Wizzy And The Traffic Light

Frank got the call from dispatch at one, just as Doris sat his burger down on his table. He listened to the message, but was sure he’d misheard so he thumbed the radio button and said, “Come again, Thelma? I didn’t copy that.”

Thelma repeated the message, Frank thumbed the radio off and said, “Well, shit. Wrap this up to go, would you Doris? I got a call.”

“Damn, Frank. I woulda put it a bag for you if you’d asked. Now I got another plate to wash.”

Frank gave Doris ten dollars, said “Keep the change, for all your trouble” and left Wilber’s Diner, climbed into his old Jeep Cherokee and headed into town.

Buckley, Montana, population two hundred, had one traffic signal, out front of the post office, which also served as the library and video rental store. Across the street was a Shell station.

Frank parked behind the Shell, crept around front and peered across the street at the post office. A rifle fired, the crack echoing across the street. Frank ducked behind a gas pump, though better and ran into the Shell’s office where he found Lenny, who owned the gas station, crouching behind the counter.

“What the hell, Frank?” Lenny said.

“How long’s he been there?” Frank said.

“Sonabitch’s been shooting that twenty-two of his for a half hour now! He’s gotta be drunk. Goddamn, who sold Wizzy booze?”

Frank raised his head and peered through the window. “There ain’t but one store in Buckley, Lenny. Who’d you think sold it to him?”

“Henry knows better than that, don’t he? Don’t he know why Wizzy can’t have no booze?”

“You’d think, after what happened last Thanksgiving.”

“And the Fourth of July.”

Frank crept to the door and yelled across the street, “Wizzy, this here is Frank. What the hell you doin’?”

After a pause, a voice echoed back, “Frank, don’t you try nothin’! You stay put ’till I’m done!”

“Wizzy, for God’s sake, put the twenty-two down and come on out before someone gets hurt. You don’t want no one to get hurt, do you Wizzy?”

“You shut up, Frank! I can’t take this no more and I mean to end it right now.”

Another rifle crack, and a bullet caromed off the traffic light’s metal casing, making it swing back and forth above the intersection.

Frank ducked back into the office and said to Lenny, “It’s the stoplight, ain’t it? He’s shootin’ at the stoplight. Goddamn Wizzy.”

“Wizzy’s a good shot,” Lenny said. “Best in the county two years straight. He shoulda’ hit it by now. He’s already fired seven or eight times.”

“When Wizzy’s been drinkin’, he couldn’t shoot an elephant if he was sittin’ on it.” Frank blew out a breath. “Well, I suppose if he can’t hit the stoplight, he can’t hit me, either.”

Frank went out front again, this time as far as the street. With hands on hips, he hollered, “You come out now, Wizzy! Just lay the rifle down and come on out. We’ll forget this whole thing happened.”

“Like hell, Frank! Every time I come to town that damn light is red! Every time! You hear me Frank? I spent half my life sittin’ at that damn light, and I ain’t gonna do it no more.”

“Wizzy, we only got one stoplight. Now come on, you’re scarin’ Lenny.”

Wizzy’s twenty-two cracked again and Frank ducked, but didn’t run. “Goddamnit Wizzy!”

Frank could hear Wizzy muttering and swearing as he reloaded the single-shot rifle, then thought he should’ve charged him after he’d shot; he might’ve grabbed him before he reloaded.

He opened his mouth to holler when the rifle cracked again. This time sparks flew off the stoplight and glass tinkled down to the street. The light blinked a few times, then went out.

Wizzy whooped and laughed, came out of the post office, laid the rifle on the sidewalk and said to Frank, “I ain’t never gonna sit at that damn light agin, I tell you what.”

“You’re the dumbest drunk I ever saw, Wizzy,” Frank said. “Not only do I gotta haul your ass to jail for distrubin’ the peace, you’re gonna hafta pay for that light to be fixed. I bet it’ll cost you three hunderd.”

“I ain’t payin’ fer no light what has a red part. I tell you what, Frank. I ain’t.”

This will be me one day. When I snap, it’ll be over the damn traffic lights. They’re always red. How much of that is a man expected to take?

Much thanks to Wizzy for letting me borrow his name for this short story. Wizzy’s a colorful character from my book, THE MIGHTY T. He’s been great to work with.

P.S.  Here's the link to my other Wizzy post:  << Click here >>

After Lightfoot: Restoring the Hetch Hetchy Valley

O’Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch Hetchy Valley

After the exciting conclusion of THE MIGHTY T, I wrote a brief chapter that addressed several things. One was what happened to the Hetch Hetchy Valley after the terrorist John Lightfoot successfully destroyed the O'Shaughnessy Dam. Here is a excerpt from that chapter:

There were two camps of thought concerning the restoration of the Hetch Hetchy Valley. While they differed on everything else, they had agreed on a set of eight givens.

To create a solid base for the dam, Michael O’Shaughnessy had had to excavate 118 feet below the natural riverbed. If they removed all 118 of concrete, the river gradient would be too steep and the valley would quickly erode.

So the first given was, leave enough of the dam in place to restore the original stream gradient.
Sediment accumulation behind a dam is a major problem; it displaces water and is a huge environmental mess when the dam is removed, which all dams eventually will.

The second given was, Hetch Hetchy lacked sediment. The watershed forming the Tuolumne River is mostly granite rock, cut and formed by glaciers, covered with a thin layer of soil — there was little to wash into the valley. What little sediment there might have been over the years had already washed downstream because water was released from the bottom of the dam.

The second given leads into the third: because of the lack of sediment buildup, the original river channel still exists. Restorers didn’t have to worry about dredging a new channel, which they would have had to do if the valley was full of silt.

No one knew for sure what native flora and fauna existed in the Hetch Hetchy Valley circa 1920, but — the fourth given — whatever would’ve been living in the valley had the City of San Francisco not flooded it, probably still lived in the mountains and valleys around Hetch Hetchy. It was assumed these native plants and animals would, with time, find their way back into the valley.

The fifth given was simple: it would be impossible to prevent non-native plants from taking root. Yosemite Valley had forty-five non-native types of grasses, so it was silly to think Hetch Hetchy wouldn’t also.

The sixth given was, bugs and worms will return on their own.

Seventh given: no one knew what to do about the white bathtub ring around the valley, so they would have to be content to let nature figure it out.

Eighth and final given: little creatures might need help if there were too many bigger creatures around eating them. Everyone thought it would be okay to meddle by bringing in more little creatures, or removing a few big ones.

(This information came from a 1988 National Park Service study; I wanted the book to be as accurate as possible, keeping in mind it’s a work of fiction.)

The chapter also discusses two camps of thought regarding how the restoration should be managed: one camp says, keeping in mind the above givens, give Hetch Hetchy back to nature and let her make of it what she will. Man screwed it up in the first place by flooding the valley so he should keep his soiled hands off the restoration.

The second camp wants to micromanage the restoration and is split into two subcamps; some for managing with a light hand, others with a heavy hand. Those in favor of light management think it would be okay to meddle a little by replanting fora and re-populating fawna native to the area; give nature a helping hand.

Those who favor the heavy-handed management want to control everything. They would erect greenhouses and nurseries while the valley drained, then map out where everything would be planted. Then they would micromanage the valley forever.

All sides think Hetch Hetchy would, in 150 years, look like it would have had the City of San Francisco not flooded it in 1923. Except, of course for the fifty-foot white ring around the valley where the pure water had leached minerals from the granite mountains. It can be erased only by hundreds or thousands of years of erosion.

I’m not sure I agree. In all likelihood, the Hetch Hetchy Valley would have been developed in a similar manner as its big sister, Yosemite Valley. No doubt someone would have erected a hotel or two, paved roads would’ve been laid, and tourists would’ve been motoring through the valley, dirtying up the air.

A restored and protected Hetch Hetchy, save for the bathtub ring, might be an improvement on what might have been had man not intervened.

Albert Bierstadt's painting of Hetch Hetchy Valley

Native American Rivalry Over Hetch Hechy

John Muir with Yosemite-Mono Paiute, circa 1901

“Miwuk girls are ugly,” Paul had told Jack, after taking a seat on Jack’s porch and popping open a can of Coke he’d found in Jack’s fridge. “I was hoping to get a date but the girls looked like your dog.”

Jack’s dog, an old mongrel, got off the porch and disappeared around the corner of the house. Paul watched the dog go and said, “A couple looked like your dog’s ass.”

“Now look what you did,” Jack said. “You insulted my dog. Go apologize.”

Paul drained half the Coke. “Hey, I heard a new joke. Want to hear it?”

“No.”

“So, some Miwuks were celebrating in the corner of a bar one day and they were shouting, ‘Forty-one days! Forty-one days!’ So the bartender’s watching them, and more Miwuks come in and join the celebration. The bartender finally gets curious so he goes over and says, ‘Why are you celebrating, shouting “forty-one days, forty-one days?” ’ ”

Paul takes another hit from the Coke and delivers the punch line: “A Miwuk holds up a ten-piece puzzle box and says, ‘The box says four to six years, but it only took us forty-one days!’ ”

Paul roared, and Jack smiled, despite his best effort not to.

“I don’t know why they hold that festival every year,” Paul said. “All they do is eat shitty food and play those stupid hand games, and dance around like it was still the 1800s.”

“Because young assholes like you have to be taught what it was like before the white man stole our land.”

Paul snorted. “That was even before your time, Uncle. You got to let that shit go. You know what was weird, though, there was a crazy white guy there dressed up like a Miwuk, in that stupid outfit that makes them look like chickens. He was dancing with the Miwuks, which means he was acting like an ass.” He laughed again.

Paul helped himself to another Coke, drained half of it and belched. “You should have heard the shit he was laying out. He was saying the white man killed the Tuolumne River and cheated the Miwuks out of their rights, or some shit like that. Like the Miwuks ever owned the Tuolumne River.” Paul laughed. “He’s white, but he thinks he’s an Indian.”

Jack, who had been thinking about Hetch Hetchy and working his way toward a nap when his nephew dropped in to drink his Cokes, was now wide awake. He said, “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You know what’s so stupid? Of all the Indians a white guy could pretend to be, he picks the Miwuks.” Another round of laughter.

Is there really a rivalry between the Miwuks and Paiute (Jack and Paul are Paiute) and do the Paiute look down their noses at the Miwuk as depicted in this scene?

From my research, probably not. At least not today. They might have been hundreds of years ago, when their paths crossed. That wasn’t likely because the Paiute lived primarily in the high country while the Miwuk stuck to the valley and foothills. The Miwuk in the valley lived in mud huts and were called “diggers”, and were considered extremely lazy and indolent by white settlers (invaders?).

The Paiutes were proud warriors; the Miwuk, not so much. The Paiutes’ last successful defense of Hetch Hetchy was against the Big Creek Band of Miwuks, who were repelled and driven back into the foothills.

The Paiutes didn’t live in Hetch Hetchy year-round, they migrated through it seasonally to gather food such as pine nuts, which could be stored for the winter. It was also a place of refuge for them, a sacred valley. When the 1872 the Lone Pine earthquake rocked Yosemite Valley (Hetch Hetchy is Yosemite’s little sister) causing massive rock slides, five hundred Paiutes were spotted in Hetch Hetchy.

I’ve taken literary license in this scene to show how the old Paiutes first heard of John Lightfoot. Paul’s joke about the Miwuks and the puzzle is an old one I Googled into; one Native American group really used it to make fun of another. I guess rivalries still exist. 

Hetch Hetchy Valley before being flooded.

Lightfoot Makes Them Pay For What They’ve Done

Old Photo of Jones Pumping Plant, circa 1958

Tonight, before they drove their bomb to the Jones Pumping Plant, Lightfoot felt the need to tell them why the pumps had to go. Again.

He stood next to the river, his back to the water, in his Indian getup, lecturing: “The salmon fed the Miwuk for centuries. They caught enough to dry…”

The rest of the gang sat on the ground and swatted at mosquitoes, which were plentiful and so aggressive they pushed through the thick layer of repellant the gang had slathered on. The pests seemed to ignore Lightfoot, much to the other’s disappointment; they were sure he wouldn’t be so long-winded if he was being eaten alive like they were.

“Then the white man came. He dammed the Tuolumne in 1923 and 1926, and once more with the New Don Pedro Dam in 1971. And he thought, in his arrogance, he could ‘manage’ the Tuolumne, improve on Nature’s perfect wisdom.”

Donaldson tuned Lightfoot out and mentally reviewed his part in tonight’s mission: he was to drive the truck bomb. Driving the bomb wasn’t dangerous, it wouldn’t explode unless it was detonated, but if the cops pulled him over he’d go to prison for a long time while the others went free.

“The mighty and noble salmon might have survived the white man’s dams, but when the white man decided to send water from the Tuolumne to southern California, they sealed the salmon’s fate.” Lightfoot’s face filled with grief that quickly morphed to rage.

“In 1951, the white man installed six 25,000-horsepower pumps near Tracy. These killer pumps siphon the Tuolumne out of the Delta and push the water through 15-foot-diameter pipes at a rate of 768 cubic feet per second.” He spat the numbers out.

The numbers meant nothing to Roberts, who was also trying to ignore Lightfoot’s ranting. How much water was in a cubic foot? He didn’t know and didn’t care. Lightfoot had him riding in the truck with Donaldson, to keep an eye on him. “If he suddenly grows a conscience, shoot him and drive the truck yourself. If he gets sick or has a heart attack, push him out and take over.” Lame.

“The pumps draw water from the Delta and lift it 197 feet into the Delta-Mendota Canal. There’s no salmon in the Delta-Mendota Canal. Do you know why? Because the pumps cut the salmon to pieces!!!”

The group had heard the speech so many times they were ready for Lightfoot’s outbursts; no one flinched. The first time Lightfoot delivered the Pump Talk, Griffith did some fact-finding research—for all the shack didn’t have, it did have a broadband Internet connection.

He learned the California Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that operated the Jones Pumping Plant, which they would hopefully blow up tonight, went to great lengths to stop fish from getting sucked into the intake canal that took water to the gigantic pumps. Various types of fish-screening devices were used and were, for the most part, fairly effective. A fish had to be less than one and a half inches long to make it through the screens.

So Lightfoot’s speech about the salmon getting cut up in the pumps was bullshit. When he told this to the others, everyone except Danny, they had all had a good laugh.

What Griffith didn’t tell the others was that while the small immature fish—the babies—couldn’t get through the screens, they often couldn’t get away from them either: the screens cut the fish up, not the pumps. Lightfoot was right, his timing was just off.

* * * * *  

Thankfully for the gang, the end of Indian Class is seconds away. Do you think Lightfoot’s “sermon” sounds rehearsed? It does, for a good reason: He’d typed and memorized it before giving it the first time. And he’s no Winston Churchill.

Lightfoot blames the decline in Tuolumne River Chinook salmon on the two dams controlling the river and the massive siphon pumps in the San Joaquin Delta. But the dams didn’t build themselves, and the pumps didn’t drop out of space and land in the Delta like some piece of space junk: humans were responsible, so humans had to pay for what they’d done.

The O’Shaughnessy Dam at Hetch Hetchy was constructed and is operated by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. The Don Pedro Dam belongs to the Modesto and Turlock Irrigation Districts. Lightfoot targets the three utilities for revenge, specifically, their general managers.

THE MIGHTY T begins when Danny, a member of Lightfoot’s gang who’s crazy-good with a sniper rifle, and just plain crazy, targets one GM from the top of the twelve-story DoubleTree Inn in Modesto. He hits his target and empties the rest of the clip into the plaza below. (Read Chapter 1 to see what happens to Danny when he’s no longer useful to Lightfoot.)

The pumps in Tracy are run by the State of California; far too big a target for Lightfoot. Who would he send his gang to kill, the governor? Turning the 150-foot-long pump building into rubble will have to suffice. Those pumps won’t be killing salmon for years after he’s done with them.

Local Settings Make for Easy Research

My novels, CANALS and the soon-to-be-released THE MIGHTY T, are set in or around my hometown, Modesto, California. I've always been interested in how authors get ideas for their books, and I bet you are, too. You'll read about the genesis and writing of my novels in future posts, so stay tuned.

Setting your book locally makes for easy, or easier, research. In CANALS, an alien monster is living in the irrigation canals running through and around Modesto. I drive by and over these canals every day; it was nothing to stop and look, and snap some pictures.

You can do the same if you live near or visit your settings. Then, when you write scenes set in these locations, you can whip out a photo or look at a digital image and make your writing more precise and realistic.

You can also make everything up. However, I find descriptive writing less mentally taxing than creative writing; electricity and I have something in common: we seek the path of least resistance.

Visiting or having pictures of your locations saves precious creative energy for plotting and dialog, where it's really needed. Daily creative time is finite, is it not?

I ventured further out of town for THE MIGHTY T, but still could drive to my locations to snoop and take photos. This is the O'Shaughnessy Dam:

O'Shaughnessy Dam at Hetch Hetchy

See that room-like outcropping in the middle of the dam? Wait until you read what happens there!

Dams are magnificent and immensely useful structures. They're also controversial; good fodder for fiction. THE MIGHTY T deals with controversy surrounding this dam and the river it controls.

The O'Shaughnessy Dam made a lake out of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which is part of Yosemite National Park. That it was built in the first place is tragic, but there it is, and only two hours away.

Seeing gates and buildings, and the dam itself, and having photos of them, helped tremendously when I wrote the novel. And saved brain-energy for biting action and dialog. (No people or animals are actually bitten in the book, but people are certainly harmed. It's a thriller, after all.)

You can look at other photos of the dam and lake here, if you so wish.

The second dam in THE MIGHTY T is the New Don Pedro Dam:

New Don Pedro Dam

The New Don Pedro Dam is an earth-and-rock-fill dam and is the setting for the exciting conclusion of THE MIGHTY T. John Lightfoot attempts to... Later, Everett!

One scene took place in front of the dam, where nosy, plotting visitors aren't allowed, so no photos were possible: Google Earth came to the rescue. I relied on Google Earth quite a bit, at both locations. It shows elevations, allows you to measure distances, and lets you nose around in places the authorities don't allow. Again, making the action more accurate while preserving creative energy.

I feel sorry for you poor science fiction authors, who have to make everything up! My brain would ooze from my ears if I had to do that.

A parting shot of the O'Shaughnessy Dam, in proper perspective:

The Dammed Hetch Hetchy Valley

A beautiful setting, no?