

Hunting Camp with Friends
I was raised by a single mom, but still had early experiences with my father and uncles in deer camp. Since those early days, every year I spend a week with family and close friends in hunting camp where harvesting is secondary to men’s tales around a campfire, and especially the sharing of the kind of grey hair experiences that mold younger hunters. Today the camp is in a moose camp in Alaska where our idea of roughing it is red wine with fish.

Travel Into Other Cultures
Being married to a Latina woman has enriched my lifetime love of the melting pot of American culture and fascination with peoples and other nations. My two favorite destinations in North America are New Orleans and Victoria, British Columbia, both because of the diverse community of people of different ethnicities and origins. Close behind is the southern Pacific Coast of Mexico where we vacation every year. I love the Russian people and wish that they weren’t born to suffer. Among our closest friends are a French couple who love to share the cultural wealth of their country. People everywhere share human traits that bring us together and other traits that create the same struggles all over the world. With that said, the one great gift of those who created the USA is the foundation of personal liberty, seen nowhere else.

BONUS
I must admit that I have one more passion, aviation. I was bitten by the flying bug when I had my first airplane ride, in an old Stearman Biplane when I was eight. I’ve been a pilot for decades and someday will be a talented enough writer to explain the sheer joy of sweeping around huge cumulous clouds on a bluebird day, or of landing on a remote lake that may have never seen a floatplane before.