Bright Moon at Mid-Day
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"I don't know what gets into a man sometimes. He wanders and roams, pulls up his roots and leaves home. He's almost like a wild sheep, constantly moving, head down, ambling onward toward whatever it is he seeks and when getting there goes home." -- Jack London
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About the Book
"It’s a disease, a sickness, an obsession. As with drink or women, some men are driven crazy to get it even unto death."
Gold! Even today the very word conjures up unimagined wealth, adventure and hardship, he-manly work and the prize of all prizes: "Gold --the same precious metal which all through history made men do things they would not otherwise do to get it–and women, even nice women, to do the same."
"The bug bit Miller–hard!" (The Prologue)
William Miller setout with his young wife and two-year-old daughter to make his fortune in the gold fields of Nome, Alaska, during the gold rush of 1898-99. But more than gold, during his decade in the great north this man learned and turned from a chauvinist to become a loving husband, from a hardcore miner to a caring and replete father. His treasure became not gold but love, for life, wife, and family.
He and his wife, Hilma, had four other children during their ten years living in this godforsaken spot of earth. The growing together of man and woman, the adventures (all true) of this remarkable family, and the harrowing experiences of life on the edge is at the core of Bright Moon at Mid-Day.
You will meet some of the most interesting and entertaining characters in all of fiction: Whisky Gus, a bedeviled, bewhiskered sourdough who hardly drew a sober breath but seldom let booze slow him down nor hold back his innate words of wisdom.
Big Tom and his half-breed son, Little Tom, who originated the deep-freeze using the 40 below zero temperature to hang their "secret recipe" beans out-of-doors where they would whack off a hunk with a hand axe for dinner or breakfast.
Sitting on the porch of the general store is Hokey Pokey, the loveable town gossip. There is naive Dolly, an abused teenage runaway heading for the Silver Slipper Saloon, who becomes Hilma’s "adopted" daughter, though they are but a few years apart in age.
There are the two Misses Mabels, K-12 schoolteachers whose first names are their only commonality. Both learn that lovemaking is also entertainment in this vast wilderness where talking, reading, and loving are the only forms of amusement and diversion from the endless nights and unbounded bitter cold.
You’ll get to know Dusty Rhodes, Miller's eventual partner, and Amy and Amos who own the one-room general store which gets its provisions twice a year, both times in August when Kotzebue Bay thaws. There’s "Doc" Wilson, really a defrocked dentist who never worked on a real tooth but now practices surgery and veterinary medicine.
Among the most loveable are the dogs, Niki, leader of Miller’s first team, and Dolly, Chaffin, and Nellie who lead Tom, the first white child born in Nome, to victory in the kids’ dog sled race.
Among the stories are Tom getting frozen feet which "Doc" Wilson wants to amputate until William punches him out, Helen getting the calf of her leg ripped open by Niki and her life saved by Wilson’s surgery, Bill, Jr. falling through the ice into the Kiwalik River, and the spring breakup of the river which destroys much of Candle.
Christmas comes with real reindeer pulling a sled full of presents to the community party at the one-room log schoolhouse, driven by white whiskered, red capped Gus. Gus, in his cups, ends upside down.
The Miller trio get snowed in on the Great Northern R.R. before they even get to Alaska, and their ship from Seattle, The Hunter, flounders and is grounded in Seward Bay, the scheduled day of their arrival in Nome. Two weeks later they finally join with 30,000 other would-be miners renting a cot and vying for a place to sleep on the beach.
Getting out ten years later is as harrowing as was getting in. Miller hand carries his five children up a rope ladder flung over the side of their homeward bound ship during a summer storm, "the likes of which no man has seen from before then unto this day."
The Epilogue of Bright Moon at Mid-Day is about Alaska Jack and his dog team who pulled a sled from Nome to Chicago to open the Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933. Jack was the guest of the Explorers’ Club and told of his harrowing experience in 1905 of finally getting Christmas mail to a snowed-in family in Candle late that March. One of the kids in that Candle cabin turned out to be Tom who, paradoxically, thirty years later, was also a guest at that luncheon.
About the Author
Until his move to Sisters, Oregon, Tom Chace was a private consultant and lecturer in advertising and marketing in Santa Barbara (CA). He has been extensively published in newspapers, periodicals, and other forms of graphic communications throughout the United States while writing for and heading his own advertising agency, Chace Company Advertising. He has been freelance writing books, newspaper, and magazine articles since his retirement in 1994. This is his first novel. Chace has a trilogy on alcoholism. Am I? Am I Not?, breaking through denial for the alcoholic; Step-by-Step, a generic text on the 12-Steps of Recovery; and AA From the Inside Out. The later two books have not yet been published. He has three other books: Where In The World, a photo essay and short story journal based on Chace's magazine articles; Murder Four, an irreverent "get-even" spoof at attorneys and judges; and As I See It, "everything I wished my grandkids would ask but they never did. They all still reside in his computer." Chace received "The Best Fiction Writing" award two years running at Barnaby Conrad's writing conference and 1st place in "The Bulletin's" writing contest (1999), both for Bright Moon at Mid-Day.