In 1896, Cushing pulled some wooden artifacts out of Marco Island,
including
an effigy of the ivory-billed woodpecker. I used a gold replica of it
as a plot
device in my second novel, THE SOLID GOLD PECKERWOOD.
The design motif was important
to the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex,
a revitalization movement that swept the
Lower Mississippi Valley just before
and after European contact. After contact,
they had gold from Spanish shipwrecks,
although not much. And they had some gold
before, as trade goods from
the Great Lakes region. You find conch shells up
there. Actually, Busycon.
I considered myself an Old Southeast Hand and
my hero, a campus cop,
was a defrocked dirt archeologist, who had an altercation
in graduate school
with a man who went on to be an underwater archeologist. He
was the second-in-
command on the dig, the executive officer (XO) to the commanding
officer (CO).
The CO was called the PI (Principal Investigator). Whenever I drive
past Marco Island
I think of that book. A straight, naturalistic novel with a
plot and characters, a setting
and a theme. The setting was 8WA16, just next
to 8WA15, where a gold artifact
was actually found (although not an ivory-billed
woodpecker). By Chief.
The characters were people Brenda and I had dug with.
Plus my Schwinn
Cycletruck, Dreadnaught. The theme was vocation and career
in conflict.
How do you do the best work you are capable of doing
in a world that doesn't
want your best. Is hostile
or indifferent to it. For 40 years. Or 38 years.
One
day's daily typewriting at a time.