A photograph from the inspirational file – 9

…

I remeber once being told that if you shoot for the moon, you’ll land in the clouds, if you shoot for the tree tops, you’ll finish up back where you started from.

It was a silly analogy, but I always remembered it when I looked up at the sky and saw clouds.

That was back in those hazy carefree days just after you were finished with school and you had your whole life in front of you. Your parents were there as the safety net, and were still proud of your scholastic achievements, and were not in too much of a hurry to hustle you out of the house.

But what happened when there’s a recession that came upon everyone without any warning.

Stocks plummeted, people lost their life’s savings, those with mortgages and loans suddenly finding that along with unemployment came no income, no ability to pay the bills, and therefore lost everything.

Although I never said it, I was thinking what good was an education when the whole world had gone to hell in a handbasket.

Two things I remember from back then, which in the context of disaster, wasn’t all that long ago. Firstly, my father making us children go camping from before we could walk, and with it, to survive with nothing but the clothes on our backs, and our wits.

It had happened to him, as a member of am expedition in Africa in his younger days, thinking that he might become the next great explorer, or archeologist, and finishing up getting lost, even though he asserted the other members had deliberately left him behind.

And secondly, that it was essential that we forge working relationships with any and all those who were like minded, such as those who wanted to be saved, not those who expected everyone else to so the work. It was obvious he had met a lot of those type of people too.

It served us well.

When nations began turning on each other, when essential resources like electricity and fuel stopped being distributed and rationed, when food suddenly became scarce, that’s when the real trouble started. My father said, at the outset, what would happen, and was glad our mother was not there to see it.

Then, when neighbours attacked neighbours once food became scarce, it was time to leave. The pity of it was, he died defending us, even after offering up some of the food we had stored away, but that had not appeased a hungry or angry mob.

His last words, “Go to where we said we would go, and remember everything I’ve taught you” were etched in my brain, and my brother and I did as he asked.

But, even knowing where we had to go, and how to get there, a plan of action made many years before, and trialled in recent years with success, nothing in the past could have prepared us for the journey.

It was, literally, time to shoot for the moon.

—

A photograph from the inspiration file – 7

There is always something strange about certain photographs that is not evident when you take them.

For instance, the photograph above.

While this might look like some vegetation by the side of a river or stream, its that are of blackness behind what looks like steps up from the water level that adds a level of intrigue or mystery.

For instance:

…

We had spent two weeks slowly going upriver looking for a needle in a haystack. It was an apt description, because there had been quite a large number of likely spots, all of which after investigation, came to nothing.

I mean, the description Professor Bates had given is was as hazy as day is long in these parts.

His recollection: that it was what looked like a cave behind lush undergrowth, with steps fashioned out of stone.

It was all the more confuse. Because when we found him, he was drifting on a rough hewn and constructed raft, half dead from dehydration. We were told he’d been on the raft for nearly a week.

That meant the cave could be anywhere between where we found him at the 10 mile mark, and 200 miles further on based on river flow.

We were currently at the 150 mile mark and the river was losing depth and width, and soon there would not be enough water to continue in the boat.

It was dusk and too dark to continue. We’d been enthusiastic those first days, continuing on in the dark, on shifts, using the arc lamps.

Then after a week, having lights on made us target practise, and after sever brushes with death, and the loss of all the bulbs being shot out, we got the message.

There was the odd marauder during the day, but we had the width of the river for safety. Now that had gone too, and we had lookouts posted, but seeing into the dense jungle was difficult.

But we got through another night with no activity, and come morning, what looked like the entrance to a cave was not fifteen feet from us.

All we had to was row over and check.

…

Inspiration, maybe – Volume 1

50 photographs, 50 stories, of which there is one of the 50 below.

They all start with –

A picture paints … well, as many words as you like. For instance:

lookingdownfromcoronetpeak

And the story:

It was once said that a desperate man has everything to lose.

The man I was chasing was desperate, but I, on the other hand, was more desperate to catch him.

He’d left a trail of dead people from one end of the island to the other.

The team had put in a lot of effort to locate him, and now his capture was imminent. We were following the car he was in, from a discrete distance, and, at the appropriate time, we would catch up, pull him over, and make the arrest.

There was nowhere for him to go.

The road led to a dead-end, and the only way off the mountain was back down the road were now on. Which was why I was somewhat surprised when we discovered where he was.

Where was he going?

“Damn,” I heard Alan mutter. He was driving, being careful not to get too close, but not far enough away to lose sight of him.

“What?”

“I think he’s made us.”

“How?”

“Dumb bad luck, I’m guessing. Or he expected we’d follow him up the mountain. He’s just sped up.”

“How far away?”

“A half-mile. We should see him higher up when we turn the next corner.”

It took an eternity to get there, and when we did, Alan was right, only he was further on than we thought.”

“Step on it. Let’s catch him up before he gets to the top.”

Easy to say, not so easy to do. The road was treacherous, and in places just gravel, and there were no guard rails to stop a three thousand footfall down the mountainside.

Good thing then I had the foresight to have three agents on the hill for just such a scenario.

Ten minutes later, we were in sight of the car, still moving quickly, but we were going slightly faster. We’d catch up just short of the summit car park.

Or so we thought.

Coming quickly around another corner we almost slammed into the car we’d been chasing.

“What the hell…” Aland muttered.

I was out of the car, and over to see if he was in it, but I knew that it was only a slender possibility. The car was empty, and no indication where he went.

Certainly not up the road. It was relatively straightforward for the next mile, at which we would have reached the summit. Up the mountainside from here, or down.

I looked up. Nothing.

Alan yelled out, “He’s not going down, not that I can see, but if he did, there’s hardly a foothold and that’s a long fall.”

Then where did he go?

Then a man looking very much like our quarry came out from behind a rock embedded just a short distance up the hill.

“Sorry,” he said quite calmly. “Had to go if you know what I mean.”

I’d lost him.

It was as simple as that.

I had been led a merry chase up the hill, and all the time he was getting away in a different direction.

I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book, letting my desperation blind me to the disguise that anyone else would see through in an instant.

It was a lonely sight, looking down that road, knowing that I had to go all that way down again, only this time, without having to throw caution to the wind.

“Maybe next time,” Alan said.

“We’ll get him. It’s just a matter of time.”

Find this and other stories in “Inspiration, maybe” available soon.

InspirationMaybe1v1

A photograph from the inspiration file – 8

A picture can paint a thousand words, or more, or less, but…

…

The interesting thing about a place in the dark, in the distance, and behind a chain wire fence usually means something. Especially when there are mysterious lights involved.

We were at a night sports event, watching over a thousand screaming and yelling kids from five to eighteen pretending to compete in a variety of athletic events.

I was there to nominally to support my granddaughter in her endeavours, but right at that moment, on the far side of the track, what I was really there to see was what was behind the wire fence

“Are you watching, Poppy?”

Well, at that moment I wasn’t, but I did turn just in time to see her clear a meter high high jump and execute an elegent backflip, a result no doubt of the ballet training she had since the age of four. Seven years later those lessons had transformed into a high jumper with a great future.

Except, she couldn’t really care less. It was more about the parents and athletic organisers expectations, than hers. I was there, she told me in a secretive tone, to tell everyone to back off.

if you think spying was a dangerous occupation, then let me tell you trying to navigate a safe path between child and parents, and then the rest of the word, forget it.

So, with my trusty phone camera, slightly modified, I was pretending to take pictures of surrounding trees in the high density lighting for the athletics oval, whilst zooming in on the real target.

And, about to take the money shot, I could feel a tugging on the side of my jacket.

I looked down to see the petulant face of a child not happy.

“You said you were coming to see me perform.”

I had. I looked over at the woman the boss had assigned as my ‘date’, Nancy, and whom I’d introduced as a long time friend who deigned to suffer my invitation so she could meet the girl I was always talking about.

“Yes, Poppy,” she said with an evil undertone. “You said you wanted to see her high jumps. You’d better get over there, while I take some pictures of the trees for you.”

“Why do you want pictures of dumb old trees?” That was a question I would have asked myself, and I didn’t quite have an answer for it.

Nancy did. “Because he’s odd like that. It’s one of the quirks I like about him.” She took the camera out of my hand and shooed us off.

And, heading back to the high jump, she asked, “What’s a quirk?”

“Just ask your father later. He knows all about quirks.”

…

The first case of PI Walthenson – “A Case of Working With the Jones Brothers”

This case has everything, red herrings, jealous brothers, femme fatales, and at the heart of it all, greed.

See below for an excerpt from the book…

Coming soon!

PIWalthJones1

An excerpt from the book:

When Harry took the time to consider his position, a rather uncomfortable position at that, he concluded that he was somehow involved in another case that meant very little to him.

Not that it wasn’t important in some way he was yet to determine, it was just that his curiosity had got the better of him, and it had led to this: sitting in a chair, securely bound, waiting for someone one of his captors had called Doug.

It was not the name that worried him so much, it was the evil laugh that had come after the name was spoken.

Doug what? Doug the ‘destroyer’, Doug the ‘dangerous’, Doug the ‘deadly’; there was any number of sinister connotations, and perhaps that was the point of the laugh, to make it more frightening than it was.

But there was no doubt about one thing in his mind right then: he’d made a mistake. A very big. and costly, mistake. Just how big the cost, no doubt he would soon find out.

His mother, and his grandmother, the wisest person he had ever known, had once told him never to eavesdrop.

At the time he couldn’t help himself and instead of minding his own business, listening to a one-sided conversation which ended with a time and a place. The very nature of the person receiving the call was, at the very least, sinister, and, because of the cryptic conversation, there appeared to be, or at least to Harry, criminal activity involved.

For several days he had wrestled with the thought of whether he should go. Stay on the fringe, keep out of sight, observe and report to the police if it was a crime. Instead, he had willingly gone down the rabbit hole.

Now, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, several heat lamps hanging over his head, he was perspiring, and if perspiration could be used as a measure of fear, then Harry’s fear was at the highest level.

Another runnel of sweat rolled into his left eye, and, having his hands tied, literally, it made it impossible to clear it. The burning sensation momentarily took his mind off his predicament. He cursed and then shook his head trying to prevent a re-occurrence. It was to no avail.

Let the stinging sensation be a reminder of what was right and what was wrong.

It was obvious that it was the right place and the right time, but in considering his current perilous situation, it definitely was the wrong place to be, at the worst possible time.

It was meant to be his escape, an escape from the generations of lawyers, what were to Harry, dry, dusty men who had been in business since George Washington said to the first Walthenson to step foot on American soil, ‘Why don’t you become a lawyer?” when asked what he could do for the great man.

Or so it was handed down as lore, though Harry didn’t think Washington meant it literally, the Walthenson’s, then as now, were not shy of taking advice.

Except, of course, when it came to Harry.

He was, Harry’s father was prone to saying, the exception to every rule. Harry guessed his father was referring to the fact his son wanted to be a Private Detective rather than a dry, dusty lawyer. Just the clothes were enough to turn Harry off the profession.

So, with a little of the money Harry inherited from one of his aunts, he leased an office in Gramercy Park and had it renovated to look like the Sam Spade detective agency, you know the one, Spade and Archer, and The Maltese Falcon.

There’s a movie and a book by Dashiell Hammett if you’re interested.

So, there it was, painted on the opaque glass inset of the front door, ‘Harold Walthenson, Private Detective’.

There was enough money to hire an assistant, and it took a week before the right person came along, or, more to the point, didn’t just see his business plan as something sinister. Ellen, a tall cool woman in a long black dress, or so the words of a song in his head told him, fitted in perfectly.

She’d seen the movie, but she said with a grin, Harry was no Humphrey Bogart.

Of course not, he said, he didn’t smoke.

Three months on the job, and it had been a few calls, no ‘real’ cases, nothing but missing animals, and other miscellaneous items. What he really wanted was a missing person. Or perhaps a beguiling, sophisticated woman who was as deadly as she was charming, looking for an errant husband, perhaps one that she had already ‘dispatched’.

Or for a tall, dark and handsome foreigner who spoke in riddles and in heavily accented English, a spy, or perhaps an assassin, in town to take out the mayor. The man was such an imbecile Harry had considered doing it himself.

Now, in a back room of a disused warehouse, that wishful thinking might be just about to come to a very abrupt end, with none of the romanticized trappings of the business befalling him. No beguiling women, no sinister criminals, no stupid policemen.

Just a nasty little man whose only concern was how quickly or how slowly Harry’s end was going to be.

A photograph from the inspiration file – 6

For those who are wondering what this is a photograph of, it is a tree bordered stream that runs along a long valley that runs from outside Canungra, in Queensland, to the Lamington National Park.

It’s near a place we like to stay for a few days when we want to get away from everything, and I mean everything. There is no television, and cell phone reception is awful if not non existent.

So, you can see the benefits.

Sitting at the table on the veranda overlooking the fields, and this stream, you have time to just think, or not, about what it might have been like before the settlers came.

What is was like when the explorers we seeking new places to live, and they chanced upon this valley. It it was me back then, I would have followed the stream.

But, as for a story…

I have read a great many stories for the explorers of this country, and the hazardous nature of their treks.

What seemed to be the most common theme was crossing from south to north, that is from Melbourne to the Northern most tip of Queensland, or from Adelaide to the Northern Territory. In both cases they would have to traverse a very dry, very hot outback where the sight of a stream, or river, like above, would have been very welcome.

For some, it became an impossible quest, and stuck in the desert, they eventually perished. That in itself, the trials and tribulations of an early explorer would make a great story.

Australia is a very fertile country around the coastal regions, but one you start venturing inland, it is dry, dusty and almost uninhabitable. Unless there’s water from rivers, streams, or underground, or mining settlements, there is very little else to see.

The exceptions to this are Uluru and Kakadu National Park, in the Northern Territory, Shark Bay and The Pinnacles in Western Australia, MacKenzie Falls in Victoria, The Simpson Desert, the Boodjamulla (Lawn Hill) National Park, and the Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland, to name a few.

One day I might get to see them.