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BOOK SIGNING: Gary Spina will sign copies of "The Mountain Man's Field Guide to Grammar" at 1 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 8, at Borders in Fredericksburg. Spina's Web site is mountaincampfire.com.

November 3, 2007 12:35 am

THE MOUNTAIN MAN is not afraid of the bears, wolves or unsavory characters who roam his portion of the American West.

And the mountain man is not afraid of grammar.

He knows pronouns must agree with their antecedents. He can spot an independent clause at 20 paces. He always carries a comma, and he knows how to use it.

The mountain man in question is Big Jake McLaughlin, literary creation of Spotsylvania County resident and grammar book author Gary Spina.

People around the area have probably noticed Spina on the roads since he moved back to Spotsylvania County this summer, after several years away.

He's hard to miss, riding as he does in a pickup whose cap advertises "The Mountain Man's Field Guide to Grammar: A Fearless Adventure in Grammar, Style, and Usage."

(That's a serial comma before that "and" in the title; Spina insists on it. Because newspaper style shuns the serial comma, the title and one example from the book are the only places you'll see a serial comma in this story.)

Spina, 62, recently retired after teaching English at Catholic schools in Washington, New Jersey and Montana.

Teaching was an unlikely career for a man who spent most of his own school years wishing he were somewhere else.

Old West devotee

As a boy in northern New Jersey, Spina hated school. But he did love literature and remembers one of the first tales he read on his own, O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief." It impressed him that O. Henry had written short stories while in jail.

"I realized, if you're a writer you can write from anywhere. They can't stop you," Spina recalled.

He and an older brother also read books and magazines about the outdoors, which fueled their passion for camping, hiking, hunting, fishing and canoeing in Stokes State Forest.

It was then that Spina started identifying with the mountain men of the West, the trappers who from about 1810 to 1860 lived independently, moved comfortably among American Indians and made money by supplying furs to company traders from back East.

Mountain men were self-sufficient and self-taught in subjects they needed for survival.

That sounded good to Spina. Once he finished high school, he considered his formal education complete.

His life education was just beginning.

Drafted into the Army in 1966, Spina was sent not to Vietnam but to Korea's demilitarized zone, where he served as a radioman. Military life suited him; it was fair, and everyone followed the same rules.

But he had a fiancee, so after two years in the Army he returned home to marry. He found work as a policeman, bought a house and became a father.

A few years later he discovered that the GI Bill would essentially pay him to go to college, sending a monthly check that covered his whole mortgage. It was too good a deal to pass up.

"I hated school and never wanted to see the inside of a classroom again," he recalled.

But once he enrolled at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., he loved it. He earned an English degree.

While a full-time student, he continued working full time as a policeman and part time as a security guard. He coached Little League. And in spare moments he read poetry and literature to his children, Amanda, Gary, John, Michael and Laurie.

He still yearned for adventure, and several years later he got it.

After a divorce, he worked for months at a time in Alaska. He signed on as a deckhand on a merchant marine ship because it was headed to Easter Island and the South Pacific, places he wanted to see.

In between adventures he started puzzling over his next calling. Daughter Amanda, by then a schoolteacher, pointed it out.

"You're a natural teacher," he remembers her saying. "You've been a teacher all your life."

Lively lessons

In the classroom Spina liked teaching literature, but he struggled to bring across the concepts of grammar. Years of boredom had numbed his students to the subject.

Spina remembered the feeling, but he couldn't just skip the topic.

Like a mountain man, he figured out on his own how to be successful at a difficult endeavor.

He enlivened his lessons with stories, examples and performances, which held students' attention well enough to make at least some of the information stick.

That's the quality he brings to "The Mountain Man's Field Guide to Grammar," published last year by Sourcebooks Inc. of Naperville, Ill.

Spina intersperses grammar concepts with tales of Big Jake and supporting characters Silas Potter, Stinky Petey, Sagebrush Sam, Locoweed Louie, Soft-Headed Sylvester, Iron Skillet and Calls Down the Stars. An omniscient narrator addresses the reader as "crittur" and tackles topics without foofaraw:

Concrete nouns are things you can see, touch, chew on, or bang on. Abstract nouns are things you cannot see, touch, chew on, or bang on. Generally, concrete nouns can get a man hurt; abstract nouns can get a man hanged. That's because ideas are dangerous. But you'll learn that, crittur, as you get older and ideas come into your head at random times for better or worse.

Spina is a few weeks away from completing his follow-up manuscript, tentatively titled "The Mountain Man's Field Guide to Writing and Storytelling."

After that, though, he plans to turn his attention to fiction.

Stories shaped his character from childhood, he said. Now he has enough life experience to tell stories of his own.