Research for any story comes in many forms. For my current teen novel project, I’m having to enter a world in which I have very little experience and knowledge, despite years of work in the museum field. I’m having to transport myself back to the 1940s, during World War II, and into the heart and mind of a bombing crew. Aside from sorting through a boxload of dusty photos, mouse-chewed letters, and a diary from 1945, I decided to transport myself physically through time and space by going for a ride in a B25. 

I searched online, emailed back forth with a few folks around the country, and finally landed on the web page of the good folks at Warbirds Unlimited in Mesa, Arizona. Their motto is “live history,” and let me tell you in all my nearly 20 years in the museum field, I haven’t discovered anything quite like it. Historians use their imaginations a lot, but this is as close as you’ll get to traveling to another time. Consider the factors:

The environment (it’s a “working” but authentic restoration of the original right down to the seat belts), the noise (it’s a total mind-buzz requiring the use of serious ear muffs), the altitude (about 3,00-5,000 feet low), the motion (enough skittering side-to-side and up-and-down to make breakfast perk-o-late), the smell (a little diesel, a little metal, a lot of human sweat, a little nephew puke), and finally the vastness of the view (about 300 degrees in the tail gunner position). 

I sat in the tail gunner position during the last part of ride, breathing deeply and trying to tap into what my dad would have thought being stuck out there in the tail for 59 missions over the mountains and valleys of Italy. If every great story is built of character emotion, surely this story will be about pride, determination, resignation, and being scared shitless a huge percentage of the time. 

The flight was “only” 30 minutes, but all of us agreed (my niece and two nephews who had come along) that it was truly the longest 30 minutes of our lives. By the end, both Dylan and I were carrying bags of barf (no more scrambled eggs for me or a while), and all of us were exhausted. Just that little taste gave us a feel for what those bomber crews must have felt like (times about 1000) as they set out on every mission not knowing if they would live or die. 

No matter what my writer friends say, I wouldn’t pass up this experience as an means to tap into the emotions of my characters for anything. In fact, when I think of a B25, I’m still a little queasy. No wonder my dad never wanted to talk about the war…just kidding. But in truth, I’m a lot like him, figuring out how to handle the literal ups and downs for whenever I might have the chance to go again. People really can pull off amazing feats when they have no choice. 

Well folks, that’s it for this post. Special thanks to Ray, Leon, Bill, and pilot Jack Fedor of Warbirds Unlimited for making this experience both well orchestrated and extremely enlightening (all four of us nominate Crew Chief Bill for Sainthood). And to my brave niece and nephews, Haley, Krister, and Dylan, many thanks for helping me “tap the gramps.” This story will be richer for it, baby! 

Coming in Part 2: Our visit to the CAF Aircraft Museum to see their recently restored B25J, “Maid in the Shade.”

Hey All,

I came across this poem while reading Laura Purdie Salas’s children’s poetry book AND THEN THERE WERE EIGHT: Poems about Space. It’s about a very cool THING.

Aiming High

Silver arrow to the skies, you’re my mighty mirrored eyes

Finding stars and Saturn’s bands, you place them gently in my hands.

Okay, so what’s that thing? 

Think about it. It’ll come to you.

Laura has a few other books of children’s poetry out that are lots of fun, including:

DO BUSES EAT KIDS? Poems About School

FLASHY CLASHY OH-SO SPLASHY Poems About Color

She was our guest poetry speaker in the Craft of Children’s/YA class through the MFA program of the Whidbey Writers Workshop, and she was great! Poetry forms have always befuddled me, but between her guest presentations and A KICK IN THE HEAD: AN EVERYDAY GUIDE TO POETIC FORMS by Paul B. Janeczko a whole new world (complete with singing angels, blues brothers, and pickle bucket bangers) opened up for me.

I’m still no genius poet, but I have a much greater understanding of the challenges of both forms and free verse. Pick up those books at the library or bookstore, and you will too.

A Tall Ship Extraordinare

I had seen the massive Columbian flag billowing from her stern. At night, as I drove down Tacoma’s Dock Street, I had seen the lights strung amidst her masts and yardarms. They beckoned, as sailing ships and the sea do. She was the tallest Tall Ship I’d ever seen and there was a familiarity about her too. I searched my mind to figure out why.

It came to me as I stood on the dock studying her, half way through my evening walk. She looked like a picture I knew, of a ship that was the subject of a story in the upcoming issue of COLUMBIAKids. A bark too, that one had been plying the waters in the 1890s, and word on the ’Net says this one was launched in 1968 specifically for cadet training. At one hundred and seventy-eight feet long, she’s so big she must be guided in and out of the Sound, for (if I heard right) she has no engine accept for her sails.

The Gloria sports a crew of about 135, and I’d seen the cadets walking in groups along the sidewalk the night before. I saw a handful of them now. Those on board were dressed in their “whites” to meet the public, while carloads of others were carrying bags and boxes of American “treasures” aboard. Cups-o-noodles, backpacks, play stations, toys, and tennis shoes to be buried amidst berths and bunks down below. As I stood in line to go aboard, a volunteer entertained us with stories of cadet adventures. They’d been supplied a van and driver, and when asked where they wanted to go, they all cried “Walmart.” So, to Walmart they went. When asked where they wanted to go to lunch, they cried “Hooters!” And so to Hooters they went. Rumor has it, they garnered much attention there.

Speaking of hooters, I tried to catch a glimpse of the Gloria’s figurehead, but the dock was too short and I not nimble enough to leap into a passing boat to catch a waterside view. I find figureheads a bit magical as they embody the spirit of the ship. I imagine the Gloria’s figurehead is as strong as the bronze emblem that is apparently the symbol of the Spanish Armada. Once I stepped aboard, I paused to study the huge polished bronze plague at mid-ship that bears the Spanish or Columbian seal. In it, is a crossed combo consisting of a sword, a quill, and a trident—intriguing ode to the Greek god Poseidon, ruler of the sea.

I walked the spotless teak decks from bow to stern, wondering at the tremendous masts, the web of complex rigging, and the aft deck that was large enough to host its own shipside version of Dancing With the Stars. Speaking of stars, I stopped to listen to a cadet explain, through a visitor who translated for his group, that while they had all the best navigation equipment aboard, they still learned to rely on the stars. Each sailor was trained to look to the stars first, electronics second. And the stars are never so bright as on a clear, dark sea.

As I padded down the steep stairs to the dock, I looked again to the pristine green and white paint, the Columbian-king sized blue, red, and yellow flag, and the metal hull. But it was the comment about the stars that stuck with me. I left the dock thinking that maybe, if we all made a practice of looking to the stars first, we might one day clear the air enough to see them.

Second in a set of essays about one of Tacoma, Washington’s abandoned bridges.

Ramps to Nowhere

by S.T. Lile

In an apparently continuing effort to gentrify Dock Street and the Thea Foss Waterway, they’ve improved the sidewalks all the way to the base of the 11^th Street/Murray Morgan Bridge. They’re wider. There are bolt-studded concrete stumps where streetlights will one day be. Saplings have been planted in yawning squares, their roots reaching for fertile ground. Rising above that last bit of new sidewalk are the steel legs of the bridge. Some grey, some green, some spotted with rust and moss, the legs press skyward to support the span of roadway high above. Yet laced among them are a series of dangling ramps that hang useless and forgotten due to the amputation of their active ends. What were they for?

The answer was difficult to find—and there may be more pieces out there still—but old photographs and a morning of urban archaeology revealed the basic story. The clues—old dots in a connect-the-dot urban mystery—were there, hidden beneath the street surface and in the raw edges of the aged ramps themselves. Those crackled layers of wood, asphalt and steel pointed to a second use for the bridge structure, that of access to what had once been a line of Dock Street flourmills on the waterfront below. Hundreds of people worked in those mills until one by one the mills burned and failed to be rebuilt. Albers Mill, blocks away and transformed into loft apartments, is a lone survivor.

I knew about the flourmills from photographs found at the Tacoma Public Library. First I searched for pictures of the bridge itself. Then for Dock Street, the road that runs beneath it. Then for Cliff Street, Bayside Avenue, and Schuster Parkway—all streets that do or did once run perpendicular to the bridge’s 11^th Street entrance. I found all sorts of photos—floods of pedestrians walking to work over in the tide flats, Dock Street flour mill workers, postcard shots of the bridge’s mid-span lifted to allow the entrance of Old Ironsides, and a few distant cityscapes showing a ramp sliding down from the underpinnings of the bridge to the street below. Those photographs confirmed my suspicion that cars had once sullied their way from one level to the next on a switch back route beneath the bridge.

It’s been a long time, however, since the ramps have felt the burn of rubber tires. Based on the photos, it’s been a good 30-40 years. This morning as I hiked the stairway from docks to bridge, I marveled at the tenacity of Tacoma’s flora. A sword fern fanned out from a crack in the stairway roof support. Moss blanketed whole stretches of buckled asphalt, willing it into fertile soil for grass and blackberry vines. Pigeon poop and rust-defying paint mingled on the metal supports, camouflaging the original latticework of the ramps’ siderails. Nature is winning.

And after 95 years, perhaps that’s as it should be. One look upward from the lower level of stairs, and you have to fight the vertigo that rickety heights inspire. A train passes on the tracks below and the whole structure shimmies. The pigeons flutter. The wood planks under the buckling asphalt creak. You know then why the bridge is closed to cars.

Once at the top, I walk along the pitted roadway now blocked with orange striped barrels and concrete barriers. I’m looking for what I’ve missed twenty walks before—the clue that confirms my suspicion that the ramps once joined Cliff Street for cars and pedestrians alike. Steps to the right of the bridge beckon. I follow them down below the surface of the bridge to a forgotten tunnel that slides past a reeking dumpster and reaches, if only in my imagination, for that old dangling, rotten ramp. I can see the dots of road and ramp connected now, despite the concrete supports of Schuster Parkway. Cars on one side, people on the other. It had been a clever solution for accessing the waterfront far below.

Although a quiet relic now that the new 509 bridge is open, the Murray Morgan still owns the waterway. Tall ships must call ahead to have the bridge lifted as its operator has been reassigned to Hood Canal. Its metal skeleton stretches prominently from shore to shore, accented by an operator’s house and a little guard shack. The walls of the shack are streaked with graffiti and a flagger’s SLOW sign peeks through windows blurry with grime. But the bridge still stands, clues to its age evident to those who look.

And one doesn’t have to look far. Nineteen twelve appears on the grayed-out commemorative plaques at either end of the bridge. Nineteen fifty-six is imprinted in the concrete balustrades at the tide flat end. Built and modified over time, the Murray Morgan faces potential death despite the efforts of Tacoma’s city council. Rumor has it that certain council members chained themselves to the bridge in an effort to save it, but I can’t say whether that’s true. All that’s visible to me now are ramps to nowhere, except, perhaps, back through time.

First in a set of essays about one of Tacoma, Washington’s abandoned bridges.

Snow and Wings: Mystery on the 11^th Street Bridge

by S.T. Lile

Finally, it was the wings—wing after torn wing—that made me look up. When I walk, I usually look down. Down at the new paving in front of my apartment building, down at the gravel-strewn construction zone nearby, down at the wooden planks of the boardwalk edging the Thea Foss waterway, and down at the broken pavement and cordoned-off sidewalks of the 11^th Street Bridge. I’d climbed up there on a set of wood and metal steps that pass the decrepit underpinnings of a bridge understandably now closed—to cars that is. Feet are fair game if you don’t mind the wings and heads; bird parts strewn across the abandoned roadway like a cemetery of fallen angels.

That morning, as I perched on my balcony fastening snowflake lights to the metal gridwork, it snowed. They were tiny flakes, but after a cold dry night, they were actually sticking. Accumulating like powered sugar on the concrete plaza of the Museum of Glass next door, the snowflakes lingered there at five feet above sea level long enough for me to remember how much I love the snow.  So, I’d decided to go for a walk and watch the snowfall from high up on the bridge.

As I reached the top of the stairs, a lone figure shuffled toward town, dark pants and tan coat soaked with grime. I walked the other way—over the bridge, toward the Tacoma tide flats filled with warehouses, pulp mills, and shipping yards. It was then that I noticed the wings. Wings are feathers not food. Especially when an abundance of pigeons roost nearby—and you have baby chicks to feed, and you’re a falcon. I remembered the peregrine falcons that got great press when they took up residence on the counterweights almost a decade ago. Evidence suggests they are still there, still hungry, and still hunting.

But even with a viable explanation for their presence on the bridgeway, the wings still haunted me. In my last pass across the bridge—I’d lingered on the span far longer than I’d intended, surveying the worn waterfront in the quiet of a snowy Sunday—the Lone Bridge Keeper—for that’s what I’d come to call him—returned in a flurry of wild scratching around the neck and chest of his cast-off Carhartt. We kept a wide berth but swapped greetings as our paths crossed, two strangers on a silent bridge. Why was he there? Why then, in that very moment?

A few days later, snow had turned to rain, but I went walking anyway. The 11^th Street Bridge provided welcome shelter for about ten steps as I passed beneath it. I had no desire to hike the stairs and cross the bridge in the pouring rain, but that didn’t keep the snowy morning out of my mind. In a strange Skellig* moment, I imagined the Lone Bridge Keeper glance behind him as he reached for a pair of freshly fallen wings. He slung them over his shoulder, shrugged into them, and disappeared into the bridge’s heights.

Months later when I walked the bridge again, there wasn’t a pair of wings to be found. The Lone Bridge Keeper had vanished too, gone to wherever snow goes in summer.

*SKELLIG is a story by David Almond about a boy who discovers a lost and sick angel hiding in a tumble-down garage.

Have you ever wondered what the inside of an ancient Egyptian tomb looks like? If so, you need you check out the Thebian Mapping Project web site at http://www.thebanmappingproject.com.

Thebes is the ancient name for modern-day Luxor (Al Uqsur in local and Google terms) which sits on the east bank of the Nile River far south of Cairo. Nearby sprawl the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens. The Thebian Mapping Project web site lets you journey there not only through the lens of scholarly expertise, but with views and maps of the various tombs that give you a sense of the place no other web site has mastered. 

In the “About” section of the web site, you’ll find a brief introduction and explanation of the project as it was conceived by Dr. Kent Weeks and his artist wife Susan Weeks. “Since its inception in 1978, the Theban Mapping Project (TMP, now based at the American University in Cairo) has been working to prepare a comprehensive archaeological database of Thebes. With its thousands of tombs and temples, Thebes is one of the world’s most important archaeological zones.”

Their work opens our eyes not only to the wonders of these ancient tombs, but to the importance of working in league with governments and institutions to preserve them–and antiquities of all sorts. Exploring ancient funerary practices and religious centers can also help us open our minds and hearts to different ways of interacting with the world and the people and objects in it. 

The Thebian Mapping Project is a journey you won’t forget.