Books by Eric Douglas

Thriller fiction and Non-fiction

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Words of Wisdom

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monk in russia
The unheated cave home of a Russian Orthodox monk lit by a single candle in a small town outside of Moscow.

Earlier this summer, a friend from Russia asked me to review a book that had been translated from Russian into English. She wanted me to just read through it and tweak the translations to be more conversational. I’m barely literate in English, but my friends who are multilingual tell me that one of the greatest challenges in translating written works is maintaining the author’s voice in the new language while making things seem natural.

The book was about Mount Athos, a mountain on a peninsula in Greece that is dotted with Eastern Orthodox monasteries and has been for nearly 1000 years. Reading through Ways of the Holy Mountain I was intrigued by the history and events that shaped the dozens of monasteries and the approximately 1400 monks who live in them today. (It has moved to the top of my bucket list of places to visit.)

If you’ve never been in a holy place that is that old, you’re missing something. Even the harshest non-believer can’t help but feel the decades of human emotion that are imbued on a place like that. While nothing exists in the United States that is that old, you can feel the same power and depth in places like Arlington National Cemetery or the 9/11 memorials in New York or Washington DC. Regardless of your feelings of “religion” and Orthodox versus Catholicism versus Protestantism versus any of the other world religions, you can find respect for these men and the way they choose to live their lives.

All too often, people post “sayings” and thoughts for the day on social media, without really reading them or understanding them—as long as it comes with an interesting picture. I generally ignore all of them. Most of the time you have to question the people quoted and even the content of the quote. I have seen quite a false attributions or changed quotes because someone didn’t exactly like the way it read or tweak it so it better supports their own political leanings.

At the end of the manuscript I reviewed, there was a document that included quotes from many of the monks on the island. I was struck by how many of them were fantastic platitudes that many of us (and I am definitely including myself here) could stand to remember in our daily lives. There was no “twist” to anything, just their feelings. I have copied a few that I liked best. My favorite is the last one…

  • Abba Arsenius said about himself: “After a conversation I often regret, after silence – never”.
  • If you want to learn to speak well and infallibly, first you should learn to keep silence. (Schemamonk Zosimus)
  • If you want to gain peace now and in the future, always say to yourself: “Who am I?” and do not condemn anyone. (Abba Joseph)
  • A Christian is one who takes after Christ in words, deeds and thoughts as much as it is possible for a human being. (St. John of the Ladder)
  • Do not say: “I cannot.” This phrase is not Christian. The Christian word is: “I can do everything,” but not by myself – with the help of our God who strengthens us as Apostle Philip says. (St. Theophanes the Anchoret)
  • Do not like to listen to people about the demerits of others and you will have fewer demerits yourself. (St. Ambrosius of Optina)
  • Do not tell anyone about a good action you are going to do beforehand, just do it. (St. Antony the Great)

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Leaving the “old home place”

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I’ve never been terribly sentimental about “things”. People, yes, but not stuff. With the exception of pictures and a few other mementos, things are just something to collect dust on a shelf and be moved from one place to the next.
It’s an odd feeling this week, though, now that mom has finally decided to sell the house I grew up in. She has lived in that house since 1966, but she decided that it was just too much for her, too big and needed too much maintenance. I don’t blame her and I think it was a smart decision.
Realistically, I haven’t lived in that house for more than 20 years. Still, that house is full of memories from a childhood and a family. There were difficult times: I remember listening to the radio over breakfast before school and hearing them talk about the company my dad worked for. We didn’t know if he was going to have to go on strike with the union. That was in the late 70s and I was all of 10- or 11-years-old. There were good times too. I remember model trains, model cars and model rockets and playing games by the Christmas tree.
That house was a place my friends knew they could come to and hang out. Saturday mornings, it wasn’t unusual for kids to drop in for breakfast or to wake up there. In later years, friends and girlfriends would simply drop in, walk through the front door and say hi. We threw parties there; cookouts and volleyball days in the yard. Mom knew that when the party was over, everyone would pitch in and pick up the trash. When I left for college, I brought friends home to stay there. When a friend’s family moved away from West Virginia but he was still at Marshall, he came home with me for weekends.
Home for me isn’t about a house or even a place. It is family and tradition and friends who are closer to you than family. It is about getting through the bad times, experiencing the good times and being there for all the times in between. I don’t know anything about the people that bought the house. I hope it is a relatively young family so they can begin their lives there. I hope the memories and the joy that grew up in that house over the last nearly 50 years help them get their lives off to a great start.

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Imagining life on a sternwheeler heading down river

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I’ve always been fascinated by the river, river boats and the age of steam in West Virginia. It doesn’t hurt that one of my closest friends, JD Pauley, owns the sternwheeler, Hobby III, so I’ve spent an undo amount of time watching the wheel throw water in the air and imagining life 100 years ago.

 

Yesterday, Jerry Sutphin gave a presentation at the Archives and History Library in the West Virginia Culture Center on The Great Kanawha River and River Transportation in West Virginia. When JD emailed me about the lecture, I immediately knew I was going. I was particularly interested since my new book River Townwill be available on August 12. River Town is a collection of short stories set in West Virginia, on the river, in 1890 when the river was the center of everything. One story in the book features a riverboat captain and his steamboat, the Miss Jayne Marie. 

Sutphin explained that any river west of the Appalachian mountain chain is considered to be a western river. When that term came into use, there were only the original 13 colonies in the United States. For settlers heading west, rivers were the natural highways and the easiest way to get natural resources back to the cities. That commerce to bring salt, coal and timber out of the mountains spurred the development of steam boats and barges carrying everything from apothecaries to zoos and everything in between.
The only problem with riverine commerce was the rivers were seasonal; you couldn’t rely on them to be deep enough to run on year round. In 1884, the federal government began a lock and dam system that maintained the river level at nine feet deep, deep enough for any river boat.
The Great Kanawha River is the only river totally within the boundaries of West Virginia. It is 99 miles long with only 91 miles of that navigable. In spite of its diminutive nature, the commerce that has floated through those locks, and still does, is almost unimaginable. Salt, coal, oil and gas and timber have all moved down the river, through those locks and off to markets around the world.
Originally, there were 10 locks on the river. Eleven were planned, numbered and mapped out, but only 10 were built. In a fit of government logic, #1 was planned for a section of the river above Montgomery, but it was never constructed. Many people are confused about how many locks were on the Kanawha since #11 was built near Point Pleasant. People naturally assume there were 11 locks, according to Sutphin. Later, that number was reduced to three larger dams and two of those were expanded in a third series of changes in the last 20 years.
I kept listening to Sutphin’s lecture, hoping I didn’t hear anything that would make me think “Oh No! I got that wrong” but that moment never came. River Town isn’t a historical work. Rather, it is a collection of fictional stories about the river. Hopefully, though, readers will escape to a time on the river when river boats were king and the only way to get anywhere was by booking passage. And then they will see the river as I see it from the back of a sternwheeler.

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Summer Vacation isn’t always “a trip”

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When school started up in the fall, the first assignment elementary school teachers used to give was to write a paper about “What I did on my summer vacation”. I’m sure it was simply a way to get to know the new crop of students and to shake the rust off of our sun-baked brains. They probably could have cared less what we actually did.

I remember being a little embarrassed at the time when I didn’t have a big event to report on like some of my classmates. Growing up, we didn’t go to “the beach” every summer. I think I was about 11 years old before I saw the ocean for the first time. On the other hand, I do remember a lot of camping, horseback riding, fishing and swimming in my summers. My brother and I did summer 4-H camps and Vacation Bible School and various other activities, mostly intended to keep our mother from pulling her hair out. Those were the things I wrote about in my back to school essay on the first day of school.

As summer breaks from school get shorter and parental work schedules get tighter, I think we try to do “more” in less time. We parents often think about the summer trip without remembering the little activities. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for a summer vacation. I’m all for taking off and going to the beach, digging my toes in the sand and playing in the surf. It is a great excuse to take a break from work, play, nap and relax.

 I just wonder if, in the process of planning the big summer event, we forget about the smaller activities and outings that make summer just as special and just as memorable; the day trips to the parade, the festival or the lake often mean more to us as we look back on our childhood. I know those are the things I think back on now that I have my own children. (I realize there is a fallacy in my logic. I’m just remembering my childhood. If we had taken those big trips, I would probably remember them, too.)

Still, sometimes I think we put too much emphasis on the things that don’t necessarily matter to make up for not emphasizing the things that do. We worry about making sure summer is memorable for our children, without making sure we spend time with them and help them experience life. My daughters have been to the beach a dozen times in their young lives and we are making another trip this summer. Yet, it occurs to me that they haven’t seen many of the things that I saw growing up close to home.

Which one of us had the better childhood?

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Do your part for World Oceans Day

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Considering that yesterday was National Doughnut Day it seems like there is a “day’ for just about everything any more. I think World Oceans Dayis one we should all celebrate and support, though.

 

(From the World Oceans Day website) Why Should I Celebrate World Oceans Day?
  • Generates most of the oxygen we breathe
  • Helps feed us
  • Regulates our climate
  • Cleans the water we drink
  • Offers us a pharmacopoeia of potential medicines
  • Provides limitless inspiration! 

I like to think of the ocean as “mine”. The last one on the list is especially true for me; all of my novels, most of my short stories and most of my non-fiction writing involve the ocean. It inspires me, calms me and excites me all at the same time. When I’m out on the water (or under it) I find myself smiling. Especially when I’m diving, I often daydream and end up writing portions of upcoming stories while I float along.

 

You might be saying to yourself, I don’t live anywhere near the ocean. What does World Oceans Day have to do with me? How do my actions affect the ocean? Taking care of water in your own backyard directly influences the health of the ocean. Pollution, chemicals and litter all make it to the ocean through small streams and watersheds. 

What can I do? Here’s what other people are doing (again from the World Oceans Day site):

  • I promise to bring reusable bags to the grocery store
  • I promise to get a reusable water bottle
  • I promise to take shorter showers.
  • I promise to take public transportation to school/work once a week.
  • I promise to only eat sustainably harvested seafood.
  • I promise to participate in a litter clean-up.
  • I promise to not use toxic pesticides on my lawn.
A couple of the things on this list that I do involve plastic bottles and bags. I make a concerted effort to recycle all of the plastic bottles (along with paper and aluminum) that come through my house and I try to always use reusable shopping bags at the store. I have seen those flimsy shopping bags littering pristine beaches and water bottles coating shore lines in my travels. It makes me sick to see them and I don’t want to contribute to the problem.

A good friend of mine always referred to the ocean as “hers” and she has worked her entire professional career to protect it and support ocean causes. That’s where I picked up the phrase and it influences my everyday actions. Honestly, I think we would all be better off if we all thought of the ocean as “mine”.

 

If you want to learn more about how your own efforts at home can support World Oceans Day and the health of the ocean that provides life for all of us, visit the website and make a promise.

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