Saturday Snippet: Move over, Hardy Boys, you've got competition

 

Fenton Wood is a pseudonym for an author who's published a five-book series he titles "Yankee Republic".  I started reading it recently, and I'm finding it very interesting and well written.  It's for older children and young adults, and brings to mind earlier pulp fiction classics and adventure series such as the Hardy Boys books.  It reminds me of some of the books I used to read as a child.  (Don't knock books for children, no matter how old you may be.  Some remain very enjoyable.  I still read and re-read some childhood favorites.)

The series blurb reads:

A young radio engineer travels across an alt-history America, encountering primeval gods, mythical beasts, and tall tales come to life, in a quest to build a radio transmitter that can reach the stars.

It all starts in the mountain town of Porterville. Twelve-year-old Philo starts a pirate radio station with his friends, and learns that the world is a stranger place than he ever imagined. The Ancient Marauder, the Bright and Terrible Birds, the Mishipeshu, and other creatures of myth and legend populate this enchanting mixture of science and fantasy.

YANKEE REPUBLIC is an old-school adventure series with traditional values and down-to-earth heroes. Escape from the pessimism and propaganda of modern fiction, and take a journey through a mythic America that might have been.

You can read a brief interview with the author at this link.

There are five books in the "Yankee Republic" series, plus a sixth omnibus volume containing the previous five.  Obviously, that's the most economical way to collect them (although their prices on Amazon are pretty low, anyway).  So far, I'm enjoying them.

I found it hard to pick out a selection to highlight the series, so instead I thought I'd just bring you the first chapter of the first volume, titled "Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves".  It's short, but sets the scene nicely.

This is the story of Philo Hergenschmidt. By now, the whole world knows what he did, although many people don’t believe it. This is the story of how he did it. It was compiled from original research, contemporary news accounts, and interviews with the man himself. It ranges from the apocryphal, to the questionable, to the impossible. But every word of it is true.

The story begins long ago, when Philo was a boy. He had never seen a television set, or flown in an airplane, or been outside of the valley where he was born. But it was there that he took the first steps of his journey.

1. THE HIGH PLACE

A boy of twelve sat atop the Devil’s Throne.

It was a bare outcropping of volcanic rock, topped by a single gnarled pine tree. The rock formed a vaguely throne-like shape that gave the peak its name. It was the highest point in the hills that ringed the valley. It was supposed to be inaccessible. He had accessed it.

The smell of sun-baked earth and green growing things, the sound of rustling leaves and distant traffic, and the feeling of sweat and grime on his body, proclaimed the advent of summer. From his vantage point, he could see the entire town of Porterville, home to upwards of twenty thousand souls. Every building, every street, every tree, every automobile, every railroad line was laid out before him like a fantastically detailed model train diorama. But he wasn’t there for the view.

“Randall!” he called out.

“Philo! What do you see?” came back a voice from somewhere below him.

“The whole town! Every inch of it!”

“You know I can’t get up there!”

“I’ll send you a postcard!”

“Ha, ha.”

“I’m coming down!”

Philo grabbed the rope that trailed down the side of the peak and descended through the trees, half-climbing and half-sliding. Fifteen minutes later, he rejoined his colleague.

Randall was six months older and half a foot taller, blond-haired and stocky, with a broad, genial face. “How does it look?” he said eagerly.

“It’s perfect. It’s more than perfect. It has a direct line of sight to every part of the valley.”

“So what kind of transmitter do we need?”

“Nothing too big. Thirty watts will be plenty.”

“Thirty watts?” said Randall in dismay. “How are we going to reach the whole town with thirty watts? 7J6 has thirty thousand watts! That’s a thousand times more powerful!”

“No, it’s only eight times more powerful. Wattage adds up logarithmically. And the location of the antenna is a lot more important.”

“Well, if you say so,” Randall said doubtfully.

They had to get down off the mountain while there was light enough. They strapped on their army-surplus packs and canteens, consulted their hand-drawn map, and set off.

“I wish I could have seen it,” Randall said wistfully.

“Once we start building the station, we’ll have rope ladders and pulleys and all kinds of stuff.”

“Say, did you happen to look on the other side?”

“Yep. It’s just like the map says, nothing but mountains and more mountains.”

“Do you think we’ll ever get a signal to the next valley?”

“Well, it’s possible. The boys in that valley would have to find a peak just like this one and put up a repeater, and then we’d have a network.”

Randall smacked his forehead. “Hold on. How’s anybody going to reach this place? Who’s going to climb a mountain just to be on the radio?”

“Well, they don’t have to. We’ll find a spot somewhere below the peak that’s easier to reach. That’s where we build our shack. Then we just have to get our hands on about five hundred feet of coaxial cable.”

They retrieved their bicycles and descended from the mountain, following the bed of a dry creek. It was a strange property of the mountain that you could never come down the same way that you came up. The landmarks were unrecognizable in the other direction, or the branches of the trees bent the wrong way, or you plain got lost. This oddity was well known to the people thereabouts, and the boys found nothing remarkable about it.

Finally, they reached a footpath. They raced down the slope, hitting the bumps at full speed and momentarily taking flight. On the turns, they braked by backpedaling their fixed-gear bicycles and skidding their rear wheels in the dirt. They didn’t slow down until they reached the edge of town.

They turned onto Main Street, a two-lane road that cut a straight path through the town and onward to the Western Gate, a high and narrow notch cut into the rock at the lowest point of the hills. The notch was thirty feet wide, a hundred feet tall, and a hundred fifty feet deep. The setting sun blazed through the gap.

Great piles of rock were poised on either side of the notch, massing thousands of tons, ready to be rolled down to close off the gap in the event of invasion or civil disorder. It would take a construction crew a month to move that much rock, and they’d have to dodge boulders while they were doing it. Meanwhile, the mountain folk would travel the secret paths they had used for centuries before the highway was built. The most hazardous of these was the legendary Eastern Pass, which climbed up so high that on a clear day you could see the far-off glimmer of the ocean.

It was said that the mountains could never be invaded, because the mightiest army would be scattered and lost, diverted into a thousand gullies and crevices. Only the people who were born here, who felt the land in their bones, could navigate it. Even the forces of nature were thwarted. A hundred thousand years ago, when the glaciers came down from the North, the mountains had turned them back. This valley, and others like it, served as refugia, providing shelter to numerous species of plants and animals. While the surrounding lands were a frozen waste, hidden forests grew in the deepest valleys. When the glaciers began to thaw, the forests spread outward and reclaimed the land. Some eighty thousand acres of the original cove forest still stood, being too inaccessible for logging.

The mountain people still remembered the time of the wars, when peace-loving people fled to the places where no one would follow. They were more settled now, but they weren’t domesticated. They knew how to hunt and fish, how to build a shelter from logs and mud, how to grow crops on the steepest mountainside, and how to defend their land.

They even had their own youth organization, the Survival Scouts. The Survival Scout Handbook was a wonder to behold, eight hundred pages long and packed full of information gleaned from the toughest mountain men and a variety of experts. Every summer, boys in uniform could be found up in the hills, building shelters, foraging for edible plants, trapping game, and toughening their bodies. They had to work to earn their merit badges, unlike certain other organizations we could name.

Philo and Randall discussed which merit badges they ought to try for, once the radio station was operational. “It’s too bad they don’t have a merit badge for Piracy,” said Randall.

“There’s one for Guerrilla Warfare,” said Philo. “But you have to earn Rifle Shooting first. I’m just about the worst shot in the whole troop.”

“You’re a wiz at Sabotage,” Randall said helpfully. “You’ve broken more stuff than anyone I know. Radios, windows, collarbones…”

Philo snorted. “Doing it accidentally doesn’t count.”

Things get interesting from there.  Enjoy!

Peter