Showing results by author "Lawrence WInkler" in All Categories

Most remote islands of the imagination conjure up paradise. Japan is an archipelago of puzzlement. From the sands that forged their swords and serenity, they traveled a Samurai Road of temples and shrines, feudal fortresses, and flowing mountain streams of wasabi. On sashimi and soy sauce, and green tea over rice, they lived a thousand years of pathos, under cherry blossoms and ephemeral moonlight, in Zen gardens and futon dreams. It was all so perfect.

The fates of three tormented men, born as many eras apart, come together in a rock cave on the Coromandel peninsula of New Zealand - Tama of the Ngatei Hei, Billy Green in the days of gold, and Dr. Sababa from across the ocean - seeking revenge, discovering treasure, and searching for redemption. Here their thrilling life and death stories of obsession begin by hurtling down the shoreline of the same beach and end in the fierce battles that left the coastal sands white with bones.

You will love Harbour City. Most visitors to the island drive right through, without taking time to explore its attractions. But you’re not most visitors. You will get to spend some time. Go ahead. Turn on your radio. That’s BC Bud, 101.3 FM on your home and native band. He will announce your special arrival. And if you catch something more than a salmon, you could be referred to Doctor Sababa, an internal medicine consultant at Harbour City regional, the sage of the Salish Sea.

A young boy wakes up on a Goldilocks planet, somewhere far out there. He wonders about the Silver River Galaxy and why he has no memory of his father. A locked room in the school basement will lead him to the meaning of life - through a mainframe computer and a mysterious ship on the cold border of the habitable zone. Void Vast Infinite is a short story of a long journey. If you see far, you will go far.

It lives in the hole where the moon used to be. And for most of the worst part of the Northern winter, over the last two decades, so have we. The real South Pacific was not a Bali Hai musical, but a drama of cannibals and castaways, headhunters and slavers, paradise and perdition.

The American West was a notion, not a nation. It was a process, not a place. The native animal and human life of the West was displaced, replaced, and exterminated - 60 million bison to make way for European bog animals, billions of passenger pigeons for nothing, and 90 percent of aboriginal native Americans, out of an original population of possibly a hundred million, by accident and design. Late in the summer of 2013, I set out to find the Old West, what it had been, and what had replaced it.

Madagascar is a drug. Between its dazzling culture and biosphere - 90 percent of its species found nowhere else - everything is beautiful. In 2016, I flew 30 hours over three continents, into a singular adventure across 4,000 kilometers of isolation. The roads eviscerate; the poverty steals your heart. The terrain follows, a spider web stranded in your peripheral vision. In Bandits of Madagascar are man-eating trees and elephant birds, pirates and slaves, lemurs and chameleons and crocodile caves, cattle rustlers and rosewood thieves, and sapphires and silk and solicitude.

In the summer of 1980, a maverick young doctor gave it all up, to hitchhike around the world. The first part of his odyssey took him through South America and up through Africa, accompanied by his mythical hunter companion, Orion. His vision quest continued around the second cartwheel of the European Grand Tour.

Somewhere beyond the Salish Sea lived the Stout Men who did the Megin River, and Tibet, and the Amazon. There was Tictac and Poldy, Cliffy and Madame, Captain and Gung, and Papa Smurf, who would die someday, but not yet. These are the stories of where they rushed headlong, towards adventure and suffering, and how it all took place.

In the summer of 1980, a maverick young doctor gave it all up to hitchhike around the world. The first part of his odyssey took him through South America and up through Africa, accompanied by his mythical hunter companion, Orion. Between the Cartwheels is the sequel to that cartwheel, his vision quest continuing now on the European grand tour adventure of a lifetime.

The Final Cartwheel is the story of a young doctor's return home, after a five-year hitchhiking odyssey around the world. Through East Asia, Indonesia, and around the Antipodes, the circle becomes unbroken.

In the summer of 1980, a maverick young doctor gave it all up to hitchhike around the world. The first arc he carved with his thumb stopped a little red pickup that took him over the horizon. Like his mythical hunter companion, Orion, he was on a vision quest, propelled toward the dawn to have his sight restored. This is the story of that five-year odyssey to discover his destiny.

Twenty-five years ago they bought a homestead, in the middle of Vancouver Island, on the water's edge. There are still reflections off the small lake at the foot of Mount Benson - of gardens and vineyards and woodland encounters. Westwood Lake Chronicles is a dreamscape diary, a backyard inventory of life and death in paradise, and the desperate pressures that threaten its existence.

In this audiobook lives the final seven original stories of survival, suspense, and satire from the Sage of the Salish Sea - the most special season of a seasoned specialist. He will amuse you with his wit and wisdom, and the spontaneous combustion and thrust they generate, often mixed in unequal proportions, as he dances with the devil in the pale moonlight.

You must really love this place if you want to return so badly. Or perhaps you just want to spend some more special time with Doctor Sababa, our internal medical consultant at Harbour City Regional Hospital. He would have amused you with his wit and wisdom and the spontaneous combustion and thrust they generate, often mixed in unequal proportions, as he dances with the devil in the pale moonlight. Before there was artificial intelligence, he was the real thing, working in the mysterious old ways of a masterless samurai.

Heraclitus’ fragments come together, to life, and toward its antitheses in this fantastic metaphysical journey. Forty years after Orion’s Cartwheels hitchhiking circumnavigation of the planet, Steve of the Jacuzzi returns to accompany the good doctor on another series of road trips to Alsace and Central Africa and Tennessee, in a penultimate bucket list Grand Tour.

My love of poetry was always unrequited. As with all young boys, my English teachers forced me to memorize and recite unintelligible Shakespearean sonnets and turn bad blood into worse ink. For the next half-century, I never gave it a chance.

Let us speak of the physics of time and space and the metaphysics of travel and meaning and the writing of it all. Distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But our mind has changed, and that changes everything. Real journeys continue long after movement in time and space has ceased.

In early spring, for more than twenty years, two old doctors and their fishing guide motored to a Barkley Sound float cabin on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. In a hallowed place where all men were equal before fish, pure sea air cleansed their souls. The central epiphany of every sacred ritual occurs in the wilderness. This time, there would be more particles than waves.