A Long Way From Home by Steven Mulak

A LONG WAY FROM HOME

A Baseball Story

(Work in progress)

Here’s a glimpse at a novel on which I’m currently at work. It’s a baseball story that takes place 50 years in the future. Baseball has split into two games: The traditional baseball as played in 1950, which is not very popular, and modern baseball, called “Mo-ball,” that has offensive and defensive squads (the logical extension of today’s designated hitter rule) electronic umpiring, betting, cheerleaders, and a computer chip in the ball. Moball is hugely popular. 

My protagonist is a baseball player. Before the novel is over, he will play third base for both the San Francisco Giants as well as the local Mo-ball team, the California Gold Rush. He is, as you can tell by the excerpt, also a fly fisherman and a poet. (I will attempt to get clearance to use the poems of Gordon Lightfoot in my novel.)

Writing about the future is full of challenges, since no matter what new thing I might envision, it has a house-that-Jack-built relationship with everything else. What will cell phones evolve into? Will GPS permit driverless automobiles? Will the post office survive? How about something as universal as paper—will that survive 50 years into the future? I’m having fun wrestling with these ideas.

The excerpt below seems to be finished. I’ll post more passages as they are ready, so stay tuned. (And if you have any ideas, don’t be shy: I’d like to hear from you.)

Excerpts:

There was a gibbous moon hanging translucently in the clear morning sky. In the quiet, the spruces lining the opposite bank of the Miramichi seemed to spring from their own reflections. Between casts, Gray absently investigated the river surface, but couldn’t find the phantom moon’s reflection in the water.

He was humming to himself. Someone who knew him would recognize it as a sign he was relaxed—his mind and body were focused on the same problem. His skill with a fly rod was such that his attention could be focused beyond the physical element of his actions and he could concentrate instead on their employ. So he hummed.

At the end of the drift, Gray lifted the rod tip and snaked the line from the reflections. It came up like a pencil mark and started back over his shoulder with the light leader in its wake. It uncoiled behind him—a folded arm extending. There came a brief moment when the straightened line hung in the air, then—before the laws of gravity could intercede—Gray flicked the rod forward again and the pencil mark followed. It rolled out before him, tugging the leader along behind it. The excess line he had stripped-in was released to flow through the rod guides, lengthening the loop as it began to lay down in the reflections on the river, continuously unrolling until the end was reached and the near-invisible leader was flipped forward and fell on the river’s surface. A furry bit of gray and bright orange was at the very end. It made a tiny splash and sank from sight in the tea-colored water fifty meters beyond the rocks where he stood.

As the current took both line and the unseen fly, Gray moved the rod in a series of short jabs to impart a swimming motion to the fly as it was swept first along the flow and then through the eddy immediately behind a submerged boulder. He twitched the rod tip and kept a small tension on the line as he stripped-in the slack with his left hand, but the current soon carried the bulk of the line beyond his target, and the brief few moments when a salmon might mistake the fly for a swimming minnow were over.

At the end of the drift, he lifted the rod tip and snaked the line from the water and started the cycle again.

As they so often did in idle moments, Gray’s thoughts drifted to Joan. In his mind’s eye she was again in his dim room, watching him. Joan had always seemed to get a small pleasure from simply observing him as he went about the business of his life. It was, he knew, a form of flattery. 

Having written poems all his life, his mind transcribed his thoughts almost of its own volition;

Softly she cries

Sweetly she lies, never sleeping.

He usually began with a bit of alliteration, and this time the two “ly” words set-up the structure of the poem. He hummed as he mulled over the poem’s beginning. 

And then, because he had let his attention lapse, something struck the fly. He had permitted the line to belly, and in the instant that he tried to set the hook the force of his pull was lost in the slack line.

He reeled in to check his fly, but his thoughts went back to the rhyme scheme.

Softly she cries

Sweetly she lies, never sleeping.

Something something something in my keeping

Softly she comes in the night.

When he inspected the fly, the barb on the hook was still sharp and the leader knot appeared un-frayed and solid.

Streamers were designed to resemble a baitfish when underwater, but they needed to be in motion to attract a salmon. Out of the water, the same streamers had a unique beauty that attracted fishermen. And, since he was in Canada, the streamer he was using was made from real feathers and fur. There was innocuous orange chenille and gold tinsel wrapped around the hook’s shank, but the hackle was made of real squirrel hair, with golden pheasant crest as the tail and topping and hackle — real stuff, not the plastic imitation he was forced to use at home.

He continued humming as he began a new cast. When he absently looked again for the moon’s reflection, two men in a canoe were plying the river, drifting in and out of the current as they made their way downstream. Obviously, it was a guide and a guide’s client. As they approached, the man in the bow of the canoe reeled his line in out of deference to Gray’s claim on this particular stretch of water. Gray put his rod aside and waited on the rocks for them to pass. 

The fellow in the bow of the canoe had a shock of white hair showing beneath his cap. He waved to Gray. “What are you using?”

“A Lady Joan.”

“They’re taking them on Colonel Bates below the falls, and I took a big fish yesterday on a Green Ghost — it went three Ks.” As if to confirm his statement, the old man held up the fly he was using. 

Gray smiled and nodded. He had those patterns in his fly box, along with dozens of other. Everyone had their own preferences.   

In the stern of the canoe, the guide’s attention was focused on the water as they approached the fast channel in front of the rocks. The older man in the bow looked Gray over with interest. What he must have seen was a sight out of the last century; Gray was wearing his grandfather’s stocking-footed waders, patched and re-patched but still serviceable. He had an old-fashioned graphite rod and a fishing vest that still carried a label that read L.L.Bean,  even though that company had been out of the outdoor gear business for decades. Outside of the small thermo-electronic knotter dangling from his vest, all of his equipment might have been seen on the Miramichi a half-century before. 

“Aren’t you hot in those old fashioned rubber boots?” the client asked.

“I inherited my big feet from my grandfather.” Gray lifted his right foot as if to illustrate his point. “Size fourteen by the old system. You can’t get them this big any more.”

With understated expertise, the guide made a small adjustment to the canoe’s angle, and it slid effortlessly through a riffle of white water and into the broad flat below. The white-haired fisherman gave Gray a last look as the canoe slid past. “From the looks of you, I’d have thought you were an older man.” He winked as he said that.

Then the white-haired client returned his attention to fishing, and shook his rod tip to payout some line. 

Gray watched the canoe for a few moments until it was out of earshot. “So would I,” he muttered. The canoe continued to drift with the current, hardly making a ripple as it merged with the reflections in the distance.

His thoughts returned to where they had been five minutes previous, and in his imagination he recalled Joan, and the scent of her cologne.

Her fragrance all in my keeping

That’s it, he thought. From his vest pocket he brought out a notepad. With the river burbling the world’s oldest lullaby in the background, he scrawled the four lines of the poem across the screen. There was more to come, but he needed to get this beginning down.

Then he stood, made a false cast, and laid the fly down once more into the reflections at the head of fast water. He heard himself humming.

*  *  *

          In his apartment, she looked at what he had been reading. It was an old book with the dust jacket patched with tape; Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam.

          She turned a few pages. “What’s this about, Gray?”

          “A classic pennant race in the American League between the Yankees and the Red Sox in ‘49.”

          “I thought Washington won the American League pennant for the past few years?”

          “This pennant race took place in NINTEEN-forty-nine.”

          She looked a little more closely at some of the old black-and-white photos, and muttered, “I guess so.” Then, almost as an afterthought, she asked, “This was before airplanes were invented, isn’t it?”

          He thought for a minute. “No. This was after World War II, so they had planes, all right. But in the book the teams are still traveling by railroad, so airplanes must have still been new around that time.”

          She turned a few pages. “How about cars? Did they have automobiles in 1949?”

          “I don’t know — They must have, but they don’t mention them in the book. Things changed pretty quickly during that part of the 1900s. I know they drove gasoline-powered cars for about a hundred years before hydrogen, but I’m not sure just when that got started.”

          She paused to look at some black-and-white photos. “The men are all wearing neckties, but I don’t see any pictures of women… Other than this old grandmotherly type.”

“Women?”

She looked up. “I have a picture of my mother’s grandmother. On the back it’s dated 1982. She’s wearing those old fashioned blue jeans and a pair of high heeled shoes. I was wondering if women wore those all the time back then.”

          After a moment, she turned the book toward him and pointed to a full-page photo. “Here’s that Ted Williams person I’ve heard you mention. He looks like an ordinary sort of guy here.” 

“He was—at least, he looked ordinary.” After a moment, he added, “That’s the thing with baseball—the players pretty much look like the people in the stands. They’re not giants or circus freaks. They don’t look like they had been giraffes in a previous incarnation, and they don’t look like muscle men who could tear your arm off just by shaking your hand. You can look out on the ball field and imagine yourself there. You can identify with the guy you’re rooting for. You can even talk to him—there’s plenty of time for that, and the fans are right down there on the field. Baseball is a game that rewards skill—A bigger guy isn’t automatically better than a little guy. It’s all about skill. And Ted Williams had plenty of that, even if he looked ordinary.”

*  *  *  *  *

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