The People In The South Were Gone

One morning, the people in the North woke up, and the people in the South were gone.

This is the first thing every child on Jigsaw learned about the Disappearance. Since that day, no one had learned much more.

No Northerner saw it happen. No one saw flashing lights, or heard thunderous booms. A few people who had been on the phone with Southerners got cut off mid-conversation, but at that time of night, there hadn’t been many of them. The Northerners didn’t catch wind of what had happened until a freight driver almost crashed off the end of the fractured Interstate highway at 4:30 a.m. Hawkeye could imagine what that had been like for him, slamming on his brakes, skidding to a halt just inches from destruction, then getting out and looking, first at the smooth stretch of highway the way he had just come, and then at the broken chunks of road up ahead, and finally down at the perfectly straight, even line of division six inches from his toes.

History books called that line The Break. Hawkeye had seen pictures of it. It looked like a slice, as if someone had taken a sharp knife to a hunk of cheese.

By then, people had already noticed the South wasn’t answering phone calls. Networks were down, diagnostics were being run. But prior to that morning, most technical difficulties that occurred on Jigsaw could safely be attributed to odd fluxes in its magnetic fields or to its equally odd gravitational anomalies. Fractured Time had become a familiar occurrence, so no one thought anything was seriously wrong until they saw what had happened to the Interstate. Once that had been established, authorities converged on the area.

Everybody looked. Everybody scratched their heads. Everybody looked again. The sun came up and cast an ominous light over the scene.

In the South, that light cast shadows on empty streets. Nothing moved, living or mechanical. That’s what Northern investigators reported when they came back with more questions than answers, that even automated systems had shut down and could not be made to start up again. Errant winds teased loose shutters or pushed hanging doors shut, and the footfalls of hazard-suited Northerners echoed here and there. Their respirators vented carbon dioxide as they took pictures, consulted monitors inside their helmets, and searched for evidence. No blood stained floors, or walls, or any other surface. Yet it could not quite be said that there were no signs of struggle. Some things were broken, or spilled, or out of order. Some things were missing. And in their place, artifacts had been discovered.

Hawkeye had combed through hundreds of books and electronic databases, but none of them described these artifacts. She wondered if this was because the artifacts were simply indescribable, too baffling to categorize? Or was there another reason? Something less honest, a desire to keep discoveries a secret until they could be properly exploited by those in power? Or worse, were they so terrible, news of them would have spread panic?

Were they beautiful things, practical things? Or had the Southern cities become shores upon which the flotsam and jetsam of Fractured Time washed?

If anyone knew, they weren’t saying. Possibly the investigators were too busy scanning for toxins, for high levels of radiation, for anything that might have caused a mass death and/or disappearance. They found nothing beyond normal parameters. They kept looking anyway, because despite the lack of evidence, something nagged at them, something that never quite seemed to be there when they looked over their shoulders, yet also something that seemed to be right out in plain sight, if only they knew how to see it. They looked, and measured, and documented.

And then their equipment stopped working. One second before it stopped, every one of them received a transmission over their helmet communicators. Later no one could agree whether the voice they had heard had been male or female, whether it shouted or whispered, sounded angry or alarmed. But everyone agreed about what it said:

“Get out of here.”

No one argued whether they should leave. Everyone boarded their aircraft and returned North. They flew over a countryside empty of any life that had come from Earth. Native fauna still lived there, but no wild creatures ventured into the abandoned cities again. Everyone knew that. The Neighbors said it was so.

And so did the ghosts.

-from Spirits Of Glory, by Emily Devenport

The Recurring Nightmares Hall Of Fame

Ask just about anyone if they have recurring nightmares, and some common themes become apparent, usually involving semi-nakedness, school classes that have somehow been missed all semester (and suddenly you're sitting at the final exam), and trying to run away from the monster when you're stuck in slow-motion speed. Most of these common nightmares aren't scary to anyone but the person who's suffering them. They range from sad, to funny, to downright baffling.

But once you veer away from the most common themes, it can be hard to tell just how individual a nightmare is. For the last 30 years, I've had three types of recurring nightmares that seem like they ought to be at least somewhat common, especially among homeowners. Nightmare 1: The Roof Has Holes I Didn't Know About. Nightmare 2: The Gerry-Rigged Plumbing Has Finally Gone Blooey. And Nightmare 3 (the genuinely scary one): The Runaway Stove. These recurring nightmares might seem straight-forward. You'd think that once I recognized them, maybe I could get myself to wake up. But they never show up by themselves. They insidiously insert themselves into other dreams, leaping out at me and shouting BOO! just as things begin to spin out of control.

Take the Leaky-Roof dream. Sometimes it shows up as part of another recurring nightmare, one in which a semi-apocalypse has descended upon the world, and I manage to make my way back to my childhood home. I dream about that house quite a lot – and I'm always glad to see it in these dreams, even under bad circumstances. I move back into the house, and that's when I begin to notice there are problems with the roof. BIG problems. They are always heralded by leaks from a rainstorm. Considering that I live in Phoenix, where it only rains a few times a year, this is rather an amazing thing. The drip, drip, drip warns me that I need to place pans and buckets under holes. And as I chase the drips, the holes get bigger, until I'm finally confronted with catastrophic gaps. You might think the sight of those storm clouds through what's left of my poor roof would fill me with despair. Instead, I feel determined to fix the problem.

Other times, the roof leaks are much more unexpected, showing up in dreams about sudden riches. I have somehow managed to get into a big, fancy house (always under bizarre circumstances that have nothing to do with obtaining any real wealth or security). As I try to puzzle through the labyrinthine circumstances that brought me to this house that I haven't earned and probably don't deserve, the leaks become apparent. Once again, they don't fill me with despair. If anything, they make sense. Ah-hah! This is why I got stuck with this house!

There's nothing positive about the dream of the Gerry-Rigged Plumbing. It resembles real life all too much. This is why it shows up just about everywhere, in any kind of dream you can think of. Have I married the handsome prince and moved to the castle? Too bad the master bathroom has a sink that never turns off completely. Am I being chased by a relentless, alien killing machine on a space station? Yeah, PLUS the toilet has filled the latrine with four inches of water. I have finally reached the conclusion that at no time in my life will every bit of plumbing in my house work exactly the way it's supposed to. That goes for the car and the appliances, too.

I feel determined, baffled, overwhelmed, and/or annoyed in most of these recurring nightmares. But one of them fills me with genuine terror. Like the Leaky Roof and the Gerry-Rigged Plumbing, the Runaway-Stove hides itself in other dreams. It may show up in one of those dreams I have about my childhood home, or in another common dream location, my grandmother's boarding house. It may show up in the home I live in now (about which I almost never dream). It may even lurk in a dark corner of the castle or the alien-haunted space station. It's a clever demon, a patient monster that cannot be stopped once it makes an appearance.

It's always an electric stove, and its mechanism is simple. Someone has turned a burner (or all of the burners) on high and left it on. The heat is so enormous, the controls have melted – and now I can't turn the damned thing off. It just gets hotter and hotter. I get the bright idea that I should run and turn off the main switch in the control box. But the stove is so hot, I can't get past it. I'm trapped in the kitchen with no way to turn it off, and it just keeps getting hotter. In the worst version of this dream, I'm trapped in an industrial kitchen with several of the runaway monsters.

The symbolism in these dreams is pretty obvious. Sometimes it's so obvious, you can't even call it symbolism. Maybe the circumstances of these recurring nightmares are individual, but the feelings behind them are still common. Living in the world is complicated. Life is challenging. We worry about stuff we can see and stuff we can't. If we're lucky, the sight of the leaky roof fills us with determination. Maybe we really can make our way home after the semi-apocalypse.

And when we do, we won't accidentally leave the stove on.

The Dance Of The Reptile Mummies

Here's a link to Ernie's plug for short stories by both of us -- he's so much better at the promotion than I am . . .

Chicanonautica: The Virgin of Guadalupe, UFOs, and Other Strange Lights in the Sky

Here's a link to Ernie's latest post on La Bloga . . .

Time Fractured

Time fractured as they were making their way back up the road. Hawkeye didn’t feel the least bit surprised about it. Fractured Time was what had caused human colonists to name the world Jigsaw in the first place, and though you could seldom be sure where it was going to happen, you could always be pretty sure when: at the most inconvenient moment possible.

Though technically, when depended on where you were relative to the Fracture. Inside a Fracture, only Now seems to be happening. This is because Time flows into a Fracture and pools there, before flowing out again, sweeping people along with it. Outside, time flows more or less from past to future, with the observer traveling at the Now point, more or less with the stream of time. So how can you tell a Traveling Now from a Fractured Now? The answer is simple. The Fractured Now lasts a lot longer.

Have you even been on a picnic on a beautiful, sunny day, lying on the blanket with your eyes on the clouds and the warmth on your face, and said, “I wish this moment could last forever?” On Jigsaw, sometimes it does. Or maybe just seems to. It depends on who you ask.

Not that Fractured Time is always a picnic. It happened to Hawkeye once when she was taking a chemistry test. She thought this made perfect sense, since Chemistry was her least favorite subject. Sometimes it happens to people who are standing in line. It could happen just after you fell asleep, so it would seem like you were stuck in your dreams forever. Hopefully they’re good dreams. But you wouldn’t really understand how strange Fractured Time could be unless it happened in the middle of a rainstorm.

When time is flowing from past to future, rain condenses in the clouds. When the drops become heavy enough, they fall to the ground, sometimes splashing people on the way. Sometimes the drops feel almost warm, but usually they’re very cool. Occasionally they’re so cold you can tell they might rather be snow. You can stand and see them raining: condense, fall, splat, condense, fall, splat.

If you’re sitting and taking a chemistry test, you might not notice that time has fractured until you realize that this is the longest test you’ve ever taken in your life. But in a rainstorm, you can hear time fracturing. The pitter-splat of drumming drops is replaced by a beautiful tinkling noise, as if the drops have turned to crystal and are knocking together ever-so-delicately like wind chimes. The condense part of the storm makes the clouds rumble, not like thunder, but like the voices of gods talking about time in a language no mortal could understand. The splat becomes a gentle whoosh, and you can touch your cheek where a drop landed before the fracture and feel the moisture without absorbing it. You can look into the not-falling drops and see fractured light shifting back and forth, and that’s when you know that time has not really stopped at all. If time has stopped, light can’t shift. That’s why people call it Fractured Time, because of the prisms inside the raindrops.

Probably not an accurate term, but everyone is happy with it.

-from Spirits Of Glory , by Emily Devenport

Destiny! Destiny! No Escaping That For Me!

Every year I have the same fantasy. And every year it seems more unobtainable. For the holidays, just before Thanksgiving, I dream of going away – to Hawaii, or Tahiti, some place warm. Some place beautiful. Some place where they never heard of Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or New Years. Some place where I won't be expected to cook, or send cards, or show up Christmas morning even though I'm dead tired. And every year I think, Oh well. Maybe next year. And I imagine the sensation of warm sand between my toes and sunshine on my smiling, worry-free face.

I never examine this fantasy too closely. Otherwise I might notice that OF COURSE they have Christmas in Hawaii. They've got freakin' Walmart there. I'd have to go somewhere really remote to get away from Christmas – and the more remote the place is, the less comfortable it's going to be. It might even be downright dangerous. Hey, I don't have to brave the malls or schmooze at the Christmas parties, but those guys in the camouflage-colored jeep keep shooting at me.

Not that I could afford to stay away as long as I'd like to, anyway. It's hard to get November 20 to January 2 off when you work retail. In fact, it's hard to get that block off for just about any job you could think of. And even if I could get the time off, I don't have the moolah for my dream escape. I couldn't afford a trip to Tucson, let alone Tahiti.

I suppose I could buy a sandbox, fill it full of volcanic sand, position it under a sun lamp in my living room, lock the doors, and play South Pacific and Beach Blanket Bingo movies all December.

But I actually like my family. And they sort of like me too. They could probably get along without me for the holidays. But I wonder – if I bow out, will I miss my chance to see them for the year? Because we don't tend to get together for Groundhog Day. Each year I have to wonder, is this the last time I'll see them?

And each year I sigh and think, Hawaii. Tahiti. Timbuktu.

Maybe next year . . .

Every Librarian Knew One Basic Fact

Every librarian knew one basic fact: classification precedes organization. If you wanted to put together a library people could use to find things out, you had to figure out which categories to put the books in. Hawkeye’s library didn’t contain nearly as many categories as most. At least three-quarters of her hard copies were about the Disappearance or related subjects – including the Neighbors.

Boss and his comrades zeroed in on these immediately, especially the one written by John Davies, Neighbors And Their Spirits Of Glory. According to Davies, when Neighbors die, their comrades petition the Spirits of Glory to allow the departed ones to enter into their company. Hawkeye had memorized the Genparl approximation of the ritual, assuming it must be genuine, but now that she was about to travel with real Neighbors, she wondered if they would agree with anything that had been written about them in her library. They stood looking, as if they could read the entire content of the books simply by reading the spines.

-from Spirits Of Glory, by Emily Devenport

Speaking Of OCD . . .

Most people who know anything about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder are familiar with its more common forms: Scrupulosity, where people are anxious about germs and constantly wash their hands, and Checking: where people worry that they've left some appliance on, and the house will burn down if they don't keep going back to check it, over and over. Another common manifestation is Counting: having to count up to some astronomically high number before you can go through a door, or turn the light-switch on and off a certain number of times. There are actually quite a lot of dimensions to OCD, and as many varieties of symptoms as there are sufferers. And though OCD can seriously undermine the happiness and mental health of the people who experience it, an Obsessive Compulsive condition can actually be helpful to some people. The most obvious example I can present for this is the writer.

Many writers joke about it, but most of us agree that our vocation is kind of peculiar. It's an offshoot of Compulsive Thoughts, which drive some people to worry about things that haven't actually happened, but that maybe COULD happen. Technically, writers tell stories about people they don't know, doing things they never witnessed, set in places they've never been. If we do it well enough, we can convince the reader it's all true. It's a win-win situation – we get to channel this nutty drive that compels us to make stuff up, and the reader gets to be entertained. But sometimes, odd side effects develop.

I first noticed one of these side effects about 14 years ago, when I was writing Broken Time. I'm a four-finger typist, and I make a lot of mistakes when I'm typing. I usually look at the keyboard instead of the screen while I'm working – a bad habit. During the writing process I go back every few sentences or to see if I've goofed. And of course, I have. So I fix the boo-boos, eliminating some letters and adding others. Pretty straight-forward, right? It would be for a sane person. But while I was writing Broken Time, I kept accidentally duplicating letters. And I didn't use the mouse as much then as I do now, so I'd use keys to get back to the boo-boo and delete one of the letters. And sometimes I would be too lazy to go all the way to the last redundant letter, and swoop down on the first, instead.

Notice my use of the term, swoop down. The metaphor is telling. I have too much imagination for my own good. I started to think of those letters as creatures who cringed as they waited to see who would die in the claws of the delete button. And if I grabbed the first letter instead of the last, I'd think, That letter thought he was safe. And then – BOOM.

I knew this was irrational. I even joked about it at first. This is the insidious thing about OCD – you can be perfectly aware that it's irrational, yet still be helpless to shrug it off. The harder you try, the worse it gets. In my case, the notion of the cringing letters distracted me enough to make my four-finger-typing method even more laborious than it already is. It continually knocked me out of the peculiar mental state all creative folks enter so they can concentrate on crafting a story out of multiple threads.

Creativity is a double-edged sword. But creativity is also the answer to the problem. I couldn't fight the silly notion that the letters were cringing. So I decided to make up a story about them. And it was fairly simple. When the letters get deleted, they're not dying. They're simply being transferred into a waiting room until they get used again in another word. While they're in the waiting room, they can read magazines, watch re-runs of Dr. Phil, whatever. Every time I had to delete a letter, I pictured this.

It worked. I no longer picture swooping and cringing. I picture letters who read too many magazines and watch sleazy daytime TV. Happy letters. Happy Em.

Happy ending. If you can make people believe that, you've succeeded. Whether or not it's because of your OCD or despite it depends on your point of view.

See you in the waiting room. I'll save you a good magazine.

THE PICKUP PICK-UP / MYSTERY MISSILE ROAD TRIP

Check out my husband's new blog on mondoernesto.com – I helped drive . . .

Free Sample Of Spirits Of Glory

Here's a link for a another big, fat sample . . .

Free Sample Of The Night Shifters

Here's a link for a big, fat sample . . .

Notes From A Dreamed Life

Please check out my guest blog on loveromancepassion.com . . .

Such A Deal I Have For You . . .

NOTE: THESE COUPONS HAVE EXPIRED. WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FUTURE COUPONS!

In a previous blog I mentioned that you can generate coupons to help promote your e-books, and post them on Twitter, Facebook, etc. You can also post them on your blog, and that's what I'm doing today. These coupons are good until November 29, 2010.

(Scribble down the codes before you click on the links):

The Night Shifters:

Spirits Of Glory:

The books are free with the codes, just enter them during the purchase process. You can download them onto your Kindle, Sony Reader, Nook, iphone, etc.

My books have made it to most of the major e-book sites – except for Amazon. It looks like I'll have to get my format wizard to do an Amazon version after all . . .

About Spirits Of Glory

One morning, the people of the North woke up and the people of the South were gone. That’s the first thing every child learns on the colony world of Jigsaw. But for one girl, knowing about The Disappearance is not enough. Hawkeye wants to know why. That's why she spent half her life researching The Disappearance. And that's also why eight Neighbors show up on her doorstep, demanding that she accompany them into the Forbidden Cities ruled by the Southern gods – to speak with the Spirits of Glory. Everyone thinks Hawkeye is an expert on Neighbors, these almost-humans who move, talk, and think as if they were born inside one of the Time Fractures. But she can't imagine what they want to ask the ghosts of their ancestors, or why they need her to go along. The Southern gods caused every human inhabitant of the Southern cities to disappear overnight – what else might they do?

But the Northern gods say Hawkeye should go – and her curiosity won't let her refuse, even though she's going into more danger than she can imagine. Pain and puzzlement wait along the broken interstate, along with scavengers who want to kill them all. Hawkeye's questions only generate more questions as they move farther and farther into the South, right into the heart of the Disappearance, until Hawkeye's questions have all been answered.

Even the ones she was afraid to ask.

Publishing Ebooks

For over a year I've been blogging about my intention to publish ebooks and record my own audio books. Now I've finally published a novel on Smashwords, and I thought I'd better write a bit about what I expected and what actually happened. Some things that I thought would be easy turned out to be fairly difficult, but some aspects of the process have surpassed my expectations.

First, let me make it clear that I do not expect to get rich by selling ebooks. I didn't get rich by selling hard copies through conventional publishers, either. Nothing squelches your high expectations like a royalty statement. But I had some new novels I wanted to publish, and this time around I wanted to be in charge. So I made some rational decisions.

First, I knew I needed a good editor, so I contacted Elinor Mavor, who edited AMAZING STORIES magazine for a few years back in the 80s. She went over my manuscripts with a fine-tooth comb and pointed out the problems. Using her feedback I rewrote, fine-tuned, tweaked, and read the manuscripts aloud until I felt confident that they were well-polished and up to professional standards.

Ellie is a wonderful artist and graphic designer too, so the second thing I did was contract with her to do my covers. Some writers might be really good at designing their own covers, but I'm not – though I recognize a good one when I see it. I love what Ellie came up with. Now I have attractive images connected with my new titles – I can splash them around the web and attract some attention.

I felt I was ready – I figured the next step was to log onto Smashwords and amazon and publish my first title, The Night Shifters. And that's when I ran into the wall. It was like that dream I had about Godzilla (ending with a resounding SPLAT). I found out that a manuscript formatted for printing does not work on an ebook reader. You end up with text in odd places, no indents, no centering, page numbers that no longer relate to reality, one-word pages, and all kinds of other baffling and ugly complications. And fixing it isn't just a matter of going in and dragging stuff back where it belongs. I thought I was going to have to learn HTML and become an expert on Word, just for starters. I could see weeks of hard work stretching ahead of me. I would have cried if my eyeballs hadn't already been so fried.

Then I noticed something in Mark Coker's How To Publish guide on Smashwords: he has a list of formatting professionals he'll email you if you'd rather not struggle with it yourself. He sent me his list, and I contracted with Elizabeth Beeton of B10 Mediaworx (who also writes as Moriah Jovan). She was affordable, and she did a marvelous job formatting the two files I sent her. She is now my go-to gal for all my formatting needs.

So I had all my ducks in a row. I published my first ebook, The Night Shifters, with Smashwords. Very soon I'll be publishing my second ebook with them too: Spirits Of Glory. They have an attractive site, and they have a feature called meatgrinder that renders an ebook into other formats for distribution on major sites like Kobo, Sony, Diesel, Barnes & Noble, and (coming soon!) amazon. This means a book published through Smashwords can be purchased and read in several different formats, on lots of different gizmos (like the Kindle, the Nook, and your iphone, ipad or itouch). One-stop shopping is one click away.

Now it's my job to market my books. I have offered coupons for free copies to my friends on facebook (begging for reviews in return), blogged about my new books, and looked for my name in google-search and contacted sites that mentioned me. I also bought an ad on facebook (and will be doing so again once my ebook makes it onto amazon). It will take time to build an online audience, but I'm nothing if not patient.

I mentioned audiobooks too. My first attempt at recording one on my Garage Band program was a success – except when I tried to turn it into an MP3 file. Then I found out my files were too big. So I get to do it over again in smaller chunks. But I'm not too upset about it – making my own production improved my self-confidence. I haven't learned enough about the process to offer advice about it yet, so I'll stick to what I DO know.

Hire a professional editor to go over your manuscript ($200 to $500, depending on the length of the book). Don't be afraid to contact artists and ask them how much they would charge to do a cover (price varies, but I paid around $500 – and please understand that you're not buying all the rights to that image, just the right to use it for that edition of your book). Once you've got a book and a cover you can be proud of, get it properly formatted ($40 to $75 if you don't have a lot of images, tables, graphs, etc. in the book – anything really complicated may be up to $200, and I have no idea what a graphic novel might be).

Once you've published, understand that there's a fine line between promotion and pestering. Think about the commercials on TV that you always want to mute or speed past. Don't be one of those commercials! Don't make your facebook friends wince every time they see your name in their email.

Even when all publishing was done the old, conventional way, the people who had successful writing careers were not always the people who were the most talented. They were the people who persisted. So in a nutshell: Learn your craft. Contract with Professionals.

Persist!

About The Night Shifters

“Hazel – promise me you won't give up on your dreams.”

“I won’t, Mom!” Hazel swears, assuming Mom means that she should try to be whatever she wants to be – a doctor, or lawyer, or even a mermaid. Hazel is just nine, but she really means to keep that promise.

Seventeen years later, she wonders if she’s broken it – or maybe just failed to fully realize it, because she hasn’t become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a mermaid. Or anything much, really. Yet, in one way, she has kept her promise – because Hazel is a Grand Champion Dreamer. When she’s asleep, she dreams a dazzling universe full of heroes and monsters, princesses and goddesses, cities and temples and gardens that make the most wonderful places on Earth seem dull in comparison.

During the day, she does what she has to do to pay the bills. At bedtime, she turns in, confident that she will dream, and that the sun will come up in the morning. So on the evening of her last day, she embraces the night wholeheartedly and drifts into the universe of her imagination.

But when the alarm goes off, she opens her eyes to darkness. The sun hasn’t come up, the world outside has become a City of Night, and the dwellers there are Night Shifters – gods and elves, daemons and djinns, dreamers and wizards. All of them have their own agendas, all of them are chasing Hazel – and as she fights to understand this world of dreams and her place in it, she can’t help remembering what her mother said.

And she wonders. All those years ago, when she swore to never give up on her dreams, did she really understand what she was promising?

The Night Shifters

Just a brief announcement here – I've published my new novel on Smashwords: The Night Shifters (by Emily Devenport). Smashwords will feature it on their site, but (best of all) they have converted the document to different formats and will distribute it to other online vendors like amazon and Sony. My next blog will describe the steps I had to take to reach this point, and profile the professional folks who helped me along the way with cover art, editing, and document conversion. I hope to have an audio version available soon – that bit of techno-wizardry is still making my head spin.

Please take a look at The Night Shifters – I opted for the sampling feature, so you can read up to 50% of the book and decide whether you like it enough to shell out the $.99 cover price. It's a humorous Urban Fantasy that puts a whole new spin on the advice that you should never give up on your dreams . . .

Ancient Astronauts My @## !

Reality TV shows usually leave me cold, but one show has captured my attention: Chasing Mummies, with Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass. Dr. Hawass is a leading authority on Egyptology – that would be enough to get me to watch his show. But he also reminds me of my Uncle George, who was an Egyptian Greek. I get a serious bang out of watching him run his graduate students all over the Egyptian landscape.

But it's not all fun and games. The graduate students often provoke some well-deserved wrath. I can understand that the students seem extremely ill-prepared for the demands of field work. Even if you've worked sites in the U.S. And Central/South America, Egypt is a challenge unto itself. These students are lucky to have Dr. Hawass to guide them through this extraordinary experience. What actually surprised me the most was when one student, after crawling into the heart of the Great Pyramid at Giza, expressed the theory that the pyramid was built by ancient astronauts. Dr. Hawass was thunderstruck – but only for a second. Then the Wrath of Hawass descended upon this benighted young student. “That is stupid,” Hawass replied, and went on to thoroughly and succinctly refute the Ancient Astronauts hypothesis.

I could only shake my head when I thought about this privileged young student, who must have earned excellent grades in order to qualify for the program that delivered him to Egypt, just so he could voice his lame-brained hypothesis to one of the foremost authorities in Egyptology. Yowza. What was this guy thinking? How could he call himself an archaeologist?

But my own knowledge of the subject was lacking when I posed that question. I've since learned a bit about another wacky hypothesis that used to be all the rage in the Americas: that the mounds found all over the Eastern U.S. could not possibly have been built by Native Americans. Some lost super-race must have built them, after which they either moved on or were murdered by the Native Americans currently living in the area. Educated, intelligent people formulated this hypothesis. By expressing his belief in Ancient Astronauts to Dr. Hawass, the young graduate student was continuing a tradition of confabulation and disrespect that has always haunted the field of archaeology.

Math and the hard sciences can be proven with mathematical formulae and experimentation, both in the lab and in the field. But archaeology is one of those fields that has to combine the scientific method with a certain amount of imagination and inspiration. The evidence left for archaeologists to examine has often been tampered with and plundered by yahoos, idiots, and charlatans – they have to work very hard to preserve the integrity of sites. These are smart and dedicated people, and they try to err on the side of caution.

But intelligence has a negative side: arrogance. Smart people often underestimate other people. When early archaeologists began to survey the mounds and study their grave goods, they had little or no respect for the Native Americans who lived in the area. They reversed the scientific process and came up with a “theory,” then looked for evidence that would support it. When they found evidence to refute that poorly tested and unproven “theory,” they explained it away or stuffed it out of sight into drawers. Eventually, skull measurements confirmed that Native Americans living in the area were descended from the Mound Builders. Grave goods and excavated sites presented evidence that the pattern of agriculture, economy, and technology changed in the area, shifting the people into a different pattern of living.

The premise behind the Ancient Astronauts hypothesis is even dopier than the confabulations surrounding the Mound Builders. It is simply that ancient men weren't smart enough to engineer and build the pyramids. I would have thought this silly notion no longer held any power over students interested in archaeology. I'm sorry to learn that it does.

Visit Tonto Natural Bridge, Arizona

We all have wonders in our back yard that we never had the time to visit -- mostly because we didn’t make the time. Last year I resolved to stop running the rat race so hard and visit those places. Since then I’ve hiked in some ancient mountains near Phoenix: Piestewa Peak, South Mountain, McDowell Mountains, and The Superstitions. I’ve driven highways 60, 77, 87, and 17 past amazing roadcuts that reveal sedimentary layers -- twisted, intruded by volcanic sills and dikes, metamorphosed by a landscape that was accreted, uplifted, compressed, and/or stretched.

I’ve seen schist and igneous rocks that formed when terranes were sutured to North America about 1.7 billion years ago. They are topped by layers of limestone, sandstone, and shale that formed in the Paleozoic Era, when Arizona was covered by an inland sea. I’ve seen footprints of dinosaurs who walked in muddy riverbanks of rare streams that cut through a desert dominated by dunes. I’ve hiked through floodplains and basins full of sediment and conglomerates -- and ash from volcanoes. And now I’ve seen something everyone in Arizona should visit: Tonto Natural Bridge. Better visit soon, because it may close because of funding problems before you get the chance.

The oldest visible rocks under the natural bridge are the deep red rocks that look like solid play-dough.

They are actually a volcanic rock known as rhyolite, a mixture with a lot of silica in it, stained red by hematite. They are generally thought to have formed about 1.7 billion years ago. A sandstone layer formed on top of this parent rock -- then the beds were faulted and tilted. Limestone formed up against that tilted ridge during the Paleozoic Era when a shallow sea covered parts of North America. You can find fossils from this era in the Payson area and below the Moggollon Rim. Finally, basaltic flows capped the whole shebang when Arizona moved over a hot spot in the mantle, about 30 million years ago.

A fault in the area broke the basaltic cap and allowed it to be eroded, forming a valley. Water from rain and melting glaciers percolated through the limestone and formed a travertine dam in the valley. The trapped water from a creek bored a hole through the travertine, and the bridge formed.

We hiked the Waterfall Trail to a spot where a spring tunneled through the side of the canyon and built new travertine structures with the aid of some moss.

Then we walked around to the Anna Mae Trail and hiked down to the bed of Pine Creek. From there you have to pick your way through and over rocks, but it’s totally worth it. I went ahead of my hiking buddies (who were busily taking pictures), and had the good fortune to see the bridge in what seemed like complete solitude. A waterfall poured over the other side. The sight brought tears to my eyes.

Eventually, hikers from both sides of the bridge caught up with me -- we advised each other about which paths were the least treacherous. We made our way under the bridge and hiked out to the Gowen Trail side of the bridge, then out of the canyon. A storm was building on the horizon as we drove home again, reminding us of the erosional forces that helped form the bridge in the first place.

Arizona is struggling with the some poisonous politics these days -- it’s possible to forget the amazing beauty that surrounds us, and how incredibly lucky we are to live in a state that hasn’t been completely carved up and turned into piles of ash and rubble. State funds to maintain our parks have been raided recently, reduced to almost nothing. If we want to keep these sacred places, we need to craft legislation that won’t allow politicians to raid those funds again. But we also need to visit those places -- pay our fees, buy our year passes, shop in their gift shops, place donations in their boxes, sign up for their classes and events, volunteer for them .

Tonto Natural Bridge only costs $5 to enter! You can drive up out of the heat of Phoenix in about 1 1/2 hours and have the experience of a lifetime.

Whether you live in Arizona or you’re just visiting -- take the time to see Tonto Natural Bridge. You’ll never forget it.