The Ballad of Sara Zane

Believe in miracles?
It's hard to go through life without your people: Sara Zane's grandparent's fled Warsaw and worked their way across America chasing the American Dream as itinerant farm workers when her sixteen-year old mother, Gina falls in love with Hollywood stuntman Malibu surfer Tom Zane and elopes but not before leaving her diary with Velzy for safe-keeping. Tom is tragically killed a few days later. Alone, afraid to go home and pregnant Sara is taken in by a childless Irish couple from Lorimor, Iowa. For the first time in her life, she has a real home and gives birth to baby Gina but her joy is short lived as she succumbs to peritonitis, orphaning Gina, leaving her with a ribbon around her wrist and a tiny brass key. The musical Irish couple adopt Gina and raise her as their own. Gina grows up in a world music and will become a huge country/western star. He best friend, confidant and and protector during those years was her next door neighbour and 'tearaway', RJ Tibbs who'd be a bull riding superstar before he was twenty. Like most young men with more money than good sense and a low alcohol tolerance, RJ runs afoul of the law and is given the choice of joining the Marines or jail. Promising to write, her, RJ goes to Vietnam and sees things that no one should ever be exposed to and Gina loses touch with her soulmate. When RJ is eventually deemed fit to return to civvie life and cut-loose, he hitch-hikes to San Francisco with a hippie-chick and gets initiated into the psychedelic age that gets him into trouble again and he's forced to flee to Montana where he finds work on a ranch and has an encounter with an Indian Shaman known only as 'Smoke' who wanders the ancient game trails to assist those alone and in need. Later the evening he meets surfboard builder by summer and master cowboy leather-man by winter, Dale 'The Hawk' Velzy who had known RJ's famous Grandad, bronc-buster Casey Tibbs. The two become good friends and Velzy soon convinces RJ to get back in the ring with the big brahma bulls again. While he would be heralded in the ring, a freak accident sees him thrown from a stock-loading gate onto the horns of an irate bull and disembowelled. He will spend many months clinging to life until he is visited by the mysterious 'Smoke' once again and begins to heal. Enter: Surfer Shawn McQueen whose Australian wife dies tragically of cancer, who arrives in Lorimor to grieve with his estranged and bigoted father. To escape his father's bigoted raves, Shawn begins spending time at the Gold Rush Saloon where he meets the beautiful Gina and they start spending time together. Things are going along nicely and Shawn is actually believing he can love again when RJ appears on the scene and tries to kill Shawn in a drunken rage that has the busted up little cowboy on the lam yet again heading for Malibu where he hopes to find his buddy Dale Velzy. After a row with his father, Shawn encounters Smoke and is told to return to his home in California where he belongs and leaves for the coast on the first flight out of DesMoines the next day. A few weeks later Shawn is contacted by Gina who is recording in Los Angeles and he takes her to a beach party in Malibu at his old friend Dale Velzy place below the pier. On introduction: Dale, recognising his old friend's Tom Zane's last name and asks her about it and all she has is the little brass key that she has worn on a chain around her neck as a good luck charm for as long as she can remember. Velzy drops to his knees in front of his old sea chest and rummages around until he finds the diary Sara had left there so many years before. In the weeks that follow, Shawn takes Gina to one of the last location entries in the diary and Gina is united with her aged Grandparents who have waited forever for new of their only daughter or her return. "Miracles, ya gotta know 'em when you see 'em an' then you gotta go to where they happ