How did I dream up The Last Shade Tree, a strange book by any definition? When I was fifteen, a frightening polar-route flight home from Europe to San Francisco forced an emergency landing at the US air force base in Frobisher Bay, Canada (now Iqaluit), near the Arctic Circle. It was mid-winter. Shivering in the sub-zero air, I was amazed by the intensity of the Northern Lights. I decided to write about it one day. Many years later, pieces of that experience have inspired several chapters.
But as I’ve grown older and more aware, what has surely shaped my book’s unusual story are my fears for our future. I have watched the world lurch from bad to worse to bad and back again—more times than I can count. And so I decided my characters would convey a message: that humans don’t seem to learn from the past horrors they’ve either created or lived through—except briefly at best. Soon the well-intentioned agreements and treaties begin to unravel until the world finds itself in worse shape than before, whether through hubris, greed, or the mind-boggling limitations of our world’s leaders.
Still, I wanted to write a novel, not a piece of forbidding non-fiction. So I came up with a story that would be thought-provoking and a great adventure at the same time. I hope I’ve succeeded, and that The Last Shade Tree will sweep you off your feet as you share my characters’ extraordinary journey across the world and through time.