Point Last Seen

About a week ago my wife’s diet club, TOPS, held a Christmas luncheon at a local restaurant. Unfortunately, spouses of club members were welcome. I hate parties, but I knew this meant a lot to my wife, so out of my hole I crawled.

About 30 of us sat gabbing, around a long, narrow table. A finger of restlessness clawed my gut, as there was something at home I had been deeply engrossed in, that I wanted so much to return to.

I found myself warding off the usual assortment of flibbertigibbets, Nosy Parkers, and loud drunks. I did my best to suppress my inner misanthrope, while surveying this party for a kindred spirit who might share my wonkish taste for cerebral communication.

I spotted a candidate. This spirit sat opposite me, and about three chairs to the left. At first I wasn’t sure if the candidate was male or female, until I heard her feminine voice. She was middle-aged, had a heavy, husky build, with a large, square face that surrounded tiny spectacles.

She spoke with those around her sporadically, thoughtfully, and briefly, yet with the gravitas of an anvil. Just my type of conversationalist. I said something in her direction, to grab her attention, and it came across as awkward as the oblique acreage that separated us. I looked like a fool and gave up, contenting myself with the pursuit of staring downward and studying my napkin.

A party game ensued, called Who Am I? We were given clues about various club members’ lives, and asked to guess which member it was. One of the clues stood out like a unicorn.

“I was a Search and Rescue volunteer at Joshua Tree National Park. And then I moved to the Kalahari desert to research subsistence tracking,” the party leader proclaimed, as she read the clue from the paper. Everyone was stumped. “Hannah,” the leader finally revealed (pronouncing it “Hon-noh”).

Wow! I thought. Now there’s someone I’d like to have a conversation with. “Who’s that Kalahari desert person?” I asked my wife, sitting next to me.

“Oh, that was Hannah,” and she pointed at the husky lady with gravitas, whom I’d so awkwardly and unsuccessfully attempted to ensnare in dialogue just a few minutes earlier.

Hannah heard us and looked over at me. My opening! And our conversation began.

She was a challenge. She revealed herself in short sentences. But each sentence was an enticing breadcrumb that led my wife and I, and those around her, on and on, deeper into her personal history.

Hannah had come to our desert to get away from people. Yes! A fellow misanthrope! Tell us more, Hannah!

Her children had been abducted. Twice. What? Was Hannah actually a crazy nut? I mean, whose children get abducted twice? Ah, but it was her estranged ex-husband who had done the abducting. And it was our eccentric local judge who had given this ex-husband unsupervised visitation rights, after the first abduction. Yes, now we understood.

But Hannah exhibited no bitterness toward the judge. Or toward her ex-husband, whom she made a point to say something positive about after I made a sarcastic comment about him. Here was a deep spirit indeed. One who could find the beauty in any soul, no matter how obscured by the dark shadows of their heart.

Hannah mentioned graduate school, which led me down the tangent of her education. I love educated people when they’re as down-to-earth as her. She had a Masters Degree in Anthropology and a PhD in History.

Poor Hannah. It seemed to me that she had invested in an expensive education that was highly unlikely to pay for itself in monetary remuneration. Yet what an adventuresome life. “You’ve really lived!” my wife noted.

“You could write a book,” I added.

“I have written a book. Several books,” Hannah answered.

Another breadcrumb. More inquiries. And more enticing information.

This was no everyday Hannah. This was Hanna Nyala, author of the books, Point Last Seen, and Leave No Trace.

Click for Amazon listing.

Point Last Seen: A Woman Tracker’s Story had first been published in 1997, and is an autobiographical account of Hannah’s experiences as a tracker for the National Park Service’s Search and Rescue operations. And not only was she a tracker in this memoir, but she was also tracked. By her ex-husband.

Point Last Seen was highly successful for Hannah, and in 1998 became an eponymous, CBS-TV movie, starring Linda Hamilton.

Leave No Trace was also a big success for Hannah, and made into the 2013 action-thriller movie, Heatstroke, starring Stephen Dorff and Svetlana Metkina.

She has also authored the book, Cry Last Heard, a sequel to Leave No Trace.

The diet club members seemed stunned. They suddenly realized that for months, they’d had a celebrity in their midst. The quiet, modestly unassuming, Hannah.

My favorite book genre is the public domain classic, and it takes a lot to get me to stray from that genre. But this was a true story about someone hiking through my backyard. Joshua Tree National Park. And Hannah fascinated me.

So after the party I got on Amazon and forked over $15.21 for Point Last Seen. When it arrived a few days later, it was hard to put down, and I consumed it within 24 hours. Or perhaps I should say, it consumed me.

For me, Point Last Seen was suspenseful, intriguing, outrageous, and funny.

I followed along on pins and needles as she tracked people lost in the desert, including a nine-year-old girl. I felt intrigued as I learned how to track. Or at least, learned how to learn how to track.

I raged at a legal system that sided with her abusive husband and put her and her children in mortal danger. And I laughed at her sense of humor, which had of way of seeping through at unexpected moments throughout the book.

Hannah shares her personal philosophies throughout this memoir, intertwining them with the art of tracking, the terror of being tracked, and poetic descriptions of the Mojave Desert. She left me with the sense that tracking is not just about finding a lost person. It’s also about finding yourself.

Point Last Seen was an inspiring read for me, and so of course I stole many quotes from her book. Here’s a few I’ll share with you, for your own inspiration:

Sitting and thinking and watching. That’s an important part of tracking. Patient attention to tiny, seemingly inconsequential details and differences. Measuring changes, memorizing patterns, asking intuitive questions and looking for their answers, ignoring sand in your eyes or rain on your head but imprinting on your mind the qualities of rain and sand located anywhere else.

As a tracker, I was not only surviving, but following the footprints of other human beings, well on the way to becoming human again myself. Going to the desert to escape people, I quickly began searching for them again in the most literal way imaginable: following their tracks.

Tracking isn’t instinctive or natural. It only begins when you start seeing the ground under your feet instead of just staring blindly at it; when you acknowledge the pain, accept the uncertainty of hope, feel the fear of being saviorless, yet insist not simply on surviving but also on paying attention to the small details of life once again.

Tracking also means learning to walk alongside, caring enough to reach out to other people—a crucial part of surviving when someone wants to make sure you don’t.

“Why didn’t you just leave him?” is one of the first questions our society has for battered women. What we don’t yet want to face is that there are many excellent reasons for staying with an abusive man—and not one completely positive reason for leaving. When you leave, things almost always get much worse, and sometimes they stay that way for a very long time.

No one else can teach you to track, no matter how much money you pay them or how much time you spend with them. Until you put in enough dirt time yourself, you cannot follow footprints on the ground.

Too frequently we notice vague signs, hesitate, and miss the lesson entirely. How many lessons can we miss before we’ve jeopardized the whole search?

Perhaps it’s time to admit that if trackers didn’t pay attention to hindsight, they’d be as lost as guppies on a tree branch . . . Looking backward and sideways while keeping your eyes focused forward is a crucial part of knowing not just where you are—but also where the one you seek may be.

Part of the process of getting lost is losing sight of your reference points without noticing they have disappeared. Then when your memory tries to connect itself to something familiar, it’s gone.

In the final decision to leave, you get out blindly, dumbly, knowing that when (not if) he catches up with you, he’s going to kill you and your children. So why even leave? Because somewhere deep inside, something shattered that last time he choked you—from a place long forgotten, you finally decided that if you had to die, you at least would not do so cowering in a corner of his house.

It’s always the little things, the tiny decisions or nondecisions, that contribute most to losing one’s way.

There’s no rationale behind losing your way, but trackers have to at least try to understand the process before attempting to find someone. Tracking one’s life is much the same. Sometimes you have to figure out why you did a thing in order to know what it was that you actually did. Retracing steps requires getting alarmingly close to what is most unknown to us: who we were at a specific point in time.

The U.S. legal system does not work for people who have no money. And according to the judge in our own case anyway, while it was legal for a man to beat his wife and children, it was illegal for a woman to desert her husband. I had deserted Kevin—and now to fight for the return of my children would require more money than I could ever hope to find.

I’ve always thought that those who manage to do anything for anyone else—regardless of where they happen to be at the moment of “the find”–are heroic. And as for the notion of “outstanding in the field”? To me that means exactly what it says: “out standing in the field”.

By learning to really see and listen to one another, by daring to smile and laugh and, yes, cry together, we can overcome what would destroy us. By joining hands, hearts, and efforts, we make human places where a whisper of hope is indeed equivalent to a done deal.

You can find Point Last Seen on Amazon, by following this link.

And you can learn more about Hannah Nyala at her website: PointLastSeen.com

Alcatraz #1259

Tired, broke, and homeless, Bill Baker found an unlocked car door and got out of the weather. He lay sleeping there for a while, until a rap on the window woke him up. It was the cops.

He got four years in the Oregon State Penitentiary for attempted car theft. Even though he had no intention to steal the car, nor did he possess the keys.

Thus began a lifetime of revolving door incarceration for this 19-year-old.

He was a hell raiser in the Oregon Pen, and spent much of his time in the hole with other hell raisers. Together they attempted a daring, and nearly successful escape.

Soon after being released he was arrested again, in Portland, for stealing cigarettes from a warehouse. But this time he actually succeeded at busting out of jail. He stole a car for real, and fled to Washington state. That was a big mistake, crossing the state line, because there he was caught and charged with a federal crime for the interstate transportation of a stolen auto.

He was sent to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas. But on the long bus ride, wouldn’t you know it? He tried to escape again. They weren’t having any of that, so shortly after he arrived in Leavenworth, this now 23-year-old recidivist was shipped back West, for the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.

That was in 1957. As inmate #1259, he spent the next two-and-a-half years in this supermax. But he was getting older and wiser. He decided to grow up and make something of himself while in Alcatraz. So he learned a career. He found a mentor, who was a fellow inmate, and this man taught him how to write hot checks.

That earned him multiple stints in prison over the course of his working life. But he finally retired from the business of hot check writing at the age of 80, and began a new, more honest career as a celebrated author. He wrote the book, Alcatraz #1259.

Bill Baker is one of only two former inmates of Alcatraz who is still living. And these days he’s a celebrity at Alcatraz Island, rather than a prisoner. He talks to tourists about his experiences in Alcatraz prison, and signs copies of his book they purchase in the gift shop.

Alcatraz #1259 tells about this penitentiary from an inmate’s perspective. Baker’s writing is raw and candid. There’s no sugar coating, but there’s no bitterness either.

He treats guards and wardens with both respect and contempt, in measures he believes are well deserved. He humanizes fellow inmates. He makes no excuses, nor apologies, for his crimes. And he warns of the consequences for choosing a life of crime.

His writing style is folksy, reflecting his rural Kentucky background. And it’s also friendly and laced with humor. Bill Baker comes across as a down-home character that anyone would love to have as a cellmate.

This seems to be his first and only book, and his dearth of writing experience is detectable through occasional misspellings and unpolished grammar. But that only adds to his story’s authenticity, in my view. It leaves the impression he’s not trying to pull anything over on the reader.

Even so, some passages came across to me as startlingly eloquent and thought-provoking. I’ll just steal a few quotes from this ex-convict, to show you what I mean:

“A water tower rises high above Alcatraz Island shivering on long iron legs in the cold January wind.”

“Happiness comes in small packages in prison. But it comes. It has to get through the gray filter of awareness that you’re locked up. But it gets through, somehow, maybe not as powerful as cruising down the road with the wind at your back and all your red lights green, like when you’re free, but it gets through in smaller portions. It’s all relative. To a junkyard dog a bone is pure heaven.”

“Love is a four-letter word in prison, one you don’t use when fuck will do, for you dare not show your weakness in the middle of a jungle where a spear may pierce that most vulnerable place in your heart. And loneliness is a word you never use even in a whisper.”

“I have no love for the law, nor they for me, but me and the law had a congenial dumb and dumber relationship, they being dumb and me being dumber.”

“If you’re thinking about going into hot checks as a criminal career you might ought to toughen up your immune system so you can eat a lot of rotten prison food.”

“Never make somebody afraid of you, because a coward can be just as dangerous as anybody if he’s afraid you’re going to do something to him.”

“It’s easier to do time if you don’t fight it.”

“THE FIRST LAW OF SPACETIME: Space and time are equivalent, and neither space nor time can exist independent of the other.”

“My church is a place where space is equivalent to time and Mother Nature is equivalent to God. It’s a place also where the good and the bad are equivalent, where neither the good nor the bad can exist independent of the other, for if it wasn’t for the bad there wouldn’t be any good.”

My wife and I met Bill Baker. We shook his hand in the Alcatraz Island gift shop, and he kindly signed our copy of his book. He came across just as folksy and friendly and funny as he comes across in the pages of his autobiography.

Bill Baker is the real thing. The genuine article. And a national treasure. He’s 85 now, and I suspect he hasn’t much space or time left on this Earth. So don’t waste your space or time. Steal a car, write some hot checks, or do whatever else it takes to get inside Alcatraz and meet the man.

But lacking that, just order his book through Amazon.com, and let yourself have a fun little reading escape.

When you get on Amazon, aim your searchlights for Alcatraz #1259, by William G. Baker.

The All-American Sun Oven

It was the 23rd day of February. The outdoor temperature was in the 40’s. The snow was melting. And most importantly, the sky was clear blue. So I decided to bake a loaf of bread in my All-American Sun Oven.

The sun oven uses no electricity, propane, cow dung, or any other fuel, except the flaming hydrogen gas of the sun.

My little ball of dough growing and rising, trying to become a big ball.

I used a simple French bread recipe, but any bread recipe will do. And you don’t have to bake bread. Anything that can be baked in a regular oven can also be baked in a sun oven. Including Baked Alaska. At least that’s what the All-American Sun Oven literature claims.

But so far, I’ve only baked bread.

Proofing in the Pyrex. It still has rising power. Go dough, go!

I wanted to try this oven a few weeks ago, but then we were hit by a pox of precipitation that cut off my hydrogen fuel supply. The literature claims that it will work under partly cloudy conditions, as long as the sun is peaking in and out of the clouds. But our refractory weather wasn’t even doing that much for me.

Back view of the All-American Sun Oven.

In the wintertime you have to confine your baking time to the two hours before and after solar noon. But screw that. At 9:30 am, about two-and-a-half hours prior to the 11:59 am solar noon, my oven had pre-heated to just 260°F. I felt impatient. So I stuck the bread in there anyway, even though the recipe calls for 30 minutes in a 400°F oven. But hell, it’ll warm up, I figured.

Front view of the oven, baking my baguette. The oven will hold a pan up to 8.5”W X 12.75”L X 6.5”H.

The weird thing is that the literature claims you can leave food in the solar oven for much longer than you can in a conventional oven, and it will never burn. Nor will it dry out, due to the way the oven is sealed. Well, we’ll see.

At 9:30 am, the oven temp was only 260°F. Almost touchable.

By 10:00 am, the oven temp had risen to 350°F, with the outdoor temp at 48°F. The bread had also risen a little more, but still looked pale white. However, with these higher temperatures, I expected caramelization to occur soon, with browning of the bread top.

10:00, and 350°F. The bread should be browning soon.

About every 20-30 minutes you must go outside and rotate the oven a little, so that it tracks the moving sun. But checking on the oven can be advisable anyway, for warding off your dogs, in case you’re broiling steaks.

By 10:30 am, the oven temp had only risen to 360°F. The bread was still as white as my fanny.

10:30, and 360°F. Come on, bread, where’s your tan?

At 11:00 am, the oven temp was back down to 355°F. Steam was streaming out of leaks in the seal, carrying the heavenly scent of baking bread. That’s because I accidentally engaged only one of the two latches that seal the glass lid.

11:00, and 355°F. Still working on that tan.

At 11:30 am, the oven temp had dropped to 350°F, with the outdoor temp up to 50°F. The bread top had browned some.

11:30, and 355°F. Finally some real brown is showing up.

At solar noon, 11:59 am, with not a cloud in the sky, the oven temp had dropped to 325°F, with the outdoor temp still at 50°F. There was no breeze. So I do not understand why the oven temp had dropped at the same time the sun had reached zenith. I suspect it may have to do with steam that formed on the inside glass, blocking out some of the sun’s rays. But it may also have to do with me only latching down one of the lid latches. Oops.

11:59, and 325°F. Notice the condensation at the bottom?

At 11:59 am, the bread came out hot from the oven. It had a crisp, slightly golden brown crust, but was soft and moist on the inside. It was thoroughly cooked, and not doughy. The crust was a bit too thick for my preference, but my wife thought it was just right. I think maybe an hour less of cooking would have produced a thinner crust, better to my personal liking.

Fresh and hot, out of the oven. Looks good enough to eat.

But the most important thing, was that the bread tasted delicious. After two-and-a-half hours of baking you’d think it would be burnt to a crisp, and rock hard all the way through. But no, it was very edible.

Delicious. Especially after I zapped it in the microwave for a few seconds, to soften the butter.

If you haven’t fallen asleep yet, and you’re still interested, click this link to learn more about the incredible All-American Sun Oven.

[This post paid for by nobody. I just like this oven.]