Hockinson author pens moving 4th book

There’s a beautifully sad moment in Dan Strawn’s new young adult novel where a couple of growing boys sneak away to their secret hideout, a clearing in the California woods, to think over the unthinkable.

One of their childhood band of brothers has moved away. But even more than that is pulling them apart: Summer work. Baseball. Girls.

“It ain’t the same. This is the same. But we’re not the same,” the boy known as Frog announces bitterly.

They’ve been the kind of buddies whose real names mean less to them than their secret nicknames: Frog. Rifle. Stinch. Streak. Teach. And a couple of names that refer to the male anatomy, which we won’t print here. Suffice to say, however, they sound awfully innocuous in our day and age.

“The Dead Possum Gang” takes place during the innocent 1940s and 1950s — or were they? Strawn does a superb job of showing off these boys’ heartfelt camaraderie, their love of life and the sunny Southern California landscape — even while tracing how seriously adult worries keep gathering on the horizon.

Or maybe those worries were always right here. When “The Dead Possum Gang” opens, our 6-year-old protagonist, Rick, is waiting to greet the father he doesn’t remember. That father is returning from the big war with crutches and an eye patch, and he’s frankly more interested in getting friendly with his wife than hanging out with his son — at first, anyway. Thanks to Strawn’s insightful and carefully straightforward prose, readers get a clear window into the complexity of this family’s life, and can’t help sharing Rick’s joy and relief as his dad comes around.

But duck-and-cover drills are an obvious waste of time. (“We didn’t talk about it much, but we all understood — we were toast in the event of a nuclear attack.”) Polio strikes too close for comfort. School bullies and sprouting females represent strange new threats. (“A treasonous thought entered my mind. This girl. Her quiet confidence, her interest in who I was, her easy smile and her flute — could she fill the gap left by Stinch’s absence?”)

And war eventually breaks out again, in another far-off place called Korea. Rick’s world may be happy in sunlight, but at night he tends to cower under his covers, driving away his fears with comic books and the comedy of Abbot and Costello and Our Gang.

Idaho legacy

Author Strawn, who is 78 and lives in Hockinson, has one of those amazing second-act stories in life. He didn’t publish his first book until well after retirement from the world of business.

Strawn grew up in Idaho loving to read and write; his mother made sure the house was always stuffed with books, and her son took to evading the local library’s limits on how many you could borrow at once by sneaking extras out under his coat, he said. He’d already finished masterpieces by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens long before they were assigned in high school, he said.

Strawn spent his working life writing business plans and teaching business communication courses. It was great writing discipline, he said, but it wasn’t terribly satisfying to his soul.

What was satisfying, was getting busy with a great story about the 1877 Nez Perce War. “I had things I wanted to write, things that needed to get written,” Strawn said.

That first novel, “Lame Bird’s Legacy,” was self-published but did better than Strawn ever expected — so he held out for a real publisher after that. Bluewood Publishing, based in New Zealand, has brought out “Isaac’s Gun” and “Black Wolf’s Return,” and then picked up “Lame Bird’s Legacy” too. You can find all three bundled together in a single e-book called “The Nez Perce Collection.”

“You don’t grow up where I grew up in Idaho without being very aware” of Nez Perce history and culture, he said. Strawn has supplemented that awareness by being a volunteer docent and researcher at the many scattered sites that make up the Nez Perce National Historic Park, he said; he’s also taught Nez Perce history and culture at Clark College and other local schools.

“The Dead Possum Gang,” which has nothing to do with the Nez Perce, is a semi-autobiographical departure for Strawn. Some of it is based on real people and real places, he said, but the plot is basically fiction. Strawn said he always makes outlines and even writes background biographies for his characters — but he also hopes that everything will come to life in ways that surprise him.

“The story is writing you, rather than the other way around,” he said.

Strawn said he’s restless to keep trying different genres. His next book will be another Indian novel, he said, but with a twist: it’ll be a “paranormal” story which may or may not feature the vengeful ghost of a Walla Walla leader named Yellow Bird.

“I can’t say I’ve made a million dollars. I’m not on the production line,” he said. “But I’ve made connections with readers all over the world.”