Lost Arrow & Other True Stories

By Scott Davis

Thirty-five years ago Tom Wolfe and John McPhee ushered in the era of New Journalism with reportage that had the color and drama of fiction. In Lost Arrow, a younger writer builds on their achievements and pushes the genre in a new direction. Rather than examining his subjects from the outside, Scott C. Davis reports from within - he really is a mountain climber, for example, and has worked as a carpenter for many years. Davis is engaged - a position that yields special insight and also allows him to turn the reportorial lense back on a skeptical society. Some of the stories in Lost Arrow are gripping, others are sweet. Several first appeared in the Christian Science Monitor's Home Forum - the last literary general store left from a simpler America where "reminds-me-when" stories provided insightful, sometimes withering, commentary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cune Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781614570356

Book preview

Lost Arrow

Scott C. Davis

Copyright 2010 Scott C. Davis

Published by Cune Press Publishing at Smashwords

* * *

TABLE OF CONTENT

Chapter 1: Baby Job

Chapter 2: The Best Stuff

Chapter 3: The Day We Squished Phil

Chapter 4: The Singing Boy

Chapter 5: Riding with the Mukhabarat

Chapter 6: Suzanne, Arabic for a Kind of Flower

Chapter 7: Lost Arrow

Chapter 8: The Motor that Brought Us to Mike

Chapter 9: I’ve Got to Vote Tonight

Chapter 10: Flood

Chapter 11: Charlie Barbour

Afterword

Classic Journalism

Acknowledgements

* * *

Chapter 1: Baby Job

I just finished a baby job. That’s where people who are about to have a baby decide to remodel their kitchen. In this case the project was in West Seattle, a modest ranch house on a hillside overlooking Puget Sound. The house had picture windows and a deck toward the water, which was nice for sunbathing on warm afternoons, for evening barbeques, and for sitting in deck chairs and talking to friends while the water and sky slowly turned red, and the sun slid down behind the Olympic Mountains. The kitchen, however, was dark and small and looked the other direction, toward the driveway and the recycling bin.

The kitchen was not ideal, but it had been OK with my friend and his wife. He ran his own company doing custom software, and she was an engineer—a couple of high–powered professionals, neither of whom spent much time in the kitchen. Only now they had decided to have a baby, their first, and wanted to clean up a few details. Nothing big, they said, just some new paint and a couple of lights. Also a skylight in the dark corner by the fridge. Time was of the essence.

First we ripped out the ceiling for the skylight.

Loose insulation fell into our shirt pockets. We installed the skylight, patched the three-tab roofing back in, and also built a wing wall, something to more completely separate the kitchen from the dining room. That new wall is too confining, the woman said the next day. So we tore it out, and after work she took another look. I still feel closed in, she said. We tore out the existing wall as well as some cabinets and an oven. The wall was holding up the ceiling at one point, so I left a couple of studs in place to serve as a post.

With the wall gone, the kitchen looked into the dining room—what they call an open kitchen, a fashionable thing out here in the West where spontaneity and talking– to–the–cook are very big and no one minds staring at dirty pans while eating a meal. The woman liked the idea that she could see Puget Sound while she cooked. The construction would be a bit more complicated, but not too bad. At least—thanks to our post—we didn’t have to make any structural changes.

By now it was Friday. Our new layout was a success, only the woman didn’t want the post. Why have a kitchen with a view of Puget Sound and then leave a post in the middle of it? I hustled off to the lumberyard in my old truck to get a beam, a big one, which I managed to purchase before the yard closed. I had to get this thing in, and it was late, and all my guys had gone home. So I called a friend whose fourteen–year–old needed something to do. I picked up the kid, he insisted that I give him comic books as compensation, and, when we reached the job, I put him on one end of the Doug Fir 4 x 12. We shoved the beam into the low attic, dragged it down to the chimney, worked it around the corner, and set it in place.

We removed the post, and hit the comic book store on the way home. When I came back on Monday, the people were even in more of a hurry. We weren’t halfway yet.

We got the electricians in and out and started slapping wallboard on the ceiling. The wire boys had centered four lights over the island.

Those lights are a little busy, said the woman. So the next day I removed two lights and repositioned the others. I was at the lumberyard when the husband phoned home. My carpenter took the call. We’ve got this baby coming, you know, said the husband.

On the window sill there was