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Show RTVER starts on the book during the previous year and knew what a difficult task lay ahead, but now at Lonestar the book was positively a pleasure to write. In the clear mornings I'd start writing as soon as I'd climbed out of bed and work until it hurt too much to keep typing. I felt sure that I was working on a piece of real literature. Writing a book is a lot like building a house. Both are vast tasks that never really end, though the feeling of accomplishment gets better by the day. Chapters are like posts and beams, words are nails, and pages add up like boards covering framing. There was great satisfaction in watching my creation grow. The heart of my story was built around an encounter with the towboat America: in the cliff-hanging finale, the adventurers' raft was destroyed by the great towboat, a piece of symbolism that I figured would have made old Melville jealous. At the tender age of twenty years I was prepared to take western literature by storm. Strained by our summer adventures, Rosie and I lived apart. In Lompoc at another remote locale in the Santa Cruz Mountains, she converted a redwood water tank into a cabin. We still spent a lot of time together at Lonestar because the water tank was only slightly drier as a cabin than it had been as a water tank, and we were still in love. I was having my first profound encounters with solitude and isolation, and it was always a comfort to see Rosie drive up in the hysterical Volkswagen that she'd traded for her ten-speed. We went through many ups and downs, but Rosie kept me in groceries, a fact I still appreciate even though she made me pay her back. The feeling that I was living right on the edge, at the exact precipice of life convinced me that I wasn't going to live very long. The feeling became especially intense while working on the book. I was pretty sure I'd die before finishing it. -125- |