It started out like most days start out here at the world headquarters of Westphalia Publishing located along the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies… coffee for me and tea for my wife, Culley Jane, the retired professor. She’s a writer, too. I never knew what I was missing until I married another writer. She understands. I can spend an entire day in my downstairs office tethered to the keyboard struggling with a single paragraph and not feel guilty, even if the kitchen floor needs to be mopped. And it’s the same way for her, too, although she never went to Catholic schools with Dominicans, so she doesn’t experience guilt the way I do.

Sipping our tea or coffee nestled into our favorite chairs facing one another in the living room – the cats stretching – we start most days talking about where we’re at on what we’re “working on” and where we think it’s going. She thinks she might almost be done with the first draft of another novel – her fourth since just before Covid. For the time being, I’ve put off work on my own novel to concentrate on weekly columns, currently about the Ben-Gurion Canal. I tell her that novels are easy because they only have one beginning, but a weekly column needs a new beginning every week.

It was snowing outside.

“I think I’ll make a fire,” I said.

“Will you write today?” she asks.

“I hope so,” I said. “Maybe, but you know how it is… maybe not. I want to write about Spokane.”

“As in Spokane in the state of Washington Spokane?”

“Ya. Eastern Washington near the Idaho border.”

Sometimes my wife drifts off when I go off on a riff, thinking with my mouth open. She has worlds to create, too, but there never seems to be enough time. But Spokane caught her attention. She has friends in Washington. Actually, a nephew in Spokane. She grew up mainly in Oregon where her father was a professor, too.

I, too, had some familiarity with Spokane. One night back in the 70s, while I was hitchhiking around the country imagining that I was Jack Kerouac, I spent a night in the city jail there. I can’t even remember what for. Later, when I was working as an over-the-road trucker, I went through Spokane lots of times on I-90.

My wife cautiously asked me what Spokane had to do with the Ben-Gurion Canal, sensing it was going to get me started on a riff.

She knows me. She was right.

“I’m reading a book by a guy who met in secure suites on the top floors of Five-Star hotels in Beirut in the 50s, planning a rearranged world with agents and spies from the CIA, British SIS, French Intelligence… the Mossad… discussing the pros and cons of different plans to kill Nasser. I can imagine that to assassinate a high-profile political figure requires lots of planning. First off, you need plausible deniability. You need to make it look like somebody else pulled the trigger. That was after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. That was in 1956…”

“I know,” my wife said, sounding a little impatient to get to the part about Spokane. “1956. I proofread your columns, remember? I know about 1956.”

I could tell that I had not yet lost her to her own worlds under construction because then she said, “What guy? What book?”

“Wilbur Crane Eveland,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve never heard of him. I’d never heard of him either until the other night… you were sleeping and I was rummaging around on the internet, researching the lengths to which the Dulles brothers had been willing to go to get rid of Nasser. That’s where I first came across Eveland’s name, like on the fifteenth page of a Google search for ‘Dulles Brothers, Nasser, 1956.’ I did a quick Wikipedia check and learned that he had published a book in 1980 called ‘Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East.” I found the book on Amazon and got it on my Kindle. I’ve been reading it the last few nights. It’s fascinating.”

“What about Spokane?”

“He was born there, in 1919. He tells great stories about growing up there in the 20s and 30s, where the treeless landscape of eastern Washington comes up against the spearpoint fir of the Bitterroots. It’s what got me into the book right from the start.”

I picked up my iPhone from the table next to my chair and pulled the book up on my Kindle ap. “Listen to this,” I said. I read: "‘At the time of my birth, Spokane was still close to its frontier past. Squaws bearing papooses were a common sight; they lived in teepees on nearby reservations. Miners and loggers from Idaho came to Spokane for its brothels and speakeasies.’”

“How did he get from there to Beirut?”

“It’s a long story.”

“All your stories are long stories.”

“He started out by hitchhiking.”

My wife rolled her eyes and made a move like getting ready to go to her own upstairs office.

“No, really,” I said. I read again from Eveland’s book: "‘Christmas 1939 was difficult,’" he wrote. "‘My father was hard hit by the depression (…) During the middle of the night I started to hitchhike east. I had no definite plan; I knew only that I was determined not to return until I became successful. My timing was terrible; as I moved across the snowbound northern states, I was often left off by farmers in freezing weather, with only haystacks or culverts for shelter.’

“I’ll bet he went through Iron Mountain,” I said. (That’s where I grew up, in northern Michigan.) “I’ll bet he took U.S. 2… it goes all the way across the northern tier of the country… it goes through Spokane and is the main street in Iron Mountain where it’s called Stephenson Avenue. He would have passed within blocks of the house where I would grow up, where my mother was growing up.  He makes it to Boston where he sleeps on the couch of a relative while deciding what to do next. War’s coming. He enlists. For reasons he has no idea why, he’s pulled out of a line of young recruits and told to go to such and such an office where he’s told he’s being assigned to an Army intelligence unit, mainly a desk job doing background checks on German and Japanese citizens with heavy accents. Then wartime OSS assignments in Europe. He does a good job and moves up through the ranks. He realizes the future is in the Middle East – the central role that oil will play in the Cold War. He goes to defense department language schools to learn Arabic and is sent off to the Levant. In the wake of the Nakba and mass movements to sever ties with its recent colonial past, the entire region is engulfed in rage and change. Eveland’s job is to learn what’s going on and to keep the decision makers in Washington informed…”

Deep breath.

Culley Jane’s hanging on. She leans forward slightly in her chair, disturbing the cat on her lap.

“And… ?” she says.

“Eveland’s good at his job. He looks beneath the turbulent surface, sees life beneath the sand. He crosses deserts with Bedouin tribes, riding on camels; sleeps in their tents reserved for honored guests; shoots desert birds with them for dinner. He roams the mysterious back alleys of Baghdad, Damascus, Amman. Crosses mountain passes with Iraqi soldiers in secondhand jeeps looking for signs of trouble in the land of the Kurds in the north. In Cairo, he’s tempted by a gorgeous British spy.  At the famous long bar at St. Georges Hotel in Beirut, he drinks top-shelf White Label with international news correspondents. He becomes an “informed source” for the New York Times. The military industrial complex and the Dulles brothers want to flood the region with military equipment for profits and the strategic power to prevent the Russians from sweeping down out of the North to control the world largest and most accessible oil reserves. Because Eveland knows people who know people and has learned their language and ways, he becomes a go-between. Everybody wants weapons. He has the contacts. Doors open. He meets Nasser and he likes him. Nasser, too, wants weapons, but not to protect his country from a feared Russian invasion, but from a feared neo-colonial invasion from the west, from Egypt’s most recent colonial overlords – France and England. He’s right. He nationalizes the canal. France and England launch an aerial attack while Israeli tanks roll across the Sanai. Eisenhower makes them stop, which displeases the Dulles brothers, but they’re not the President (breath). Eveland’s at a cloistered gathering of spooks and agents at a safehouse in Beirut, all wondering what’s next, when the doorbell rings. An MI6 agent enters, ‘drunk as a lord,’ as Eveland put it. He wrote that the British agent rambled on about quote the bloody Egyptians who planned to turn the Middle East over to the commies unquote. The MI6 guy said they had quote teams fielded to assassinate Nasser unquote and then he passed out in his chair.’

“Eveland thought he was crazy,” I said.

“What did he do?”

“He cabled a Top-Secret memo through Top-Secret diplomatic channels delivered by secret couriers to the Dulles brothers back at HQ Washington, D.C…”

“… And?”

“He did his job. He told them what was going on, what the British agent had said. Then he went beyond just the facts, ma’am, and told the brothers what he really thought about the whole deal. It was a gutsy thing to do. Field agents were expected to keep their opinions to themselves, like newspaper reporters. But Eveland said he thought the plan was crazy. He said he felt like he was in a madhouse. Anyway, the brothers must have listened because Nasser died of natural causes fourteen years later. Besides, the brothers had recently heard about another, less messy way of dealing with Nasser.”

“Let me guess… mmm. A canal, right?”

Heading up the stairs to her own worlds under construction, my wife, Culley Jane, the retired professor, turned and said: “You know, I could write your story’s ending for you.”

“Oh, ya?

“Ya. He'd become successful and can finally go back home to Spokane."