Chapter Three
Lara’s first port of call was Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She was amazed at the vibrancy of the city and Corcovado peak, with its colossal statue of Jesus that dominated the skyline. Though she spoke no Portuguese she picked up the language quickly, luckily, she’d inherited her father’s affinity for languages as well as his eidetic memory, and the translator app on her phone didn’t hurt either.
The city, as she explored it, impressed upon her the stark contrast between rich and poor. People in the major cities lived in what she would consider ‘modern’ conditions but there were way too many who lived subsistence types of lives and lived in what she’d describe as hovels. She’d seen poverty in the United States, Appalachia for example, but nothing there could have prepared her for the poverty she saw here, in this very prosperous city.
That first week Lara fairly attacked her laptop. The story of what she’d seen flowed from her fingers to the screen. She didn’t find fault, she had no intention of angering local authorities, but she did know that she wanted to make people aware of the situation. Her article would appear in the Smallville Post, and she’d ask her father to submit it to other papers, potentially giving it a wider readership.
The next morning she took her article to the largest local newspaper, The Globe, and to her great surprise, she sold her article on the first try.
**********
“How long have you been in our fair city, Ms. Kent?” Manuel Peña, the city editor asked. He was a middle-aged man of portly build, shorter than she, with black salt and pepper hair and a pencil mustache.
“Not long, I’m afraid. I just got here a week or so ago.”
“I’m impressed. You’ve captured the plight of our poor without resorting to melodrama better than some of our native writers.”
Lara appreciated that someone that she didn’t know recognized her work. “Thank you, Senhor Peña. I appreciate your kind words.” Her family and her professors praised her work but this kind of validation meant a lot to her.
“I’d like to run this for our weekend section. I assume standard freelance rates are acceptable to you?”
“Oh, yes, I’m sure that will be more than fair.”
“Good. I hope that if you write any more articles, you’ll give us the first right of refusal?”
“I will, Senhor Peña, though I don’t know how long I’ll be in the city. I’m spending a year abroad, expanding my horizons, so I plan to keep moving. There’s a lot of the world to see and not a lot of time.”
“That’s too bad for me, Ms. Kent. I could use a writer like you on my paper.” Manuel Peña stood and extended his hand, which Lara shook. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, and good luck on your journey.”
Lara smiled brightly, pleased that this man wanted her to work for him. “It’s been my pleasure, Senhor Peña. Thanks for printing my article. I’ll look for it on Sunday.”
Lara made her way to the accounting department to get her check. While it wasn’t a lot of money, it was her first real sale. Lara made a photocopy of her check so she could add it to her scrapbook at home before she cashed it. As she left the bank, Lara was so happy she had to be doubly sure her feet were still on the ground. She could hardly wait to tell her dad about her first big sale!
**********
Lara left Brazil and made her way to the Andes Mountains. For the next few months, she followed the chain through Ecuador and Peru, through Bolivia and into Chile and Argentina. She stopped in large cities and small villages, spending the nights in small hostels or individual homes, or sometimes she camped out under the stars. When she found areas that provided internet access, Lara emailed her friends and family, extolling the beauty of the countries and peoples she’d seen.
She submitted articles about the conditions of the native peoples she met, urging her readers to contribute to the various charities that served them. And here Lara learned that her father was right. People were very similar no matter where they lived. They wanted to live in peace and safety and to provide for their families. In places where Lara saw injustice, she exposed it, though never in a way that would reflect badly on the native population.
For the most part, there were no emergencies for Superwoman. Natural disasters were blissfully absent, though she did find times where she witnessed people in need. Once when she was hiking through Nahuel Huapi Park in Argentina a situation arose that required Superwoman. She’d just finished her breakfast and had hoisted her pack to her shoulder when she heard a scream.
“My baby! He fell into the river! Oh please, someone, help!”
Lara glanced around with her x-ray vision and saw a young native woman standing beside the fast-moving water pointing to a toddler swept away by the current. Lara hurried behind a copse of trees and spun into her suit. Seconds later, she handed the crying, soaking wet little boy back to his mother.
“Here you go, ma’am. He’s all right, just scared,” Lara said in Spanish as she touched down, the boy cradled in her arms. The woman looked on in awe at the flying woman who stood in front of her, holding her son.
The woman wept with joy once her child was safely in her arms. “Oh thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”
“You’re very welcome, ma’am. Keep an eye on that little one. I bet he’s a handful.”
Lara smiled, floated a few feet away then disappeared in a flash. She listened as she returned to the copse of trees where she’d left her pack, as the woman told her friends how an angel in black had rescued her little boy.
**********
Lara touched down behind the barn and spun into jeans and a t-shirt. She entered and saw her grandfather just finishing up his evening chores.
“Grandpa!” Lara shouted hugging him fiercely. It felt so good to be home after three months away.
“Lara! God, it’s good to see you girl! We’ve missed you around here,” Jonathan said as his arms enveloped her.
“I’ve missed all of you too, Grandpa. Email is nice but it’s better to be here.”
“I remember when your dad was traveling. We didn’t have email then, so he’d send postcards and called some. Boy those phone bills were killers!” Jonathan laughed, thinking back over the years.
Lara was confused. “Didn’t Dad come home? I mean he could be here in minutes…”
“Sure he did, but he was searching for things he couldn’t find on the farm and we knew that, so we weren’t surprised when he didn’t visit too often.”
Lara studied Jonathan’s face. “That must have been hard on you and Grandma, huh?” Her grandfather had never been one to talk about his feelings, but his expressions always gave her clues as to how he felt.
“It was, but he was a grown man and needed to find his way, kinda like you!” Jonathan pulled her into another bear hug and he kissed her cheek.
Lara chuckled. “Yeah, well, I know my way. I’m just having fun and learning about the world. I’ll be back so often you’ll be asking me to leave!”
“No chance of that, sweetie, no chance of that. Come on, let’s go see if your Dad is home yet.”
Lara walked hand in hand with her grandfather as she’d done since she was young, the peaceful atmosphere of the farm warmed her heart. They entered the kitchen to see her father and grandmother working together to put the evening meal on the table.
“Look who dropped in, literally!” Jonathan said as he hung up his jacket.
Clark swung his daughter around in his arms and hugged her tightly. “Lara!”
“I missed you too, Dad!” Lara said as she kissed her father’s cheek and hugged him tightly. “Now put me down so I can hug Grandma!” Clark set her down slowly as if he were reluctant to let her go.
“Traveling suits you, sweetie.” Martha hugged her granddaughter tightly. “You look great, though I think you haven’t been eating regularly, have you?”
Lara laughed happily. “Grandma, you know I don’t need to eat!”
“Pish-posh, a growing girl needs to eat! Now sit down and tell us all about your travels.”
**********
Lara regaled them with tales of her adventures in the wilds of South America, filling them in on things she’d emailed them about and extolled the beauty of the continent.
“South America is one continent I never really visited, especially during my travels,” Clark said wistfully. “I don’t know why and now I’m sorry I missed it.”
Lara exclaimed. “I know, Dad. It’s funny that there’s this whole continent to our south and people just ignore it!”
Clark said proudly. “Well, they aren’t going to be ignoring it much longer. Your articles have been very popular on the circuit. Most of the large papers in the country have picked up your articles.
“I didn’t know that, Dad. You never mentioned it in your emails.”
“You asked me to submit some of your articles around and that’s what I did. I didn’t say anything because I wanted to surprise you.”
“Thanks, Dad. I’m very grateful. The people down there are so wonderful, but they could use some help. If my stories help them improve their lives, then I’m very happy.”
“I know how you feel. Even though I have all these powers, some of my greatest accomplishments have come from articles I’ve written that have helped people.”
“Yeah, no superpower can make you a better writer, that’s for sure.”
“Nope, that’s hard work and talent,” Clark said, lovingly.
Lara nudged her dad’s shoulder and quipped, “That and some heredity, huh, Dad?”
“More than you know, Pumpkin, more than you know.”
**********
Lois Lane glanced at the guest editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on her laptop. It was another in a series about poverty in South America, something she’d not normally have the least bit of interest in. It wasn’t that Lois wasn’t interested in the fight against poverty, but she preferred to focus closer to home. She’d written many articles and editorials herself over the years on the need to provide a helping hand, not a handout, to the poor and disadvantaged of Metropolis. However, it wasn’t the subject, per se, but the author she was interested in.
It was funny how the author had come to her attention.
**********
Lois needed some filler for the Sunday supplement and had asked Jim Olsen to come up with something. He’d come back an hour or so later with an article that was making the rounds freelance to various papers and had made it to the Planet. It was an article on poverty in Rio de Janeiro, and he had noticed the author’s name, Lara Kent.
“Hey, Lois, about the Sunday supplement article…?”
“Yeah, what have you got?”
“I came across this in the freelance pile and noticed the author.” Jim handed the article to Lois and pointed out the name. Lois gasped and her heart skipped a beat. “Do you think she’s Clark’s daughter?”
Jim still missed Clark, even after all these years. They talked on the phone a few times a year but while they avoided talking about their private lives Jim knew Clark had a daughter. Clark had said as much soon after he’d left the Planet and it would make sense that Clark’s daughter would be a writer, at least to him. Heck, she even wrote a little like Clark, touchy-feely stuff, though there was some bite to it as well.
“I don’t know, Jim. Could be, I guess.” Lois tried to maintain her calm as she scanned the article, her head down so she could avoid Jim’s gaze. It was at times like this that her heart was troubled. She’d missed so much of her daughter’s life, and now that she’d met her, she regretted her decision of so long ago even if the meeting was less than cordial. When she felt she was in control again she looked back up at him. “Yeah, this will do. Thanks, Jim.”
Jim Olsen returned to his desk none the wiser but Lois, however, was still in shock. Her daughter was a writer! Who would have thought? Although, given who her parents were, why did that fact surprise her? Clark loved to write and was damn good at it, even if his writing wasn’t very hard-hitting. He’d made his living lately writing travel books based on his early adventures before he’d come to the Planet, and only recently had branched out into adventure stories. Neither of those was her cup of tea, but she’d noticed that they consistently hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list year after year.
Lois read the article through once more with a critical eye and found very little to complain about. Lara’s style favored Clark more than herself, but there were flashes of brilliance that reminded her of some things she’d written at that age. Lois sent a copy of the article to the Sunday supplement editor for her concurrence, then stuffed the original into her briefcase, soon to join the Superwoman articles she had in her scrapbook.
**********
Lois’s thoughts returned to the present where she focused on the editorial on her screen. It was the latest in the series that had started with that article on Rio. Lara had continued to provide commentary about the plight of the poor in South American countries, championing the need to provide help to assist them in their desire to rise above their situation and gain a better life for themselves and their families. While Lara’s style was still not hard-hitting enough for her liking, the style did fit the subject matter. Lois saved a copy to the folder she kept for Lara’s articles, and she also sent one to her printer for addition to her scrapbook. As the laser printer hummed away in the background Lois couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride at the accomplishments of the child to whom she’d given birth.
**********
Lara reluctantly left South America but she’d accomplished everything she’d set out to do there. She’d developed a love for the peoples of the continent, and she hoped that her words would move people and governments to act to help them achieve what she knew was possible.
Her next stop was Africa. If she’d thought poverty in South America was bad, Africa was worse. South America had, for the most part, decent governments that were mostly shortsighted when it came to their people. But it seemed that several African countries were having a contest as to which one would have the most corrupt, violent government— and every one of them was in the running for first place. There were some bright spots, of course. South Africa and Egypt and some others had stable governments, but they were the minority.
Lara wrote to her father many times about the horrors she’d seen and had bemoaned the impotence she felt when she saw the crushing poverty there. While he sympathized with her and provided some suggestions on how to make a difference in the lives of the common people, he also let her know that a super-powered person, or two, could only do so much. Human beings had free will, and as much as he’d love to have peace break out on the African continent, that just wasn’t in the cards, at least not now.
Lara experienced frustration on an unprecedented level. She spent weeks working with a local Christian charity group to provide clean drinking water to the natives of a remote Rwandan village when a roaming band of rebels raided the village. She briefly pondered showing up as Superwoman but realized that since she was the only white woman around for hundreds of miles, Superwoman showing up would not be a good idea.
Lara had to stand by impotently while the rebels stole the equipment and poisoned the well. Luckily, the villagers had run for the hills while the destruction was happening, or things could have been much worse. Lara had to spend twice as long helping the village elders dig a new well, and Lara left Africa soon thereafter, frustrated, and humbled, something that her writing reflected.
**********
In two different homes, in two far distant states, a man and a woman were reading an article by their child with tears in their eyes.
Clark Kent had been aware of the situation in Rwanda because of the emails he’d exchanged with Lara. He’d tried to be there for her—as much as he could with the distance that separated them, but nothing she’d written had prepared him for the depths of despair she’d experienced in that tiny African village. Her writing touched his heart and reminded him of some of the things he’d seen on that same continent thirty years earlier. Clark felt her frustration because it seemed that nothing had changed, nor would it.
One of the hardest things he’d had to learn when he became Superman was that he was not omnipotent. He could not, nor would he have wanted to, bend people to his will, no matter how benign that will might be. Now his daughter had learned the same hard lesson very pointedly and it pained him greatly.
He could imagine Lara asking herself what good were her powers if she couldn’t use them to stop the suffering she’d seen? While Clark knew that she’d had to learn these lessons on her own, he wished that he’d been able to spare her, to protect her from the bad things in life, like he’d done when she was a child. Clark sighed, wishing for all the world that the biggest problem his little girl faced now was her childhood rival—Lindsay.
**********
Lois Lane had no idea that Lara had been in Africa until the article had shown up in the online version of the Kansas City Star. Lois had her search engine set up so that it flagged anything written by Lara Kent, so when the chime sounded alerting her to a new article she eagerly clicked on the link.
Lois lay in bed, reading the article, as tears formed in her eyes that rolled unheeded down her cheeks. Lois cried for the person beaten down by the evils of the world but she also cried for the woman she felt she’d come to know through her writing.
Lois remembered her trip to the African continent, long before she’d met Clark Kent. She’d gone to the Congo on a gunrunning story that had fallen apart soon after she’d arrived. While Lois hadn’t been there long, she’d seen how desperate that country was at that time, and now through Lara’s writing, Lois realized that nothing had changed, just the location of the suffering. Lois closed her laptop and turned off the light. She’d add this article to her scrapbook later. Right now, though, she couldn’t bear to think about the pain her daughter had experienced and had brought to life so starkly through her words.
**********
After the crushing poverty of Rwanda, the Outback of Australia fit Lara’s mood. There was no one around for hundreds of miles, no one was there to see her tears, to hear her rage against the world, or to hold her and tell her that she’d done the best she could. Lara briefly contemplated going home. She could sure use one of Grandma’s hugs but she wasn’t quite ready to face anyone yet. She’d poured her heart and soul into her article about Rwanda and she was feeling a bit raw. Lara wanted to take some time to gain some perspective before she returned home, and Australia seemed to be the place to do it. Besides, she was a grown woman now and she shouldn’t be running home to Daddy at the first sign of trouble.
**********
Lara touched down a few hundred miles southwest of the Gibson Desert Nature Reserve in Western Australia about halfway between Perth and Alice Springs. She closed her eyes and took a deep relaxing breath. Extending her hearing to its limits she listened for sounds of people and found none. Her arms outstretched she stood silently, her face turned towards the sun, its rays absorbed by her body, invigorated her. Before she’d left Rwanda, she’d filled her pack with food and water, enough to last for weeks. Though she could easily find both in a city if she needed to, she was unwilling to go anywhere near civilization. What she needed now was to heal her injured heart after her experiences in Rwanda.
Though it was quite hot Lara was not uncomfortable but still, she preferred to sit in the shade. She scanned the area for trees and found some about a mile away. She picked up her pack and set out at a leisurely pace. While she walked, she heard a sound she couldn’t identify so Lara scanned the area and found a herd of dromedary camels.
“Hey there,” Lara whispered as she drew closer to the herd. They seemed skittish so she slowed down so that she wouldn’t scare them. Lara reached into her bag and pulled out an apple as she got closer. A large male saw her and walked closer, his eyes locked on the fruit in her hand.
“That’s it. I won’t hurt you,” Lara said in a soft, soothing voice. The camel stopped and sniffed the air. He seemed to sense that Lara was friendly so he stood his ground. Lara extended her hand, palm up like she did with the horse on the farm, and stopped. The camel walked slowly closer until it stood right in front of her.
“Here you go, boy. This is for you.” The camel extended its neck and opened its mouth so he could grasp the tasty treat with his teeth. With one loud crunch, the apple disappeared, juice sliding out between his lips.
When the camel nudged Lara’s hand looking for more, she laughed. “Sorry boy, that’s all you’re getting.” The camel seemed to know there would be no more treats so he returned to the herd without even a backward glance.
“Well, you could have at least said thank you!”
Lara continued her trek to the group of trees until, fifteen minutes later, she was sitting beneath a large tree with her head resting against the trunk. Though she didn’t need much sleep Lara found her eyes were heavy so she closed them and drifted off to sleep.
**********
Lara must have been more tired than she expected because by the time she woke up the sun was close to setting. Standing up she brushed the dirt off her shorts then she rubbed her hands together to clean them. Since it would be dark soon, she decided to build a fire. A quick search found several rocks that she placed in a circle then she gathered sticks and dead branches from the nearby trees. One quick blast of heat vision and Lara had a roaring fire going.
The smell of burning wood along with the crackle of the flames made her smile. She remembered happy times she’d spent around campfires with her dad and grandfather and at the infamous Mother-Daughter camp out with her grandmother when she was twelve. Lara leaned back against the tree once more, the silence of the night lulling her. When the fire finally died down Lara scooped dirt over the embers. It was a beautiful night with no hint of rain so she hung her pack from a rope in the upper branches of the tree. She then floated above the tree and onto her back where she put her hands behind her head, closed her eyes, and drifted into a dreamless sleep.
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Continued in Chapter Four.
