Birthplace of Hostile Lookout

  This is the birthplace of Hostile Lookout, Apartment A at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum.  As mentioned in a previous post, I lived here for nearly 18 months when I first started working for BTA and my family was in Pine, Arizona waiting for our house to sell.    If the clouds, planets, and Arizona Diamondbacks were properly aligned you could almost pick up one television station, and the only radio available was talk radio and sports radio.  Not being inclined to listen to faceless voices getting grotesquely overpaid to spew hatefulness regarding subjects they knew nothing about, I listened to A LOT of Arizona Diamondbacks and Phoenix Suns games.
  The building, built who knows when, probably somewhere around the time of Prohibition, was actually a triplex.  A co-worker, Pete, lived in Apartment B, and Kenny B, a volunteer lived in The Dorm.  At the time, I was leading music occassionally for our church in Pine, so when I wasn't writing, I was playing guitar.  Kenny B played bongos, so I would go over to the dorm and practice the next Sunday's playlist with Kenny accompanying on the bongos.
  Kenny was an interesting guy.  I think he still lived in the '60s.  He was prone to bad language and torn clothing, but had a very big heart.  He also had some sort of disease in which his muscles were slowly wasting away. 
  We had a rock squirrel, or something, that lived in the attic of the triplex, and one day Kenny declared war against the squirrel.  The problem was that the squirrel would race around the attic at night, when we were all trying to sleep, and even though the squirrel only weighed a few pounds, it sounded like an elephant running around up there.  Kenny was convinced that the squirrel was getting in and out through a hole under the porch steps of my front door.  So one day Kenny filled the hole with gravel.  Of course, the squirrel dug through the gravel.  The next day Kenny placed as large of rocks as he could fit under my porch into the hole, and then filled the rest of the space with gravel.  Amazingly the squirrel still managed to find space between the boulders to get in and out.  Kenny then built a small brick wall under the steps, and back filled with boulders and gravel.  Well, the brick wall did it. Although, we don't know if the squirrel got trapped in or out of the attic, but we did know the herd of elephants stopped waking us up at night.
  We had all kinds of creatures that lived around the triplex.  Rattlesnakes, gila monsters, red racers, scorpions, and terantulas were all relatively frequent visitors to the triplex.  Pete once had a terantula walk into his apartment when he left the door open one evening, and one night I found two rattlesnakes mating in the space between the propane tank and the prickly pear cactus.
  When I stayed in Apartment A a couple weeks ago, some wonderful improvements had been made.  It was now carpeted and had a cover over the ceiling light, rather than the bare wires and light bulb I had enjoyed living with.  The apartment had received a fresh coat of paint and the outside water heater had received a new out-building to enclose it.
  I get Asclepias back from the editor this afternoon.  It should be available next month!

Life experience is a great idea generator!

  As you know, Tony has a run-in with a cougar one night in Hostile Lookout.  What got things started, sort of, was the animal pressing his nose against Tony's tent and letting out a hiss. 
  I got the idea for this from an experience I had while camping at Herb Martyr campground in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona.  Herb Martyr was the last campground on the road, the deepest into the mountains.  It had a fairly steep access road, and consequently, not many folks stayed there.  In fact, of the several times I stayed there, I think I was the only one in the campground at least half those times.  The campground had maybe eight spaces tucked into the oak woodland and Cave Creek ran along one edge of the site.
  Much to my wife's and mother's dislikes, I tended (and still do) to go out into the woods alone.  I had just finished setting up the tent, had crawled in, kicked off my boots, and was just kind of sitting there.  I noticed a sound outside the tent; something rooting around in the leaves.  The sound got closer to the back of the tent.  I continued to sit and listen.  Suddenly, something pressed its nose hard against the back of the tent, hard enough to push the tent wall in a bit.  It wasn't a big nose, like a bear or a cougar, but a nose all the same.  It made no sounds though.  In a second or so the nose retreated and I heard scuffling in the leaves again.  Not wanting to startle whatever it was, I waited a few minutes before exiting the tent to investigate.  I put my boots back on and climbed out of the tent and saw nothing around my campsite or any of the others.  Well, I knew the nose wasn't imaginary.  I then heard scuffling around down by the creek, which was perhaps ten feet down an embankment below my tent.  I peeked over the edge to see a skunk waddling around in the brush along the edge of the creek.  Made me glad I had not immediately shot out of the tent after it!

About the character Jean Paxton

If you have read Hostile Lookout, then you are familiar with Jean Paxton, Tony Spencer's best friend.  They have been close friends for a few years, closer since the death of Tony's wife Sue.  In the book, Jean lives in Mountainair and works at the Forest Service Research Greenhouse in Flagstaff.

Jean was inspired by a friend of mine, Jan Huntsberger.  Jan also lived in Mountainair and worked at the Forest Service Greenhouse.  Jan and I met while working at Pots-n-Plants Nursery in Flagstaff.  I still remember a water fight we had inside the store!  Jan and I were not necessarily best friends, like Jean and Tony, but we got along well.  FYI, we never stole a couch out of a doctor's trash bin!

When I worked for the U.S.G.S. the second year, Jan would let me park my Jeep (mine was red as opposed to Tony's orange one) at her house, to save me the expense of having to buy a parking permit to park at Northern Arizona University.  At the end of our week long shift, my co-worker would drop me and my stuff off at Jan's, and then he would continue on to Flag' to unload equipment and pick up his own car.  It also saved me about ten miles on my round trip drive to Pine (roughly 120 miles).

Jan never shot anybody for me, nor would she cook dinner for me!  But a good friend all the same.  On occassion, we would sit on the picnic table in her front yard and discuss various things over a beer.  She has since moved on to Idaho.