Blu Rose and the Land of Saunt

By Robert Pew

Less is more in writing the author's notes, so, my eyes did not see, but my voice spoke what my mind's eye did envision, and my ears heard what my mouth had expressed, my hand recorded what my mouth and ears had divulged; thus, my eyes could forever read what my world had revealed to me. Although this was my course to sublimity, I can not stop the readers of this work from questioning its worth, having not turned the pages yet. It is for the reader to unravel the value of this book for themselves.

I have been writing short stories for over thirty years. This time I set out to make from the thin air a story of good versus evil, where the right would prevail over the wrong. I named the main character Blu Rose because at the time of the making of the story seven years ago (2006), there were no blue roses. I selected green roses as the elixir for the same reason.

I was traveling a stretch of Indiana highway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, and I felt a story looming someplace in the air about me, and the first story came forth. It is chapter four, The Wizard. It is the story of Fredrick Broomstocker and the beginning of Blu Rose leaning to know herself. Liking the story, I decided to develop it. After a few weeks I repeated the act and another story came to mind. I then created a new story chapter, along the same stretch of road, and when stopped for the night, I would write down what I had told myself. This farmland of Indiana became for me the hollowed land of Blu Rose learning to know herself.

For confidence in editing I used the words of Dale Carnegie, Whatever the mind can conceive and believe the mind can achieve. I remember the distance from Milwaukee to Green Bay also setting an excellent stage for development of story lines; but it was New York State where I brought to life chapter twelve, The Deer in the Woods. It was created in the town where Elmer's Glue is made. I was spending the night along the river on the edge of the town in a dirt parking area and was hypnotized by a small lopsided tree whose leaves were being blown in the wind by the breeze. Chapter twelve is my favorite. That is how the novelette came to be.

The second story, a long short story, is The Land of Saunt. I will tell you first that I started making it up back in 1974 cursing about the local countryside, and I found the outline so charming that I wrote it down in a notebook. I forgot about it until 2007, when I was finished writing Blu Rose. Like a burst of luck, maybe just the level of creativity, no matter, I remembered the story. Within weeks I developed the plot and wrote a rough little story.

Solving the story comes about with five crystals. I had read of the five crystals of South America in a book and had made a mental record of them for years. In The Land of Saunt, you will learn of the Geometric people, and the problem they have come to by way of Ginger's crystal ball. The solution became self-evident and proved as pleasing as it was pleasant to the story plotting. Ginger's world then becomes a transparency for all and she moves on to search out her heart's desire.

The last piece of work is a poem, Walking in Confidence. I wrote it after winning a finalist award in the Dayton, Ohio Library Poetry Contest. I have not had the Ivy League university training in writing, nor have I had the workshops used by the bestsellers, but I have had the experience of traveling for a living, and I have visited some of the best museums on the earth. I have also spent more than enough time in the libraries--138 libraries last count. When I had the dream of the library, and it was really a dream, I had to write it. I have included it as the last piece of work because I owed something to the libraries that have taught me the masterful art of storytelling.

The book as a whole is all creativity, and yet it comes together from beginning to end in a singular harmonious logic, c

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483677668

Robert Pew

Robert A. Schneider, Robert Pew, author of Blu Rose and The Land of Saunt, is a person with wide-ranging talents and particular interest in American life and society. He first published Dexter Ave in 1981. Born in Ohio, he attended college in Wisconsin and lived and worked in Philadelphia for three years during the city's bicentennial. He is an all-American springboard diver. He spent four years in the army, two year in Germany, attaining the rank of sergeant. He received a business administration degree in 1988, although his first love has been writing. In 2011 he was a finalist in the Dayton, Ohio Library Poetry Contest. In 2012 he was inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame at the University of Wisconsin. The rest of his life was spent in transportation and traveling, where he could gain insight for realism in his writing. He is currently editing two more books for publication, a volume of short stories, and a novel.

Book preview

BLU ROSE AND THE

LAND OF SAUNT

Robert Pew

Copyright © 2013 by Robert Pew.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013913797

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4836-7765-1

Softcover 978-1-4836-7764-4

Ebook 978-1-4836-7766-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 09/05/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

138875

CONTENTS

Author Notes

Chapter 1

Blu Rose Travels To America

Chapter 2

Blu Rose Travels To Pittsburgh

Chapter 3

Blu Rose Stopped The Storm

Chapter 4

The Wizard

Chapter 5

Blu Rose Finds Her Father

Chapter 6

Blu Rose And The Serpent Mound

Chapter 7

Otaht-He-Wagh-Pe-Qua

Chapter 8

Blu Rose Returns To The River Valley

Chapter 9

Blu Rose And The Wind

Chapter 10

Blu Rose And The Bees

Chapter 11

What Is Reality?

Chapter 12

The Deer In The Woods

Chapter 13

Rand Ogden Meets Frederick

Chapter 14

Knowing Yourself

PART I

PART II

PART III

Growing In Confidence

By Robert Pew

AUTHOR NOTES

Less is more in writing the author’s notes, so, my eyes did not see, but my voice spoke what my mind’s eye did envision, and my ears heard what my mouth had expressed, my hand recorded what my mouth and ears had divulged; thus, my eyes could forever read what my world had revealed to me. Although this was my course to sublimity, I can not stop the readers of this work from questioning its worth, having not turned the pages yet. It is for the reader to unravel the value of this book for themselves.

I have been writing short stories for over thirty years. This time I set out to make from the thin air a story of good versus evil, where the right would prevail over the wrong. I named the main character Blu Rose because at the time of the making of the story seven years ago (2006), there were no blue roses. I selected green roses as the elixir for the same reason.

I was traveling a stretch of Indiana highway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, and I felt a story looming someplace in the air about me, and the first story came forth. It is chapter four, The Wizard. It is the story of Fredrick Broomstocker and the beginning of Blu Rose leaning to know herself. Liking the story, I decided to develop it. After a few weeks I repeated the act and another story came to mind. I then created a new story chapter, along the same stretch of road, and when stopped for the night, I would write down what I had told myself. This farmland of Indiana became for me the hollowed land of Blu Rose learning to know herself.

For confidence in editing I used the words of Dale Carnegie, Whatever the mind can conceive and believe the mind can achieve. I remember the distance from Milwaukee to Green Bay also setting an excellent stage for development of story lines; but it was New York State where I brought to life chapter twelve, The Deer in the Woods. It was created in the town where Elmer’s Glue is made. I was spending the night along the river on the edge of the town in a dirt parking area and was hypnotized by a small lopsided tree whose leaves were being blown in the wind by the breeze. Chapter twelve is my favorite. That is how the novelette came to be.

The second story, a long short story, is The Land of Saunt. I will tell you first that I started making it up back in 1974 cursing about the local countryside, and I found the outline so charming that I wrote it down in a notebook. I forgot about it until 2007, when I was finished writing Blu Rose. Like a burst of luck, maybe just the level of creativity, no matter, I remembered the story. Within weeks I developed the plot and wrote a rough little story.

Solving the story comes about with five crystals. I had read of the five crystals of South America in a book and had made a mental record of them for years. In The Land of Saunt, you will learn of the Geometric people, and the problem they have come to by way of Ginger’s crystal ball. The solution became self-evident and proved as pleasing as it was pleasant to the story plotting. Ginger’s world then becomes a transparency for all and she moves on to search out her heart’s desire.

The last piece of work is a poem, Walking in Confidence. I wrote it after winning a finalist award in the Dayton, Ohio Library Poetry Contest. I have not had the Ivy League university training in writing, nor have I had the workshops used by the bestsellers, but I have had the experience of traveling for a living, and I have visited some of the best museums on the earth. I have also spent more than enough time in the libraries—138 libraries last count. When I had the dream of the library, and it was really a dream, I had to write it. I have included it as the last piece of work because I owed something to the libraries that have taught me the masterful art of storytelling.

The book as a whole is all creativity, and yet it comes together from beginning to end in a singular harmonious logic, complexity made simple. I was, from the start, out to give the book longevity. I have found nothing but joy in the making and writing of it. Fantasy is fun, fantasy is adventure, and fantasy is a teacher of truth, even if fiction is deemed not the whole truth.

I hope you take the time to read all three pieces. Realism, romance, wonder, surprise, adventure, and humor all find their way into Blu Rose and the Land of Saunt. Together or separate, they try to entertain without effort, and hopefully they will lend a hand in getting on with your life of learning to know yourself that you might know others.

Robert Pew

In its deepest meanings literature is deaf to appeals for explanation and is dumb in its attempts to make men understand.

—Wen Ch’ang God of Chinese literature

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BLU ROSE

by Robert Pew

CHAPTER 1

Blu Rose Travels to America

(Early spring, 1851)

Morning fog gripped nature quite; a silver haze still lay across the big Mississippi River and beyond to the woodlands. Miss Blu Rose, Hanqing Ro, was awaiting the ferryboat Robt. E. Lee to be paddled downstream to Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River joined the Mississippi. From the join of the two rivers at Cairo, she would make a choice to either travel east on the Ohio, or continue down the magnanimous river.

A slender woman, Miss Blu Rose was twenty-six years of age, stood a fit five feet six inches tall, and wore her rich, long, black, straight hair dangling beyond her shoulders clasped in a large brown barrette. She had been raised in the mountains along the Yellow River in China, and schooled by her father. Along with traditional class work he had taught her of Buddhism, the Chinese gods, and the teaching of Confucius. Her well-traveled literary father, Mr. Wo Ro, was a graduate of the empirical school and a Silk Road historian.

Upon her father’s death, Blu Rose chose to follow his wishes. After Wo Ro’s mourning period of one year, she had booked passage to America, respecting his sermon that she must go forth for adventure and discover herself—know yourself and you will know others. She had prepared for this adventurous journey all throughout that first year, having learned to walk twenty-five miles a day, for he had traveled the thousands of miles of the Silk Road in his youth. She then left her homeland to travel America, hoping in her heart that such wisdom as he spoke of would come forth to her from visual adventures and historical travels across such a virgin land.

Now having completed a long, engaging overland journey to St. Louis, Missouri, Blu Rose had six months back left Xi’an, China, traveling the big Yellow River upon a square sail rig to the Pacific Ocean. There she had boarded a four-mast, three-story bark toward America. When she debarked at the coastline of California, she first observed tall barren mountains; and crossing over them by wagon train on a prairie schooner, she discovered hundreds of miles of cactus ridden desert, scorpions, tarantulas, and ceaseless never-ending desolates of blond sand and gray desert brush. Journeying onward by stagecoach she crossed over dry motionless prairie lands; and after several more months of such empty wilderness, she transcended to lower plains, rolling hills, green foliage, and wetlands, where unshaded coach windows flickered tree shadows in her opal eyes. The change to greeneries redeemed to her thoughts of her homeland China, now two seasons past. Forever and again being engaged in changing global geography, and having unmasked the vast Mississippi—similar to the big Yellow River near her home—Blu Rose suffered to a quickened heart that she was falling in love with this adventurous America and its history.

While staying in St. Louis, she had found a trusted adviser in the famous Shakespearian theater actor, Surley Randoff Ogden. Mr. Ogden was a handsome man four years her senior. He was so captivated by her innocence from their first acquaintance that he contented her to refer to him as merely Rand. Rand proved himself, during their two engaging weeks now past, to be the kindest, sweetest gentleman she had yet encountered. He was intelligent, polite, inquiring, poetic, and passionate; but most notable to her ways was Rand’s selfless generosity toward her foreigner innocence.

Through persistent conversations, walks, and dinners, Rand had staged to engage her traveler’s spirit in his paternal stories of the wondrous rivers and their folklore. He would as well allow Blu Rose to converse freely of her bountiful China, and her late father’s time-honored profession as an ancient history writer.

What would be the wonder of your life at this time of year? That is if you were still in your homeland along the Yellow River, Blu Rose, Rand had enquired.

Now is the time of the Pure Brightest Festival, Mr. Rand. This traditional Chinese festival… it is celebrated in spring… it is peach blossom time, from a poem.

Yes, he’d broken in, we have a somewhat similar cherry blossom celebration. It is in the spring also; it’s in Washington D.C. my dear. Washington D.C., that’s where the capital of my country is.

Capital, she had questioned, Capital before be in my home, Xi’an, China, she had said.

Like a sapling, just as his father had taught him, Rand Ogden had revealed to his dear friend Blu Rose the many navigational facts of river travel. He enlightened her of the dangers of such as fallen trees, unseen just below the big rivers surface, adding that more and more boats were sinking from such havoc. He also spoke his knowledge of the hazards of high waters, low waters, silt dunes, wood clutter, and fogs, and informed her of a ferryboat’s paddle speeds—eleven miles per hour coasting the river, and five miles per hour fighting the current. He advised her also of the unanticipated real truths of American travel: lawless, desperate, selfish, indigent tramps with impulsive characters, describing the various groups of self-seeking discerners as scalawags—rogue vagabonds—emphasizing in the end that it was most important to watch out for those who owned nothing or laid claim to be making their living on and along the river.

Mr. Rand, loyalty is more often a characteristic of the common people, she had stated, in reply to the illimitable values of his information.

But Blu Rose, my dear, not all that glitters is gold; and if you’re going to be traveling these wilderness waterways, you must be careful of what rock you choose to turn over, there may be a rattlesnake under one. Such a cliché brought tranquility as many Chinese spoke this same way.

I thought rattlesnake… in dry lands of the West, Mr. Rand. Are there also such creature as this on the rivers?

No my dear, he had laughed, I’m just saying…

I know Mr. Rand, but Blu Rose mature good… well to American ways. It makes me dream which is happy time for me. My father says that dreams mean nothing, daughter; only hard word will bring reward.

As Rand would listen, praise her father, and coax her with drinks, she soberly beheld a secret apprehension of herself; she knew nothing, nothing of what was to become of her life.

The fog was lifting on the river and the sun was now coming into sight though the haze, giving more recall. It was that first Sunday he had acquainted her with his Missouri charm. Together they had shared a cuisine of Mississippi catfish and sweet Southern cornbread. He had engaged her into the late hours to the entertainment of American ragtime with an instrument called a banjo and another called a piano. On the following Tuesday, she remembered, realizing with agreeable compassion similar to her father’s which placed a smile on her face, he had domesticated her—one of the words he had taught her, describing to her distant cultures up the headwaters to the North. They were called Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Twin Cities. He had educated her also of cities to the south named Memphis and New Orleans—Southern delta country. All this time they had listened to wailing harmonicas and a sound called muddy-water blues. He had described geographically the cities of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh that he called the easterly river cities:

You see Blu Rose, my dear; Cincinnati is the Queen’s City. It steeps down from seven dark green hills to canvas its business center right along the Ohio River waters. And Pittsburgh is a city enjoining the three rivers that make up the Ohio. Pittsburgh is secluded by a surrounding of mountainous hills that stretch to heights that erase a view of the city’s center from all directions. The thoughts had been a regained marvel of her homeland, and she wondered how similar Pittsburgh might be. It was laurelling—Surley Randoff’s word—to have gained such teachings and verbalized illustrations, for thus far she had been utterly ignorant to imagine such spirits, sounds, and sights. With such wit and endless conversations Mr. Ogden had invariably convinced her to be sitting here, at this dock, for he had said, The most affable view of American history would be found on her rivers.

Many passengers where now scurrying about erasing her daydreams of the Shakespearian actor; but giving little pause to such activities, she started recalling dancing around in the small cemetery on her family’s land in the foothills of the ancient city, Xi’an, the beginning of the Silk Road, where her father would pray to the family ancestry only a few feet away. She then envisioned him again at his writing desk, his smartly braided gray ponytail resting to his agile back, his slender robe revealing his aged shrinking body. Her eyes absently turned void and a plaguing yet untouchable sadness roamed forth from the depths of her heart.

The camel hem of her skirt was felt dusting high up her leg. She gave a tug about her thigh to free the wrinkled silk, recalling that her mother had suggested the ensemble: a Wedgwood blue blouse and matching colored silk skirt with an oversized hem made of a blue dyed camel’s hair. The skirt was a conventional but aged style—Chinese third century, much different from the fashions of the American women. Two of these four styled skirts were now showing evidence of wear from the long dusty months of travel. As she tussled about, the hood of her navy wool cloak dipped onto her forehead, shifting her thoughts to its recollection, for each morning she blanketed herself in it against the so often changing American weather. As the hood covered her vision, blocking the dampness of the winds, its weight offered renewed warmth. A smirk came forth, reminding her indulging ego that she had chosen this garment. The heavy shawl had thus far shown most durable in this far-off land.

After a