From Cascadia - a novel

“On one particular night on the Med cruise sailing near Sicily on a night brightened by an enormous full moon, I climbed the ladder to the hatch alone and stood in that doorway watching an active volcano rising out of the sea on the port side as we slowly cruised by, streams of fire arcing into the starlit sky. At that moment, I realized that, despite spending the Atlantic transit seasick and on mess duty, I was elated to have found a way to ship out. I was at sea like Jim Hawkins, Humphrey Van Weyden; like Charles Marlow, Gerard Gales; like my Uncle Frank.… 

“It was a quiet night, the officers on the bridge, the troops manning the rail, transfixed by the volcanic cone, a wedge blocking so many stars, those Greek harbingers of fortune, the ship spectral and white in the moonlight, the bioluminescence tumbling in the wake, the Marines lining the port rail, silent before a sublime force of nature most of us thought we'd never see. We were on foreign soil for the first time, and so we were full of good intentions. We politely let Italians show us the glory that once was Rome. We let Greeks point to the Parthenon and then graciously show us into their nightclubs. The Spanish taught us how to drink from wineskins. We waited in vain for the French to notice we were there. We visited the ruins of ancient empires, their eroded monuments, their common graves, their decayed institutions, and we thought: this will never happen to us.

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From Memoir Slash Novel; Novel Slash Memoir – a novel experiment in memory.

I stopped for breakfast at a truck stop in Ohio and overheard the drivers excitedly talking about how a crucial relay had failed somewhere in the labyrinthine Northeast Power grid, triggering a chain reaction that stopped the flow of electricity and drained Manhattan of its life’s blood in seconds. First thought: how am I going to read in the dark? 

I made it from the Bay Bridge to the George Washington bridge in four non-stop days arriving just before dawn, strung out on bennies, hollow-eyed and thirsty as hell. There was no traffic as I approached the George Washington Bridge, which was strange to me, and then as I passed through the toll booths, I beheld how empty and lonely the world seemed without the lights of the Manhattan skyline. The moon, full and brilliant, ruled high in the sky, its unshaped light spilling over everything, as if, with Broadway down, the moon was finally getting its big break. From the palisades, Manhattan looked like a stonemason’s salvage yard filled with silvery moonlit monuments, still imposing, as if even without its artificial light the sheer mass of the city was enough to keep nature intimidated. Halfway across the bridge I whispered Oh God, let there be light! Then, bang, I watched amazed as the lights of Manhattan came back on, and rivers of electricity instantly flowed through the billions of copper arteries from the Bronx down to the Battery (the battery!). I had the perfect vantage out on the bridge—talk about your prayer answered—not just any prayer either, but the archetype of all prayers. Is this an amen, an omen, or an oh man! Or is it the beginning of a run of payback karma hidden in an answered prayer? I wheeled into Manhattan imagining I could hear a collective sigh of release and a round of applause.