New Book this Spring – Finding Jennifer - We’ve been working hard on a new novel which should be in most online bookstores sometime before May. I’ve included the cover art and an excerpt from the first chapter for all to read. I would appreciated commnents and constructive criticism, good or bad. The premise follows our southern border problem and how easily innocent Americans can be unwittingly drawn into the danger. Our hero, reluctantly searches for a missing young woman and finds himself in the middle of the the border war. Then things really get complicated.
Chapter One
Sunday, 5:47 am
Jennifer Hollings had to park her five-year old Honda CRV at the new wash; an inauspicious beginning to a day she hoped would improve. An exaggeration when called a road, the previous rough, gravelly, seventeen mile, two cow-path byway, intended at the end of the 19th Century for mule-drawn ore wagons, challenged the Honda’s suspension. The remnants of the old wagon road ended at the edge of a deep channel, now impassable due to rare spring rain. Surrounded by fifty-plus miles of Sonoran Desert in any direction, Jennifer loaded her backpack with three 24 ounce bottles of water, a small Mini-Maglite, two Granny Smith apples, two whole grain bread and sliced roast beef sandwiches and a package of Twinkies in the predawn darkness. She’d decided the two mile walk to the old mine site would burn enough calories to afford the sweet. Arranging everything in the backpack to ensure the Twinkies survived undamaged, Jennifer added her camera bag and wiggled into the backpack straps.
Ready to go, she lifted her camera strap over her head, securing her prized Canon EOS 7D digital SLR camera with its 28-135mm kit lens close to her body. Jennifer treasured the 18 megapixel camera body and hated the kit lens. She preferred a longer, faster lens but her meager salary at the local newspaper prevented the purchase. As a beginning photographer/writer, copy person and maker of the morning coffee for anybody that wanted it, Jennifer’s skimpy paycheck barely covered her living expenses. She skipped meals and saved loose change to buy gas for her desert photography trips. So, the kit lens had to do, and she concentrated on composition, detail, and lighting to compensate. Her plan this morning included using the hike to catch a desert critter or two framed in her camera lens and reach the mine site as the morning sun created long shadows on the landscape. The old buildings would standout like lonely pillars of a past time.
Jennifer respected the desert. She knew the silent, seemingly unoccupied setting was filled with silently struggling vegetation hiding any number of ominous creatures. Snakes, scorpions, and an occasional tarantula lurked in the sparse grasses and green barked Palo Verdi brush while Giant Saguaro cactus stood like soldiers guarding her path, arms held out in welcome. She appreciated the Sonoran Desert, but had also learned enough about it to respect its unseen dangers.
Taller than average at five-foot-nine with a slim build, she enjoyed hiking in the cool of the morning and a thrill of anticipation rose inside her anticipating the coming adventure. She tied back her crimson hair with a cotton scarf to keep it out of her eyes. When she was younger she’d hated her carrot-top hair not only because of the color, but because it curled in tight ringlets making her look like a red-headed Shirley Temple. As she aged through puberty, her hair darkened and now in her mid-twenties it was more auburn than red, but still curly. Her feet protected by sensible hiking boots with Vibram soles, she wore rugged Levi pants and a boys Brushpopper shirt to protect herself from thorns. The single common trait of desert flora was sharp and sometimes barbed protrusions that could be wicked.
Jennifer dropped into the wash and climbed up the other side, impatient to follow the remnants of the old wagon road to the mine site and its abandoned structures. The old buildings would make a dramatic backdrop for her photographical creations. It was spring and the desert bloomed in proliferate color contrasting deeply with its normal earthy tones. Backpack laden, Jennifer hiked through the growing heat enjoying the smells and sensations of crimson Ocotillo blooms, white and yellow flowers peeking from the tops of Saguaros and watching the antics of geckos racing through the hot sandy soil. The desert thrilled her; its empty landscape from a distance contrasted oddly to its abundance close up.
The gravel-filled trail she followed climbed upward along the rocky contour of an ancient volcano cone, one of many that dotted the desert floor. Jennifer considered herself desert savvy, seasoned in a variety of flora and fauna that eked out an existence in sometimes severe conditions. Summer temperatures routinely reached one-hundred-twenty in the scarcely available shade. This day, Jennifer knew it would barely reach ninety. Her pace was slow and steady; conserving energy as the sun peaked over the horizon and began its daily travel across a cloudless azure sky. She also considered herself tough; once allowing a traveling sidewinder rattlesnake to slither across her booted ankles while she clicked her Canon following its movements.
By seven a.m., after an hour of walking, Jennifer reached the half-way point, a small saddle between two pillars of eroded volcanic chimneys that looked, from afar, like two stubby fingers reaching for the sky. From the saddle, she could see the mine a mile in the distance to the west and more Sonoran Desert below her extending miles to the South. Somewhere out in the blowing dust, marked only by rusting steel posts, but at least several miles away, lay the U.S. southern border with Mexico. The border was like a sieve, with a partially built fence, but mostly guarded by technology and under-manned Customs and Border Protection, the new umbrella agency including Border Patrol agents; a thin barrier to unrelenting illegal immigration and drug trafficking. The area around Jennifer was barren and far from any population center on the Mexican side and she hadn’t heard of any problems in this locale. Besides, she reasoned, the newscasters only showed activity at night. She had made this hike numerous times without seeing a soul.
Jennifer found a convenient rock outcrop and rested. She retrieved one of the bottles of water and surveyed the desert around her while she hydrated. Her eyes drank in the scene until a stately mule deer buck stepped out of the coulee below and looked up the hill trying to decide if Jennifer was a danger. Her heart skipped a beat in excitement as she slowly brought her Canon up, turned it on, dumped the lens cap and located the deer in her viewfinder. The buck’s heavy antlers framed in her lens, it stood for a couple of still shots before sensing peril. Jennifer followed its stiff-legged, bouncing escape shooting until the fleeing animal disappeared. Excited with her first shots of the day, she had reviewed the first five pictures when she saw what had made the deer bolt. Across the canyon, somewhat higher than where she sat, the picture included a flash of light, similar to the sun bouncing off a mirror. It startled her. She looked up from her camera and stared at the spot, certain that in her many trips to the old mine; she’d never before seen light reflected from the tightly massed boulder piles across the coulee. She brought up the camera with its less than perfect kit lens and swept the hillside, but the naked boulders revealed nothing, no movement, no reflection; only desert rock. Her mind was still puzzling when her head seemed to explode in pain and the ground came up and slapped her in the face. Her nose pressed in the desert sand, she didn’t hear the gunshot reverberation echoing in the canyon.
This excerpt and photography © Dave Folsom 2012
Politics as Usual
Politics as Usual – I haven’t been able to add much to this blog lately as an accident to my right hand left me unable to type in recent weeks. Other than confessing that my wife and children have unceremoniously awarded me the Dumb Ass Award of the Month, I leave it to your imagination as to what happened. However, now that I’ve reached the one finger typing stage of recovery, the asinine antics of Washington politics has forced me back to the keyboard.
For several months, we’ve been subjected to the denials that no one, it appears, in the Obama Administration knew that the ATF was allowing automatic weapons to migrate into drug dealer hands along our southern border, a project with the inane title of “Fast and Furious.” The reason for this “migration” was ostensibly to somehow assist in their efforts to prevent the movement of drugs across the border. Having little law enforcement background, I fail to see how this would work, but common sense tells me that the idea would probably reach a lofty level of stupidity. Nevertheless, government arrogance notwithstanding, the end result was the death of a CBP agent using one of these weapons.
Denials aside, it smacks of either lying on the part of some high level Administration officials or incompetence at a level beyond belief. This is the same government that hasn’t passed a budget in over two years, has run up a massive debt that now equals our GDP, isn’t concerned by the disappearance of a 500 million dollar loan to a failed solar panel company that was in deep financial trouble time the loan was approved, and allows Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac to award obscene bonuses to high level executives for doing a failing job. So, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. I could go on but my hand is getting sore.
On a similar note, the same agency that allowed the guns to disappear along our sieve-like Southern border, sent a warning letter to Alabama officials cautioning them against enforcement of a recent law passed in that state stiffening their illegal immigration regulations. If the Justice Department would use that same tenacity to secure our borders from not only illegal immigration, but drugs, terrorists and others whose purpose is to drain state’s coffers dry with entitlements, we’d be sympathetic.
Attorney General Holder will testify again today, I suppose to reiterate that he was clueless (which we can’t argue with) about Fast and Furious. We can’t wait to hear what he has to say.