Jadbalja's Tales Proposal

8/8/2019 Jadbalja's Tales Proposal

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JADBALJAS TALES

JOURNEYs IN SEARCH OF WHO WE

REALLY ARE

By JADBALJA

Mark A. Woods

1570 W Tacoma St, Hernando, Florida 34442

352-527-0733 [email protected]


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OVERVIEW

What do strangling a wounded kangaroo with your bare hands in six feet of water and

pressing a frozen cube of paw-paw juice to the lips of a dying old man who once would have

shot you if he could have gotten away with it have to do with discovering who we really are?

How does burning a human arm in an old incinerator relate to meditating with a one-hundred-

pound wombat?

Jadbalja invites you to share his encounters with an old whore in the outback of Northern

Queensland, a medicine man in Southern Africa who administers psychedelic enemas, and a

Grenadian fisherman named Piece of Pork who teaches Jadbalja and his young wife how to fish

for ocean monsters with five-hundred-pound-test hand lines.

Come live with him on a nineteen sixties hippie commune, put your hands on his as he

guides the hands of a severely autistic little girl who learns to poke herb cuttings into pots of soil

and discovers that even she has power. Feel the adrenaline rush as you are nearly smashed to

pieces on the rocks of an uninhabited island in the Caribbean Sea when your three-hundred-yard-

long gill net gets caught in a riptide at midnight. Be a jackaroo in New South Wales, a dam

builder in a tiny mountain kingdom in Africa, and the smallest nursery vendor to the biggest Big

Box, Home Depot.

Share a young African boys alternative circumcision school as Jadbalja introduces him,

and you when you read his science stories, to the secrets and wonders of the birth and emergence

of the universe, stars, galaxies, life, and us. Share the last days of four old people struggling with

the loss of their power as they face the void.

We are at the tipping point of human history. Unless those of us living today can discover

who we really are and accept the responsibility that comes with that knowledge, we will put an

end to the wonderful cosmic experiment that we embody on this tiny, wonderful world of ours.

We must evolve our spirit and consciousness until we know in our bones that each of us is

something sacred trying to know itself. My memoir,Jadbaljas Tales, is about that discovery.

There are many books being published today urging us to discover the universal wisdom

that runs beneath the mundane fabric of our ordinary lives. It is urgent that a critical number of

us make this discovery before it is too late for mankind to unite in a higher, shared maturity.


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Hopefully, such wisdom will take us to the next step on our individual and collective journeys in

time to save ourselves. But most of these books are written for different audiences than the

majority of ordinary people who have the power to change the world, if only they can discover

and apply that power.

My book is written in a voice that I hope will resonate with the millions of us who feel so

small and powerless that we try to escape into fantasy worlds of extreme sports, extreme

makeovers, and American Idols. It is meant to be a book for everyone (or at least those who are

not too put off by its naked portrayal of a somewhat unconventional life), but especially for those

of us who are losing our true identities in the quagmire of illusion of our supersized

exceptionalism.

Jadbaljas Tales is about living your life with all of the intensity you are capable of. It is

about allowing yourself to discover discovery as you live your own tales. It will make you laugh

and cry and wonder and think. It is meant to point the way toward who you really are. In the

process, you may lose your desire to be a finalist on Survivorand instead come to discover and

use your power to help us all to survive.

WHO IS JADBALJA? WHY I AM UNIQUELY QUALIFIED TO WRITE THIS BOOK

I had just turned nineteen when I bought a one-way ticket to Australia, with only twenty

dollars left over when I stepped out of the plane. For the next two years, I bared my soul and my

body to whatever new experiences and adventures presented themselves. I supported my

searching with employment as a migrant laborer, ranch hand, tin miner, railroad worker, and

hospital orderly, each job an adventure in itself.

Jadbalja is the name with which we christened our ancient, big-bellied, lap-plank fishing

boat when my wife, Sheila, and I became fishermen in a tiny village on the Caribbean island of

Grenada. Our fellow fishermen then christened me Jadbalja, too. For a year we lived with, and

more than once nearly died with, the people of this incredible culture. We lived with them on

their terms, submerging ourselves in their way of life and living within their economic

boundaries. (We had to; we were broken to ass for most of the time.)

In the nineteen sixties, Sheila and I started a hippy commune on a hundred- acre farm.

We experimented with it for two years while I fulfilled my Conscientious Objector alternative


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military service as Director of Horticultural Training at a center for the mentally handicapped.

These two simultaneous experiences somewhat mirrored each other, in a Jungian sort of way.

Twenty years in both retail and wholesale nursery businesses, with eight years living and

working closely with poor farmers in the tiny African country of Lesotho as horticultural

extension agents between these two (ad)ventures, yielded many insights into the interdependence

of people and the natural world.

I was raised by a caring and loving scientist who taught me from a very early age how to

question and search, and who encouraged me to quest deeply into the silence and the spaces

between my thoughts. I was blessed with a mother who believed I had the intelligence to find my

own way, and who was always there to reel me in by the same ropes I sometimes used to nearly

hang myself.

Jadbaljas Tales is the story of my dance to the beat of my own unique drummer. To

some people, my journey may seem too unguided and unconventional, without a well-grounded

career with proper vesting and tenure. I would say to these people, I have felt the pulse of the

heart of darkness and looked head on into the light of the sacred. Im no guru, but I offer you this

look into who I am in the hope that you might let go of yourself for a little while, look out at the

world through Jadbaljas eyes, and maybe see who you are, too.

COMPETITION/COMPLEMENTARITY

Jadbaljas Tales shares many common elements with recent memoirs of journeys of self-

discovery: travel in exotic lands, immersion into different cultures, close personal encounters

with a wide swath of people not cast in conventional molds. All of these memoirs are stories

about learning who we are by opening our hearts and our minds to other cultures and

perspectives. All are tales of adventures of the soul as well as exotic travelogues.

AlthoughJadbaljas Tales will probably be shelved in the same location as other travel

memoirs, it differs significantly from all of them. Of the thirty-six stories in my book, nineteen

take place in exotic lands. In addition, there are nine stories of personal exploration set in the

U.S.; four stories dealing with lifes greatest adventure of all, the passage into death ; and five

science stories that provide, in everyday language, a cosmological context without which the

question ofWho are we, really? cannot be fully answered.


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Jadbaljas Tales is in no way preachy, but the book ends with a call to all of us to wake

up, live our own tales as intensely as possible, and to discover and take responsibility for who we

really are.

Similar Memoirs

Zaatar Days, Henna Nights: Adventures, Dreams, and Destinations Across the Middle East,

Maliha Masood, Seal Press, 2007.

Maliha Masood buys a one-way ticket to the world, wanting to escape from routine and

find new rhythms in a world that would reawaken my senses. Masood explores her Islamic

roots and travels across the Middle East on a one-year expedition of self-discovery and

misadventure.Zaatar Days is a memoir of a young woman with a relentless curiosity, openness

to all people, and a penchant for getting herself into and out of one sticky situation after another.

She and Jadbalja have much in common in spite of their differences in background and

the points of demarcation of their journeys.Jadbaljas Tales spans most of his adult lifetime.

Zaatar Days encompasses but a single year of discovery in the life of a young person with most

of her life ahead of her. Both books are stories of growth from within as these two explorers go

about searching for their identities in unconventional places with people who march to very

different drummers.

Whatever You Do, Dont Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide, Peter Allison, Lyons

Press, 2007.

Allison left his native Australia at age nineteen to pursue his dream of backpacking

around Africa: a one-year adventure that has stretched into twelve years. His memoir is a

collection of stories of his incredible experiences as a safari guide in Botswana. Allison, who

knew nothing about the animals of Africa when he arrived, makes mistake after mistake. He tells

his stories with lively humor and, like Jadbalja, he relates the lessons he learns without any

pretensions or condescension, and without getting in your face.


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Although very different books in their scopes, Jadbalja also leaves home at the age of

nineteen and starts his journeys in Australia. The adventures of both young men share many of

the same flavors.Jadbaljas Tales continues on, spanning fifty years and three continents, and

builds towards more encompassing conclusions. Im sure both authors would love to sit around a

campfire with a cold beer and swap stories until the sun comes up. I think the readers of both

books would like this, too.

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia ,

Elizabeth Gilbert, Penguin Books/Viking Adult, 2006.

Seven million copies sold, a movie with Julia Roberts playing the author, two thousand

one hundred and sixty reviews on Amazon, thirty percent of which are scathing and sixty-five

percent of which are raving. Elizabeth Gilberts one-year saga in pursuit of intense enjoyment,

deep spiritual experience, and a modest dose of romance (which led to marriage after the book

was published) is as controversial as it is delightful and popular. It does for the genre what

Avatardid for 3D movies.

Jadbaljas Tales will not feel uncomfortable on the same shelf asEat Pray Love. Their

respective authors are different ages, have different (though not inharmoniously juxtaposed)

voices, and the two books encompass different time spans. Both are about searching for who we

are with souls and bodies bared and all senses primed.

Yak Butter Blues: A Tibetan Trek of Faith, Brandon Wilson, PilgrimsTales, 2005.

Winner of an Independent Publisher Book Award and a first book, Yak Butter Blues is

about one couples incredible six-week, six-hundred-fifty-mile trek across Tibet. Their story is

riveting and unique and, though in many ways different from the fifty years of journeys in

Jadbaljas Tales, there are many common elements that readers who enjoyed Yak Butter Blues

will find and enjoy in Jadbalja's Tales.

Look, you two, I dont think this has ever been done before...The ultimate beauty

oftraveling deliberately...was the opportunity to observe and wallow in the minute details of

everyday life surrounding them (quotes from Yak Butter). . Wilson calls his trek a


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walking meditation. Like Jadbalja and his mate when they lived in Grenada and Africa, the

Wilsons find commonality with the Tibetans as they are welcomed into Tibetan homes and

culture.

Yak Butter Blues is a snapshot of one life-changing journey.Jadbaljas Tales is more of a

full-length film about the evolution of a life perspective. Both books are about discovering who

we are.

Somebodys Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa , Tanya Shaffer, Vintage Press,

2003.

The San Francisco Chronicle called Somebodys Heart Is Burningone of the best books

of 2003. Playwright, performer, artist, and author, Tanya Shaffer says of her transformative year

in Africa, as a traveler my goal is to enter into the culture I visit as deeply as possible. She

speaks for all memoirists who write about their searches for their own identity by opening

themselves up to the identities of others.

Shaffer writes in her bio on her website, such exploration affords us the opportunity to

see ourselves through fresh eyes, widening our perspectives and deepening our understanding of

our own role in the global narrative. I would love to put this quote on the back cover of

JadbaljasTales. Maybe Ill ask her if I can.

Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World, Rita Golden Gelman, Three Rivers

Press, 2002.

At the age of forty-eight, Rita Gelman sold all of her possessions and took off on a

fifteen-year journey to see the world. Like Jadbalja, she totally immerses herself in the cultures

she explores: Mexico, the Galapagos, Bali and New Guinea, Israel, Nicaragua, Thailand, and

New Zealand. Gelman started her journeys at the age when Jadbalja ends his overseas

adventures, but both memoirs share a common theme, which Gelman describes as discovering

that we share a core with all peoples that makes us human. She has recently published an

anthology of stories of cross-culture travel and connections from forty different authors, and she

is currently launching an organization to encourage young people to take gap years of foreign


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travel and exploration between high school and college. Our two books complement and

reinforce each other, and appeal to similar audiences of people of all ages who want to redefine

themselves in terms of our common humanity.

Encounters: A Memoir:Relationship Journeys from Around the World, Sam Oglesby,

BookSurge Publishing, 2010.

Encountersspans Oglesbys lifetime of searching, beginning in the nineteen forties

segregated South and ending with his post-retirement years in the south Bronx. Most of the

stories deal with his cross-cultural experiences, encounters, and friendships as a young man

living in Europe, and as a career diplomat in Third World countries in Asia.

Jadbaljas Tales differs from Oglesbys memoir in several respects. Jadbaljas exotic

travels were in Australia, the West Indies, and Africa. It deals less with seldom examined topics

and issues (to quote Oglesby) and focuses more directly on extraordinary encounters with

ordinary people. Jadbalja marries young and lives most of his tales with his wife; Oglesby,

who is gay, experiences his tales from a somewhat different perspective. The stories in both

books are about journeys of self-discovery and personal growth. I think each author would find a

soul brother in the other.

THE CHAPTERS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE...1

PYTHONS, PIGS, AND THE WATER BUFFALO.. 3

THE DREAM...17

THE JOURNEY BEGINS...22

JUDY...25.

THEROO....30

FOSTER CLARKS CUSTARD POWDER AND THE WOMBAT36


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GLASSES IN THE FIREGRASS........47

HOW I BURNED A HUMAN ARM..53

GIANT TOADS AND THE OLD WHORE................60

BETWEEN AUSTRALIA AND GRENADA.68

TRUE LOVE.....70

A NAKED LUNCH AND PURPLE HORSES....77

EVEN UNTO THE LEAST OF THESE ...84

THE WINDWARD ISLANDS .. 89

JADBALJA AND THE NET....90

GUISSANT...96

SHEILAS OCEAN GAR...102

BEERSNEARLY LOSES HIS HEAD..108

THE TUNA'S EYEBALL..113

THE BUS STOP PLANT SHOP....120

SHARONSGARDEN...125

HOEING BEFORE TEN O'CLOCK CAUSES HAIL...132

LEBOLLO..........138

MOKOROANE..145

WILL...151

THE SHEEP'S ASSHOLE...158

GETTING OLD IS NOT FOR SISSIES.........163

SIX MONTHS TO LIVE............................................... .166

IT TAKES SO LONG TO DIE......172

JOE..,..179

MOMMA....188

INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE STORIES.197

STORIES SCIENTISTS TELL..201

THE LITTLE BIG STORY........205


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UNTIL DUST DO WE PART.......210

THE BIG LITTLE STORY...215

THE WHIRLPOOL....221

BIG BOXES....226

MONGO.....231

WHO ARE WE, REALLY?.......................................................................................................................................235

FUZZBUT, JASON, AND MR. METHUSELAH GO TO PLANET HOPALOT...241


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Chapter Summaries

I have been telling my stories for fifty years, adding new ones to my repertoire as I lived

them. I dont know why I never wrote them down before. Maybe I was afraid that if I committed

the old ones to paper, somehow new ones would stop happening. A chance first meeting with my

initial editor, Belea Keeney, resulted in my finally putting pen to paper (I cant type worth a

damn).

I want to sell as many copies ofJadbaljas Tales as I can. I was tempted to name it

Jadbaljas Tales, Volume One. I have more stories inside me and loads of sage advice and

poignant social commentary. I realize I have to hook em first. Maybe I should leave poignant

social commentary and sage advice to more qualified commentators and sages, but I have a lot

more I want to say. (I have outlines for thirty chapters of Volume Two).

I understand that at least half, probably more, of the publishing game is about making

money in a competitive and changing market. I have no problem with this. I was in business

myself for many years, and know something about marketing and survival. I also know that I

know very little about the book market, other than that it is extremely competitive and far

smaller than the volume of would-be product.

I am quite willing to work with agents/editors to shape and arrange my stories into the

most marketable form they can be. I am reasonably thick-skinned and flexible. But I dont want

to sacrifice my Selfjust to sell my book, and I dont want to lose my voice to the pen of the

marketplace. Im actually very quick to correct my mistakes when someone points them out to

me. All but the most fun errors of my ways, anyway.

The chapters are short, five to twelve pages, and each story could stand alone. I have laid

them out in more or less chronological order, with a few transitional pieces to get the reader from

here to there. Im open to a different format if this works better.

Each chapter is preceded with a full page, black and white collage of one to six pictures

from the actual scene or setting. These period photos serve to add a touch of authenticity to what

are sometimes unbelievable (but true) mini-sagas, and they provide a visual anchor to the stories.

Nearly all are photos I took myself. A few are stock photos I have purchased rights to reproduce

half a million times.


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Pythons, Pigs, and the Water Buffalo

This is an action hook. Jadbalja, wet behind the ears but undaunted by any challenges

he might encounter, is leaving Darwin, the capital of the Australian Northern Territory, on a

seventeen-hundred-mile hitch to Cairns at the northern end of Queensland. Before he even gets

out of town, he has an encounter with a twenty-three-foot python in a private zoo. Over the next

five days, he catches rides with several different Aborigines and three beautiful French girls who

are also on a discovery tour of Australia.

The first night, camped beside the road in the middle of nowhere, he is kept awake most

of the night by the blood-curdling squeals, grunts, and oinks of wild pigs. When day breaks,

armed with his British commando knife, he treks into the bush to deal with the offending hogs.

On day two, while showing off to the French girls, he is treed by an angry water buffalo. (You

would be angry, too, if someone pelted you on the ass with rocks.)

He spends the next three days stranded in the middle of another nowhere, and is rescued

by a group of Aborigines who invite him to their Saturday night party, replete with barbequed

kangaroo meat, a keg of beer, and stories of the Dreamtime.

The Dream

His father tells him stories each night while his mother times the telling and his

playmates have adventures outside, catching lightning bugs in peanut butter jars but missing out

on the wonderful adventures Jadbalja is having.

But after sleep finally claims him, a dark, mysterious dream, which recurs throughout his

childhood and into his early teens, possesses his consciousness and takes away his identity. He

awakens, not knowing his parents or who he is. He is lost in a vibrating whirlpool without form

and filled with sound that is not sound. The effects of the dream often last for half an hour or

more. The little boy screams at the night, Who am I?

Judy


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A brief introduction takes Jadbalja from high school to Australia, where he arrives with

twenty dollars, a lump in his throat, and an erection. He finds a job as a jackaroo (an apprentice

ranch hand) in the outback, west of the Blue Mountains.

The three-thousand-acre sheep and cattle station presents the just-turned-nineteen seeker

with one adventure after another. He learns how to milk a cow, ride a horse, drive a tractor, and

castrate calves and lambs.

Judy is a three-legged roo dog, trained to muster kangaroos during the periodic

kangaroo slaughters necessary to keep their population down. Judy cant chase roos anymore,

but she is proficient at killing chickens. After an especially bloody massacre, she is finally

sentenced to death by Dianne, the station owners wife. Jadbalja, who has come to love the little

dog, is drafted to carry out the execution.

The Roo

An unusually heavy period of rainfall transforms the dusty paddocks into lush pastures

with a profusion of fragrant-blooming acacia trees. Jadbalja gets a wild hair and decides he wants

to shoot a kangaroo. Allen, his boss, takes him out on a Sunday afternoon, and armed with a

semi-automatic twenty-two rifle, the boy wounds a big buckroo, who leaps a fence miles from

any gate.

Jadbalja chases the animal on foot, wounding him several times more. The torn and

bleeding kangaroo finds a shallow, windmill-fed pond and takes refuge in the water. Jadbalja

puts down his gun, takes off his clothes, and swims out to finish the job by hand so that the roo

wont sink and rot in the dam.

Foster Clarks Custard and the Wombat

Jadbalja and his new friend Dahl quit their jobs picking apples on the Tasman Peninsula,

hitchhike to Hobart, charter a plane, and are at Melaleuca, a beautiful valley in the uninhabited

southwest of Tasmania, by lunchtime the next day.

After the first month in their Shangri-la, they run out of food and have to subsist on

vanilla custard and mealy-bug-infested oatmeal left in their tin shack two years before by a


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government survey team. They get into a fight over dividing the days ration of Foster Clarks

Custard, and Dahl goes off alone to the very southwest tip of the island. Dahl has a mental

breakdown and is taken out by the crew of a lobster fishing boat that stops for a day at their

camp.

Jadbalja, living entirely alone for six weeks, begins practicing his zazen in earnest. One

day while meditating naked, sitting on a soft vermillion sward of moss high on the banks of a

tidal river, he has a transcendent experience with a huge wombat who joins him in his

meditation.

Glasses in the Firegrass

Dahl is gone. Jadbalja has been alone for over a month, and he decides to climb a nearby

mountain. Making it to the top by midday (it wasnt much of a mountain as mountains go), he

gives a Tarzan yell of victory.

On the way back to his shack, he decides to explore a patch of virgin temperate rain

forest. Within the forest, he comes upon an area of horizontal scrub, a strange tree that grows up

six or eight feet, and then leans horizontally and grows some more before growing up again. This

creates of false forest floor six feet or more above the real floor below.

Coming to a patch of impenetrable firegrass, he gives another Tarzan yell and leaps for a

vine that will carry him over the obstacle. In the process, he loses his balance and plunges

headfirst into the firegrass, and his glasses fall into the gloom below. He struggles to break free

and follows his glasses onto the stinky, mushroom-covered, critter-infested, real forest floor.

How I Burned a Human Arm

The setting changes to the Hospital of Last Resort in Cairns, in northern Queensland,

where Jadbalja finds employment as a hospital orderly, even though his only previous hospital

experience is having his tonsils out when he was five years old.

He ministers to the senile and abandoned old people, who finger-paint on the walls with

the only medium available to them. He assists with postmortems, and burns in an old incinerator

at the back of the hospital parking lot organs and body parts removed during surgery.


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Beautiful, almost-a-doctor Keethy Blum, whom he helps to administer enemas to the

bowel-afflicted old people, agrees to go on a date with him to Green Island on the Great Barrier

Reef. The budding romance ends tragically when Jadbalja foolishly dislodges a large nest of

leaf-cutter ants from the tree directly above their picnic blanket, releasing a shower of pissed-off

ants all over Jadbalja and down the top of Keethys sexy bikini.

Giant Toads and the Old Whore

Keethy becomes a doctor, and Jadbalja takes a job as a fettler (track maintenance

crewman) on the railroad about thirty miles south of Cairns. The isolated stretch of track they

maintain is surrounded by sugarcane fields, rain forest, and not much else.

He rooms with Bing, a feisty, practical-joking native from Thursday Island. Once every

fortnight when they get paid, the crew heads for a weekend of debauchery in the seedier parts of

Cairns. Shoddy bars and blood sports are the order of the day.

One night, in retribution for having the shithouse pushed over while he was in it, Jadbalja

tethers a giant cane toad to the steps of their hut and calls barefoot Bing outside. The

superstitious islander is only temporarily deterred from his practical jokes.

Jadbalja, Bing, Helmut ( a giant from Germany), and Lenny, an Italian ex-carnival freak-

show performer who can eat beer glasses and pass big needles through his neck, all go out

together after work to the one (and only one-woman) whorehouse within miles.

Hop on, Luv, you only got five minutes.

True Love

Back in the U.S., Jadbalja finally goes to college. Three of them, actually. He gets

married and gets drafted. This is the story of how he meets his soul mate, Sheila, with whom he

lives the rest of the stories in this book.

They are broke, secretly married, and have to continue living with their respective parents

until Jadbalja can graduate and get a job.


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Grandma almost uncovers what is going on when she descends to Sheilas apartment in

the basement, forcing the not-yet-a-groom to hide naked under a small table with a big

tablecloth.

Sheilas father is an ex-cop with a bad temper and a loaded thirty-eight under his pillow.

When Sheila has a miscarriage, Jadbalja has to tell both sets of parents that they have new

children. Sheilas folks are not at all welcoming to their new son,but Jadbaljas parents takethe

newlyweds in with open arms.

Even Unto The Least of These

Jadbalja is granted conscientious objector status and finds a job as Director of

Horticultural Training at a center for the mentally handicapped. He develops a plant-growing

program designed so that every student can succeed. His charges, many of them severely

retarded, discover a new power in their lives as they interact with plants. Jadbalja and his kids

grow together.

During the two-year stint at the center, Jadbalja and Sheila establish a hippie commune

on a hundred-acre farm in redneck territory, near the Chesapeake Bay.

A Naked Lunch and Purple Horses

Two years on a hippie commune. Impossible to describe adequately with a few

stereotypes. We make love and we make war (on each other). We raise turkeys and pigs and

horses. We have a big vegetable garden in which only the initiated (the ones who actually

worked in it) can find the produce amongst the weeds.

We have turkey dinners in the nude, drink copious amounts of cheap beer and Boone's

Farm Apple Wine, and occasionally drop acid. It is a Cirque du Soul. Do we grow in spiritual

stature? Do we transcend the Veil? Do we merge our beings into one community of love? Fuck,

no. But we try.

Jadbalja and the Net


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We are in Grenada for a week before we realize they are speaking English. We had sold

everything we owned of any value (which wasnt much), and told our friends we would see them

in one to twenty years. Our intention is to work our way through the Windward Islands, spending

six months to a year immersed in each culture along the way.

After two months, we are running out of money and have not found jobs. We are denied

work permits because Sheila refuses to spend a weekend with the Premier, so we decide to

become fishermen, which does not require a work permit.

We spend the last of our money on an ancient boat built for smuggling rum and a huge,

three-hundred-yard-long gill net. Then we discover that Grenadians dont fish with gill nets and

dont know how to. Neither do we, but that does not stop us from trying.

Guissant

The gill net, mounted one Sunday by the best net-mounters on The Lance, the fishing

village where we spend the next year, is a total, life-threatening disaster. None of the net-

mounters know how a gill net is supposed to be mounted, and all of them are drunk by midday.

Guissant is a tiny, uninhabited pile of rocks rooted in the sea, next to another tiny island

called Isle le Caille. Captain Jimbo knows we can capture a boatload of fish if we set the net in

the shallow water between the two islands and just wait for the tide to change.

What neither he nor we know is that when a tide pushes its way between two obstructing

land masses in shallow water, the resulting waves grow to over twenty feet tall in a matter of

minutes. Our net is seized by a force no human hands can pull against. The jagged rocks of

Guissant are so close they filled the sky. Jadbalja finally tries to start the tiny outboard motor in

the hopes of turning our boat with the tide. The shear pin in the propeller shaft breaks.

Sheilas Ocean Gar

Womens Lib has not yet come to Grenada. Women dont fish. In fact, it is bad luck to let

one of them in your boat. But Sheila is not going to stay ashore while I go to sea and have all the

fun.


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Piece of Pork is one of the few fishermen on The Lance who will risk his life at sea with

a woman present. He teaches us how to fish with five-hundred-pound-test hand lines that could

cut your fingers off from the friction when a three-hundred-pound yellowfin tuna takes your line

and runs with it.

On our second day out, Sheila hooks a fifty-pound sailfish.

Feel the focking fish and dont be in a focking hurry, girl, Pork screams at her.

Sheila does it all correctly. When the fish turns and starts to run, she jerks hard and sets

the hook. She braces hard and hauls the beast to the side of the boat. I grab its beak and pull the

fish over the gunnel, and Pork smashes its head with his bootoo, a club made for that purpose.

No one refuses to fish with Sheila after that.

The Tunas Eyeball

This story is a collage made up of a cross section of the wonderful, animated personalities

on The Lance. Bigs, the three-hundred-pound fish vender who (rumor had it) I am cavorting

with, threatens to cut off you focking little white cock and put it in you focking whitebamsee

when I compete with her to buy flying fish.

You meet Flour Balls, an ancient, tattered old man with swollen, infected, blue feet, and

Too Too Pride, who has an eighteen-inch, half moon scar on his back put there by his drinking

buddy, who has a matching scar Pridey had given him. You meet Stressman, the bar owner who

quotes Marcus Aurelius daily, and Turner, who can bray exactly like a jackass if you buy him a

rum, and many other unique and wonderful human beings.

The story ends with a rum-inspired faceoff with Monte, the six foot, seven inch village

bully, who taunts Jadbalja and Sheila one too many times.

Beers Nearly Loses His Head

The last Grenada story takes you out to sea with Jadbalja, Piece of Pork, and Beers. A

school of birds, screeching and diving onto a shoal of small fish being attacked by a school of

huge yellow fin tuna, engulfsJadbalja (the boat), and we hook two tuna almost simultaneously.


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Beers long line takes a turn around his neck as he tries to maneuver it in front of him, and in less

than a second he is nearly decapitated.

At the same time, Pork hooks another tojan (tuna). We are rich, and it s only two days

before Christmas. Sheila and I prepare a huge feast, but Pork and Queen are an hour and a half

late. I go to their tiny shack by the sea and find them screaming obscenities at each other. Pork is

beheading the surviving remnants of Queens chicken flock, which was ravished the night before

by chicken-buggering boys.

The tragi-comedy resolves itself in laughter, and we stuff ourselves with roasted

breadfruit and coconut chicken wings while we all get drunk on soursop and rum milkshakes.

The Bus Stop Plant Shop

This is a short transition chapter that covers our eight-year venture into the retail plant

store business. Enriching no one but the owner of the shopping center, and tired of saying, Yes,

maam, can I help you? to endless plant murderers, we begin to feel like there are better ways to

save the world than bringing affluent Americans and wondrous plants together. We join the

Peace Corps, and are only one day away from leaving for two years in Western Samoa.

Sharons Garden

We are in Seattle at the end of the lengthy and convoluted Peace Corps screening

program. The plane for Samoa leaves in the morning. That night, I get a call from my mother

informing me that my father has just been operated on for colon cancer. We delay our departure

and fly to Phoenix.

When I learn that he has a large and fatal metastasis in his liver, we cancel our Peace

Corps plans and spend the next three years in Phoenix, defying the medical establishment and

trying every non-lunatic-fringe alternative cancer therapy I can learn about.

Dads tumor doesnt grow,but his Parkinsons disease progresses relentlessly. At the end

of our third year, he calls us to him and tells us we have done enough and must now get on with

our lives. We rejoin the Peace Corps and end up in Lesotho, a little, independent mountain

kingdom surrounded by the Republic of South Africa. The story of my fathers fight against his


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cancer is told in more detail in Six Months to Live, the section ofJadbaljas Tales which deals

with old age and dying.

Hoeing Before Ten OClockCauses Hail

The Basotho people have a large and rich repertoire of customs and routines that are

deeply rooted in their unique folk beliefs. Ntate Mokete, one of our more progressive farmers,

refuses to hoe his weed-filled vegetable plot in the morning because, as everyone knows, hoeing

in the morning causes hail, and its too hot to hoe in the afternoon. I make him hoe. The hail

comes the next day and turns his cabbages to coleslaw, but leaves his neighbors plots

untouched.

His pump is stolen a few weeks later. He goes to his family (witch) doctor, who

administers to him a psychedelic enema that causes him to hallucinate. He sees on the walls of a

darkened hut the re-enactment of the crime, like a movie being played on a screen, revealing the

protagonists and the location of his pump. What can I say? Building trust requires respect for

other peoples belief systems. Especially if maybe they know more than you do.

Lebollo

We live in Lesotho for eight years, working with Basotho farmers to establish little truck

farms and school and communal gardens, as well as on other projects related to rural

development and training programs for Peace Corps volunteers, extension agents, and farmers.

Lebollo takes place while we are still Peace Corps volunteers. Motlalepula is a young

boy who kind of adopts us and helps us in our demonstration gardens. He is twelve years old

when he comes to me and asks if I think lebollo, or circumcision school, is a good thing. He

wants to be a scientist and not a herdboy, which is the fate of most boys graduating from the

traditional lebollo. There are other downsides to lebollo as well.

I give him a special, alternative lebollo, and Motlalepula, his friend Mokete, and their Old

One (me) spend an incredible night together on a mountain top, eating smores and hotdogs and

looking at picture books of stars, planets, dinosaurs, and creatures living in a drop of pond water.


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Mokoroane

Never do more than one Food for Work Project at a time, we are sagely advised by

veteran development workers. We do three simultaneously. With crews of thirty workers --

mostly women, old men, and young boys not old enough to work in the mines in South Africa --

we build earthen dams that catch rain water diverted into them by stone-lined furrows connected

to the surrounding hills.

Mokoroane is our most ambitious project. During the course of a year, we build a huge,

clay-cored catchment pond several hundred feet in radius that irrigates two acres of primary

school garden from gravity-fed stand pipes and taps. There is a woodlot, a range restoration

demonstration, a quarter-mile diversion furrow, and drop spillways. The Peace Corps agrees to

extend our two-year contracts by three months in order for us to complete all of our projects and

make sure the vegetables are growing as planned. Within two years after our Peace Corps

contract ends, all of the gardens are abandoned by the villagers we had tried so hard to help.

Will

We work with many different expatriates on a wide variety of development projects

during our eight years in Lesotho. Will is perhaps the most memorable. He deeply loves and

respects the Basotho people. He does not deeply love or adhere much to convention.

Will is sixty-five years old and the chief irrigation specialist on the USAID project I work

on during our last three years in Lesotho. He had joined the Navy Seals when he was sixteen (he

lied about his age). He had been a blackjack dealer and knew how to count cards (when he was

sober). He gets into fights in bars and has an affair with one of our Basotho farmers. His wife

leaves him, and he moves in with his housekeeper and adopts her little grandson, whom she is

raising. He also is one of the most tireless and hard-working members of the project team. We

work together and spend much of our time in the field, one on one with our farmers. They love

him. I love him. Im not sure ifhe loves himself, but Ill never forget him.

The Sheeps Asshole


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This story is about communication. It talks about the importance of, and need for,

communication among all cultures and peoples. It touches briefly on the incredible revolution

that is taking place today with our ability to share information and create new amalgams of

knowledge and creativity, and the implications of this revolution for our survival.

The second half of the story talks about how easy it is to misunderstand or misinterpret

communications, especially between people from different cultures. What happens when you

mistakenly ask your gardener to castrate your vegetable plants? Or when you ask the local

butcher to give you three pounds of the sheeps asshole?

GETTING OLD IS NOT FOR SISSIES

The next four chapters are prefaced by a short section , Getting Old is Not for Sissies. These

chapters share the pain and the joy Jadbalja experiences while he tries to help each of his and

Sheilas aging parents to find joy in their final days and to face death with love.

Six Months to Live

This chapter covers three years we spend in Phoenix, Arizona, defying the medical

establishment while we help my former cancer research scientist father fight his metastasized

colon cancer. It is a tale of great joy and sharing and pain and ultimate death. It is a story of

discovering and using the power of who we are to fully live our own destinies on our own terms.

It Takes So Long to Die

This is a portrait of my mother and a brief narrative of how much she supported and

nurtured me throughout my whole life. The second half of the story details my seventy-hour vigil

by her bedside while she slowly dies from congestive heart failure.

Joe

Sheilas father, Joe, is an enigma. He is a mean and unhappy alcoholic whose own father

dies drunk in a jail cell, leaving fifteen-year-old Joe as the de facto head of his family. He works

his way up from beat cop to inspector, the level just below chief of police.


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The story deals with my changing relationship with Joe, starting with me having to tell

him that I have secretly married his nineteen-year-old daughter and that she is currently in the

hospital getting over a miscarriage. The story ends with Joe in a nursing home, where he slowly

dies from starvation and thirst when he is no longer able to swallow at the end of a five-year

ordeal with a massive and untreated stroke that has left him half paralyzed. I become Joes last

and only friend.

Mama

God threw away the mold -- or maybe he hid it just in case the world ever needed

another Mary. Sheilas motherlives in Joes angry shadow for more than fifty years. Her beauty

and her story are revealed to me after Joe is finally in a nursing home. Momma and I become

close friends in her last years. The memory of her quirks and her dreams will be with me forever.

SCIENCE STORIES SECTION

Understanding what science has discovered of the history and nature of the cosmos makes for

some of the best storytelling of all. We cannot discover who we are without understanding where

we came from. There are any number of technical books describing in great detail modern

cosmological theories. I wrote the following four stories in a format and voice Piece of Pork

could understand.

From The Little Big Story:

Just lean back in your chair, maybe open a beer or pour yourself a nice big snifter

of wine, and pretend you are Piece of Pork. We are drifting listlessly on a becalmed sea,

not even a nibble on any of our long lines. A twenty-foot pilot whale surfaces a hundred

feet off our starboard bow and blows a spout of water vapor fifteen feet into the air.

Look dat ting, mon!

After an awe-filled pause,

Where de fock you tink dat ting come from?

Pork, since youve asked, Im going to tell you some of the greatest stories ever

told.


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Stories Scientists Tell

At age five, I declare myself an atheist. My father convinces me instead to be an ordinary

agnostic(I dont know), and to avoid the egotistical pitfall ofornery agnostics (I dont know,

you dont know, nobody knows). A brief two-page summary talks about how scientists come by

their knowledge.

The Little Big Story

You are squashed to a singularity and witness the birth of the universe. Then you are

expanded out to the cosmic microwave background, where you are bathed in the light and sound

of creation.

Until Dust Do We Part

Stars, then galaxies, then super-clusters of galaxies form. You are blown away as you

discover the true size of our universe with its (almost) uncountable number of stars -- and

potentially life-harboring planets.

The Big Little Story

This is the story of how life came to be. It is probably the easiest portrayal of organic

chemistry youll ever actually enjoy. You become blood brothers/sisters with dinosaurs and ET.

The Whirlpool

The next time someone knocks on your door at eleven oclockon a Sunday morning and

wants to lecture you on why there was not enough time for the universe and life to have evolved

naturally, read them this story.

The relatively new sciences of chaos, complexity, and synchronicity are bringing us

closer to what molecular biologist Stuart Kauffman, in his bookReinventing the Sacred,


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describes as the realization that we live in a wondrous, emergent universe in which ceaseless

unforeseeable creativity arises and surrounds us.

Big Boxes

Home from Africa, we spend the next fifteen years as business people, creating and

running the smallest wholesale nursery that sells exclusively to the biggest Big Box, Home

Depot. We make and lose, in the stock and real estate markets, enough money to retire twice, and

finally retire anyway. The story ends with us in Florida in a b ig yuppie house we cant afford,

and mostly just enjoying life with our twenty-year-old cat, Socks. We are considering a move to

Costa Rica, where allegedly you can live on social security.

Mongo

A brief portrait of Darth Vader in motorcycle boots, aka Mongo, who was one of our

most colorful and appreciated employees.

Who Are We Really?

This is the only chapter inJadbaljas Tales that even come close to laying my trip on

you. But my tales are stories of my search for who we really are (and some of my misadventures

along the way). I feel my job would not be done without sharing with you some of the

conclusions I have come to at the end of this portion of my journey.

Fuzzbut, Jason, and Mr. Methuselah go to Planet Hopalot

This is a modern rendition of the stories my father told me so many years ago, when my

search for who we are was just beginning. It is about a little boy, Jason (or Jill or whatever your

kids name is), his tomcat, Fuzzbut, and their friend the robot, Mr. Methuselah. It is the first

chapter of a never-ending story of travels in the Omletrene, a wondrous machine that can take

you anywhere you can dream.

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Jadbalja's Tales Proposal

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