Bishop Bryant

In his small boy days, Bishop Bryant’s family lived in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, that some curse as the seed of modern evil. As a boy, he didn’t know that. His hidden government village was treasure, a fenced-in enclave perched on a plateau in the Jemez Mountains. It was surrounded by wilderness inhabited by bears, mule deer, cougars, rattlesnakes, horned toads, juniper, and piñon trees. Pueblo Indian spirits reportedly walked the winding rocky roads and drank pure water from endless trout streams there. The historic carnage conceived in the Los Alamos laboratories occurred right alongside the mundane, innocent childhood of an unremarkable boy. Now Bishop Bryant sees those days as an aamødt, Norwegian for a confluence of contrasting currents. Los Alamos was where evil and good traveled parallel paths and breathed each other’s air. He breathed it too.

As an adult, he has straddled the spiritual and material worlds, left foot in a Jesus sandal and right one in a lawyer’s shoe. Along the way, he divorced, remarried, and had children, as joy and sorrow ebbed and flowed. After lawyering, he stumbled into a deal that made him part owner of a candy factory. Later, he became CEO of a clean water charity. At seventy-five, Upstream is his first novel. As a late bloomer this book might also be his last, but let’s hope not.