Ski Half Moon!

Excerpt:

My dad loved water skiing. He was really good at it and, though he was in his mid-forties and wouldn’t have risked the ski jump in its heyday, he became quite agile on one slalom ski. Slashing back and forth across the wake as my godfather Steve Furman laconically sped us across the bay. Eight years old and the size of a tall, rhesus monkey, I was the spotter. 
     A bright-eyed, lanky 14-year-old, my sister Annie was a natural athlete and terrific horsewoman with plenty of Gymkhana blue ribbons to her name. She was eager to water ski and mastered it almost immediately. 
     To a passing Bedouin the sight of our speeding boat trailing a very long rope held by a ninety pound girl who waves as she passes, would make no sense at all and definitely provide much food for thought.
     But Annie is having a great time. Tom is chilling at the wheel. The motor is purring, the Grumman is slicing through the water and Half Moon Bay salt spray mists the air. All is good. And then it isn’t.
     I had just turned to look to the bow and we both saw it at the same time. There was really nothing we could do. It was less than a fifty yards ahead of us and there was nowhere to turn. Tom couldn’t stop or even veer off because Annie might lose her grip. And fall into a giant swirling pod of jellyfish.
He has to steer straight through it and Annie just has to hold on or else.
     Near the end of summer, the jellyfish bloom. A very pale, almost translucent blue they are about the size of half a soccer ball with a feathery fringe and a bunch of stubby tentacles covered with hundreds of spring loaded stingers that fire on contact.  
     They aren’t too bad to swim around because they are usually just one or two, here or there. However under certain tidal and current conditions they would be swept together into a swirling pod. A hundred and fifty foot circle packed tight with thousands of jellyfish caught in a strange and deadly Sargasso Sea.
     I spin to watch Annie. She hasn’t seen the jellies yet, but then the water turns pale with their multitude. She realizes what’s happening. My heart is in my throat. My sister will certainly die if she falls...

Christmas in Khobar is available at Amazon.

Christmas in Khobar

Another collection of wonderful stories about early Dhahran from a veteran of it all.

To follow up the success of his first book of short stories Arabian Son, Tim Barger, the imp of Satan as his mother used to call him, has returned with more stories set in the almost mythical days of Dhahran in the fifties. A small, bare bones oil company town surrounded by miles of desert in every direction, it was home to about two thousand American employeess, maybe six hundred families and several hundred children.

     These tales are about the barely supervised exploits of Tim and his friends as well as some of the colorful characters of the era: the pioneering Abqaiq housewife Martha, the driller Clark Randall, the stoic Gil Strader, and the legendary John Ames.

     His stories take you to places that few have even imagined. He offers a glimpse of the often unseen: the pure, but orchestrated chaos of the used car suq in Riyadh, the solemn quiet at the bottom of a 50 feet deep artesian well in Qatif, the rocky slopes of Jebel Shamaal or the splendor of Half Moon Bay at night with a crackling camp fire and a full moon rising.

    Careless can mean care free, “without a care in the world,” but it is mostly used to describe reckless decision making i.e. stupidity. Barger was both care free and prone to ill-conceived adventures in which the only possible upside was that he would survive to tell the tale.  And he has.