Stan Gabelein has been my friend for the last 30 plus years. I first met him at my church, and very rapidly discovered we shared the common realities of fishing, a love of the outdoors and sports. A short while after I met him Stan quenched his long-time thirst to become a fine artist by immersing himself in famed wild life artist Libby Berry’s School of Living Oils, and learned how to paint. Since then he has created dozens of beautiful oil paintings, often reflecting the sights, scenery and experiences of his many hunting and fishing trips in quest of the big game and fish of North America.

With Stan being the outdoorsman and fine artist that he is and has been for all these years, I was surprised to receive a phone call from him last year telling me that he had decided to write a book about his lifetime’s worth of experiences as a hunter and fisherman. I don’t want to say that I doubted Stan…but, I did. Being a writer myself, I know it is one thing to say you are going to write a book, and quite another to actually do it. As if to prove my lack of faith wrong, it wasn’t long before Stan was e-mailing me with his hunting and fishing anecdotes, and I began to realize the man was serious. The stories were fantastic, and I assisted him with the editing and publishing with the result that almost exactly a year ago Stan’s first book, “The Outdoorsman: Stories of a Hunting and Fishing Life” was released.

Getting that book written and published was understandably a big win for Stan. At the age of 78 he was now a published author; another major accomplishment to add to a lifetime’s worth. I thought that perhaps he had scratched that author itch, and didn’t expect to hear from him again in the capacity of writer, but once again I was wrong. Last summer he called me and said that he had decided to write a novel, which took me aback. “Stan,“ I said, “writing fiction is different than writing history or autobiographical accounts like those in your book. It isn’t rooted in a factual time track, but an imaginary one. You can find yourself writing along and suddenly realize that your last paragraph is completely non sequitur to what you wrote a page or a chapter earlier; it’s easier to make mistakes…”

And then Stan told me his idea for his novel, and it literally blew me away; one of the best story lines for a work of fiction I’d ever heard. My objections now out the window, I knew he had to write it.

That was nearly 6 months ago now. As before, across those months he would send the chapters as he completed them and I assisted with the editing and, when the time came, the publishing. All this effort has now come to fruition with the publication of Stan’s first novel, entitled “Sam Bigtree and Me: Our Trek Across North America-1759-1761,” a short summary of which follows:

Two generations before Lewis and Clark, two young men, one a native Iroquois and the other a colonial Virginian, became castaways on the rugged Pacific Northwest coast of the North American continent; the result of a devastating shipwreck that took the life of the young Virginian’s father. Stranded there, 3,000 miles from their home in Virginia, the two young men made the difficult choice to travel by foot and horseback across the the breadth of the continent to get back to their families and loved ones. “Sam Bigtree and Me: Our Trek Across North America, 1759-1761,” is the story of their incredible journey–the adventure of their lives!

Perhaps now you can see why I felt Stan had to write this book.

I can assure you that when you read it, you will be glad that he did!

Mark Arnold

13 February, 2023