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Author’s Note or Where We Find Ourselves

Before we get started with this new edition of The Old Man and the Wasteland I want to take a moment and talk with you. And by talk I mean write a few words to you. So just pretend we’re talking over a cup of tea, a few buttery shortbread cookies even. Just before a long, rainy afternoon of reading.

The Old Man and the Wasteland is the story of an old man living in the years after a nuclear war has destroyed most of the world. That’s the setting. The Old Man is part of a village of salvagers, living in a shed off to the side of lonely Highway 8 as it cuts through the Sonoran Desert of the southwestern United States. That’s our main character. He’s a salvager. He salvages what was lost during and before the war and brings it back to his village so they might use it to survive the harshness of their environment. Lately, as the book begins, the Old Man hasn’t been doing so well. He hasn’t found much of anything. The other villagers don’t want to salvage with him anymore. In their minds he is “curst.” He’s also old. That’s our conflict. One final note about the Old Man: He has one prized possession: a book he found while salvaging the wrecks and abandoned places of the deep desert. That book is The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

I first read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea at a very dark time in my life. Things weren’t going my way and I wasn’t helping matters. It was sort of my own personal apocalypse. Those who loved me could only stand by and watch as I spiraled downward. Then I broke my arm. As I recovered that summer I decided to read one book every day, and sometimes two, as I sat by the side of a community pool. And in between the adventure fiction and detective novels I read, Hemingway’s book The Old Man and the Sea surfaced in a used-book store I’d been haunting. I felt like his Old Man. I felt beat. I felt abandoned. I felt salao. And here’s what Ernest had to say in his book about the struggle that is life. Sometimes you’ve got to go a little farther out into the gulf waters. Sometimes you’ve even got to go out alone. Sometimes, even though you win, even though you are victorious against the big fish, well, sometimes victory can be snatched away. Even as you do everything you can to save your prize. Ernest’s Old Man fought the two sharks with his knife, then his paddle, and finally the broken end of the paddle. In the end, he too watched helplessly as the sharks tore away at his hard-won prize.

Now here’s the truth. We’ve all been there. Or we will be there. We will all face a moment in which we will lose, but we must still play our best game. I think what Ernest was saying in his book is that “winning” and “losing” are often just matters of perception. Maybe that came from his experiences of carrying the bleeding and dying “winners” off the battlefields of Italy in World War I. Maybe.

No, The Old Man and the Sea is a book about defeat. What Hemingway wanted to say is that no one can defeat you. They might destroy you. But they cannot defeat you. In Hemingway’s view, defeat was worse than loss. If you lost a hundred battles, a hundred contests, a hundred bullfights, you weren’t defeated. You just hadn’t won, yet. No, I think Hemingway thought you were only truly defeated when you gave up. Hemingway’s Old Man didn’t give up, even though the whole village wanted him to. Even though the fish dove deep and refused to come up over the course of a night and a day as the Old Man was pulled farther and farther out into the gulf waters. Even though the sharks eventually came and finally took away his prize between their razor sharp teeth. Hemingway’s Old Man was not defeated. He would fish again. And this time the Boy would be with him. The Old Man had proven that he was still able to catch the Big Fish.

After I wrote this book I began to get messages and emails through my website at nickcolebooks.com and on Twitter @nickcolebooks. People told me their stories. There were elderly people who’d read The Old Man and the Wasteland and told me they felt just like the Old Man. They knew they were old, but they still felt they had something to contribute—like they had one last adventure in them. There were families who read the book together. One chapter at night. Together and reading. Making memories that might last forever. There was one guy who finished the book in the bus on his way home from work. He rushed up to his apartment to tell his wife about it as she was preparing dinner. As he told her about the ending, he began to cry. And there were the soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq who probably felt just like the Old Man: all alone in the desert. And there were the people who were having another tough year. And …

Life is tough. Despite our best efforts. Life is tough. But sometimes you’ve got to go a little farther out into the gulf. Sometimes you need some of that real courage, the kind Harrison Ford’s character talks about in The Mosquito Coast: “Three-A.M. courage.” And you might get beaten again today, or maybe, just maybe, you might get a chance. You might hook the big fish. You might just win one. Whatever happens in these tough times, winning and losing isn’t so important. Just don’t give up. Christ told his disciples to keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking.

And so it’s three A.M.

Our Old Man has been turning, tossing. Trying to figure out a way to beat the day that will come with the rising sun. A way to take back something from “Before” to be used in the “Now” that is a burnt up and ash-covered world.

The only book he’s read for the last forty years is about another Old Man who was eighty-six days unlucky, and then in the dark of morning that other Old Man went farther out into the gulf waters in hopes that today might be the day he caught the big fish.

Our Old Man rolls over and hears the rusty springs in his bed. He is tired of sleep. He is tired of losing. He is tired of being “curst.” And so he puts his feet onto the dirt floor and considers going farther out into the Wasteland today.

I hope you enjoy what follows.

Nick Cole

October 2012