"Shadowman"

"Welcome to Vietnam."

Drafted in 1966, nineteen-year-old Phillip I. Elkins (better known today as Señor Felipe, host of "LA Sounds with Sr. Felipe" on Chico's KZFR.org) little knew what awaited him. Years later, living in Chico, flashbacks would haunt his life and become a relationship wrecking-ball.

Elkins is writing a series of autobiographies that capture the eras (and errors) of his life. In "Shadowman" ($20 in paperback from Sr. Felipe Press, srfelipe.weebly.com; also for Amazon Kindle), Elkins tells the story of his life in Chico.

This time he writes in the third person, using his best friend's name as the central character, mixing in excerpts from earlier books, memories from childhood (where Elkins was known as "Cookie") and his year in Vietnam. 

Elkins notes that "Shadowman" was written "when I was having a pretty rough time with things. I was going through my second divorce, and I was letting go of a successful business that I had for several years, and I couldn't seem to find a suitable job."

PTSD leaves him with a "terrible short-term memory, I was explosively angry, and I was constantly exhausted. I felt confused and disorganized…." So the story of "Eddie Pacheco" and his disintegrating marriage to Peaches is dark indeed, especially after Peaches is sexually assaulted by a stranger.

Eddie's anger is palpable. But who to be angry with—an unknown assailant, some higher ups who promoted a purposeless war? After Vietnam he is physically whole but mentally wounded. In one horrific incident, "Eddie throws up again and again. He wanders off, seeing fire burning, smelling oil, gas, flesh, clothing, and bone all burning together. He retches some more. He feels dizzy and weak, and he falls to the ground and lays there, grateful that he's still alive but somehow wishing he wasn't."

Depressed in Chico, thinking of jumping off a cliff in Upper Park, he meets a woman who is about to do the same thing. The two are saved by a ranger with a surprising childhood connection to Eddie. Something begins to change in him; "the shadows are fading," he realizes. 

And there's an old childhood memory, pushing back against the void: "Lookie, lookie, lookie—Here comes Cookie!"

"Horsemanship And Life: A True Story"

For Chico State grad Michelle Scully, taking her horse Wish for an outing in 2011 would end up changing her life forever. Not sensing (or ignoring) the horse's hesitancy, Scully pushes Wish to lope. When a rabbit darts through Wish's legs the horse bolts; Scully is thrown down hard and her back broken. The story is told in "Broken: Tales Of A Titanium Cowgirl."

Eleven years later, in the midst of pandemic and the loss of many of her beloved animals, Scully takes stock in "Horsemanship And Life: A True Story" ($21.95 in paperback at barnesandnoble.com, published by Spinning Sevens Press). 

In 73 short chapters, each with a key quote and photograph, Scully has written a realistic and yet stubbornly optimistic book that will find a treasured place in a reader's heart.

She and husband Pat live on a multigenerational farm in Northern California. Scully notes that 11 is "77 in dog years … when people ask how long Pat and I've been married … it's been 196." 

"I would never have imagined the journey before me," she writes; "a journey of wreck, wonder, and recovery, filled with lessons learned from horses, dogs, birds, and even cats." In getting a second chance at life, she has "learned the beauty of brokenness; of how letting go of my expectations and in embracing vulnerability, I'd find a new way to live…."

Interspersed throughout the book is the tale of Scully's new horse, True. "His head looks like it was dipped in warm milk chocolate, and his body explodes into roan and white and blue…." But True has a mind of his own. 

"One of the most transformative horsemanship lessons I've (slowly) learned is work with the horse before you. Not the horse of your expectations, the horse of your imagination, not the horse in your story, but the actual one you're with, in real-time."

And when the world seems too overwhelming, Scully offers words that came to her while doing chores: "Fire drought politics hate/ They're beyond my purview and beyond anything I can change, but I can water this tree./ I can save crickets./ I can dust around spiders./ I can pray."

"Camp Fire: Day One – 'Rescue People And Don't Get Killed'"

In floods or fires, those charged with protection of the public are the ones moving toward the disaster, often at the risk of their own lives. William "Bill" Sager, former Butte County Fire Chief, now retired from CAL FIRE and living in Redding with his wife, Karen, a volunteer at the information call center during the Camp Fire, tells the story of the tragic fire through the eyes of those CAL FIRE personnel who were in the midst.

"Camp Fire: Day One – 'Rescue People And Don't Get Killed'" ($25 in paperback, published independently through Citygate Associates, available at Barnes & Noble) draws on more than fifty interviews.

In a letter to me, Sager notes that he wrote his book after talking with Incident Commander John Messina on the second day of the fire. Getting the interviews was an emotional process. Firefighters rescued others even as their own homes were burning. "Yet they persevered." Four years later, he says, "many are retired, some on physical disability, some on psychological disability."

Several of the fifty-plus chapters provide overviews of the fire and the Butte College staging area, but most focus on first-hand accounts beginning with Beth Bowersox, dispatcher and "call taker" at the Emergency Command Center, whose responsibility was to name the fire. 

As the severity of the fire became apparent, engines, strike teams, dozers, and air support were all activated. Battalion Chief Tony Brownell was there that first day. As Sager writes, Clark Road "was packed with people trying to escape the fire … he proceeded north to Wagstaff to check on the Kmart parking lot situation. Between two and three hundred cars were jammed in there. … It was a TRA" (temporary refuge area).

Chapters, many containing maps and photographs, detail dramatic rescues as well as tragic losses and the extraordinary interconnection of the stories. What emerges is how often those on the scene had to make split-second decisions to save lives, part of their CAL FIRE training. 

Some who evacuated that day can read, perhaps for the first time, what was going on in their own neighborhood immediately after leaving. 

Sager's work here is simply indispensable.

"The Oosik"

Chicoan Scott Nitzel writes me that his true calling is as an "Earth Explorer who has now journeyed throughout 83 countries, including 17 new ones since Covid first arrived." His experiences provide background to a phantasmagoric novel about "a commonly known relic not only to the Inuits but also the general population." It met with success at Barnes & Noble book signings in Alaska, where the story begins.

The relic resembles a thick walking stick, a little over three feet long, "sleek and smooth with a creamy eggshell color base with swirls of caramelized deep orange … a shiny relic of desire." Specifically, it's a "penis bone from the gigantic, and long ago extinct Arctic Walrus." Inuits call it "The Oosik" ($19.95 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle).

Framed as a historical investigation for the Journal of American Rare Objects, the story traces how the Oosik becomes a "spiritual relic" once artisans etch various images, including a "female face with antlers, which to them was Pukimna, the mother and goddess overseeing the reincarnation of revered walrus and caribou."

The first known trade of the Oosik comes in Western Alaska in 1870 and its perceived value excites thieves and charlatans and even pricks the conscience of a few, before making its winding way back home in 2017. It changes hands again and again, and Nitzel's account of coincidence, comeuppance and weaponization as the Oosik travels the world is enticingly bizarre.

Take laborer Sanford Tinius who brings the Oosik to Mount Rushmore in 1934 where he is assigned jackhammer work on the back of the monument. He imagines the Oosik along with America's "most important paperwork" would reside in a secret chamber "for a future society to discover."

Years later Seoras Surratt, high on peyote in northwest New Mexico, decides to become a cult leader and appropriates the unattended Oosik; but soon it's "placed into the trunk of a mint condition Corvette and quickly driven away" to Arizona where it remains for almost 43 years.

After that, as a group of five friends travel the world exploring religious relics, with astonishing developments, the Oosik eventually arrives home in Alaska--a notable expression of authorial prestidigitation.

"Spending The Winter: A Poetry Collection"

Time to think about time. Joseph ("Jody") Bottum, poet, essayist, and Director of Dakota State University's Classics Institute out of Madison, South Dakota, points to time more than six dozen times in "Spending the Winter: A Poetry Collection" ($13 in paperback from St. Augustine's Press; also for Amazon Kindle).

Bottum's book appears in a 2022 list of most memorable books of the year by former Paradise resident John Wilson, editor of the journal Books and Culture: A Christian Review for all of its 21 years of storied history. 

The poem which gives the book its title observes that "Time's in arrears/ Crankier each frozen morning,/ The water heater groans in warning/ That it will soon give up the ghost./ Nothing lasts in a winter post." Still, the silent snow is worth listening to:

"The mind in winter may find a cleanness,/ A keening wind to clear the meanness/ Of skinflint soul and the chronic day,/ A wind to tear vain thoughts away./ Self-concern, self-esteem,/ Numbed and muted—till we seem/ Nothing but a snow-capped field:/ Draped in winter, smoothed and healed."

Bottum's accessible poems rejoice in form, rhyme, wordplay. In "Reading by Osmosis," the poet can hardly hide the sarcasm: "Percy B. Shelley and Machiavelli/ And Norman Vincent Peale--/ We've never tried opening one of their books./ We know them by their feel.// Does reading seem boring? Does reading seem hard?/ Does reading seem too precocious?/ Just pick up a book and give it a twirl./ You'll learn it by osmosis." … "We bobble, bounce, and throw them./ We never even look./ Osmosis means we know them without opening a book."

For Bottum, winter is not about being snowbound in time, unable to move, but a recognition that even though the world is shrouded in division and death, "Easter Morning" has come, will come, and has overcome:

"Time," the poet writes, "Reaches forward, hungry for winter,/ And what will save my daughter when even/ Hope is caught in the ancient snare?/ A cold fear waits—till all that had fallen,/ All that was lost, rudely broken,/ Crossed in love, comes rising, rising,/ On the breath of the new spring air."