The first chapter of my never-to-be-finished novel is entitled: “The End.”

The hardest part about writing a story (a novel, poem or weekly column) is coming up with the end. After I’ve got the end, the rest is simply just a matter of writing up to it.

Believe it or not, I might spend twenty hours during the week working on one of these columns — nineteen hours just sitting in front of my computer like a piece of furniture waiting for the end to come to me and, then, one, mere, hectic hour before deadline at the keyboard constructing the story according to grammatical rules enforced by my wife, the retired professor and novelist Culley Jane, who heads Westphalia’s language department with a detective’s eye.

I’m feeling lazy this week and it’s spring and there’s lots to do in the yard. So, I decided to just bang out a story where I already know the end.

It’s another war story. The end came to me shortly after the war got started on Oct. 7, 2023, when a modern army started bombing a tiny strip of land along the Mediterranean’s eastern shoreline.

Since then, the war has spread into the lands of the ancient Persian empire, its toxic fingers creeping into the far corners of the world. Like a train going down a mountain grade that the democratically elected engineer doesn’t know how to stop.

Other storytellers have come up with different ends. Some say it’s the beginning of Armageddon and will end with the return of Jesus in the final scene. That sounds farfetched to me, but that’s what our new Ambassador to Israel believes. Trump, too, apparently, with him in the role of Jesus. But even the Pope says that’s crazy, a fantasy. (I like this Pope, even though he’s from Chicago and pulls for ‘da Bears against the Packers.)

Since I don’t read or write fantasy, my ends have to make sense to me in the real world. Two months after the shelling started, it came to me —the end — the only end that made sense… a canal… a sea-level shipping canal across the Negev Desert from Eilat at the northern tip of the Gulf of ‘Aqabah to Gaza City on the Mediterranean coast.

I had learned that plans for the project already existed. A declassified 1963 engineering and feasibility study by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories concluded it could be done. It was possible. With 60's excavation techniques, even using a series of underground nuclear explosions, it would be costly, but the potential benefits far outweighed the cost. Today, 60 years later, given China’s monster earth-moving machines, it would be like kids playing in a sand box.

In the end, the project waters a desert. Green crops emerge from abiotic land. Small towns spring to life with swimming pools in the city park. People could build a Las Vegas in the Negev if that’s what they decided to do.

The canal makes international trade more efficient, reducing the cost of imported goods. Like the Suez canal, it connects the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, the east-west passage that eliminates the need to sail around Africa. But the new canal has advantages. It’s wider and deeper than the Suez, permitting two-way passage of the largest cargo vessels. Unlike the Suez, dug through sand and requiring constant dredging, the new canal is cut through rock.

In the end, Gaza, the Mediterranean entrepot, is again what it was for thousands of years — the hub at the center of the ancient Silk Road, where East intermarries with the West; a prosperous port city on the Mediterranean; a center of learning; renowned throughout the world.

The story leading up to the end has been a Greek tragedy so far. I’d lose all hope if I didn’t know how the story was going to end.