This is the second of a three-part attempt to unravel a bit of my writing process and how the residency experience affects it (plus a few photos of beautiful Wyoming). The first week is here. I started writing more and more, not only going deeper in to my work but also writing more about what I was writing and seeing. I began to draw more widely from what I saw and walked through. My thinking became more associative and abstract. Oh, and I required wilderness rescue.
11.29.11. I walked up the road all the way back and came out over Jim’s Ridge Trail. Finally found the yurt and disintegrating shack, and hiked for a good 4 hours. Intermittently I stared back and forth with deer, who immediately froze upon noticing me, disappearing into the deer brown of the hill grass. Today was frustrating writing. My notes from last night were so rapt with ideas, but the scenes I wrote read flaccid. I finally realized one can’t make up a cult in Texas in the early 1990s without referencing Waco, and wrote a few good scenes around that.
And generally I remembered how a few years after Waco and Ruby Ridge, I worked in the produce department at the grocery store with a kid called BJ who was country and struggled to explain to me why Ruby Ridge was an atrocity. What happened there was so outside my experience that I never fully comprehended what he was trying to tell me. We cut watermelons with machetes and wrapped the halves in plastic then displayed them for sale on a bed of soft ice. When my ex-boyfriend was stalking me, BJ walked me out to my car with the machete under his coat. We had to be in a commercial for some reason, which necessitated me going to his family’s trailer out in the country for some reason, and everything in there was brownish and laced with cigarette smoke. He and his family had Southern accents and some little girls were running around, and the adults were all sitting inside watching TV. Or they weren’t, I barely remember. I had closer friends who lived in trailers and I lived in one myself when I was a baby, but being there, I felt something heavy and peculiar in my stomach. Anyway, his kindness and that atmosphere are right. That’s what I should be writing about anyway.
I started the last chapter of the novella, which is a first-person monologue from Colt’s character, a teenage girl we see just briefly in the rest of the text. It’s unusual in that it’s written to be read aloud and also in that I think it’s very good.
11.30.11. Shane told me about how he bushwhacked up the hill by the yurt and had the most beautiful view of everything. Today I did the same, through the deep snow. I followed deer tracks most of the way up and I wondered whether all us mammals maybe look for similar paths to climb and traverse: if we’re not pursuing food, the path of least resistance. After a few inches of snow has accumulated, deer prints are stretched, probably the drag of those pretty legs, and look to my eye almost like those of a human. I put this away in my mind, as I’m writing about human-deer hybrids.
The sky was strips of soft grey, and an ethereal band of pale blue appeared to the west. This would transform into a peach color two hours before sunset. The plains spread out beneath me once I reached the top of the hill. The mountains were covered in snow and trees. There was a further spur to the east, and I followed the deer and coyote prints through the fragrant sage until I could see the hidden land behind it. It was all the magnificence S had described. I took some photos, but the utter vastness and silence and geological ancientness of those kinds of landscapes are impossible for me to preserve digitally: it ends up looking flat. I was reading PeterMatthiessen’s Zen journals in bed every night and morning and so love what he writes about snow mountains (this appears in more or less the same form in The Snow Leopard):
The emptiness and silence of snow mountains quickly bring about those states of consciousness that occur in the mind-emptying of meditation, and no doubt high altitude has an effect, for my eye perceives the world as fixed or fluid, as it wishes. The earth twitches and the mountains shimmer, as if all molecules had been set free: the blue sky rings. Perhaps what I hear is the ‘music of the spheres,’ what Hindus call the breathing of the Creator and astrophysicists call the ‘sighing’ of the sun.
I walked the fence line and saw moose poop that looked like it had fallen from a great height. I saw a tire painted with the words “You know you are trespassing” along its circumference. I came to a single-track road and followed its gentle slope downhill. The sun was starting its drowse when I arrived at the bison pasture, which we were told not to cross. B says the bison is statistically the most dangerous North American land mammal. I think getting lost happened quickly. That kind of panic and its physical and psychological effects are good things to know about as a writer. Also, it’s frightening. I thought I could get around the pasture, so followed another fenceline until I started bushwhacking downhill. I looked out over the plains, hills, and mountains, and there was nothing human except for the lights far below that I couldn’t reach. The hills were familiar, but I couldn’t place them or turn my map the right way. I realized I couldn’t navigate the hill I was descending in the dark, so I went back up, but was panicked and couldn’t remember where I’d come from. I went back to the place I recognized on my map and called the program director. Two hares who hadn’t yet grown their winter coats watched nearby, and when it grew fully dark, a distant ring of coyotes howled. I know my sense of direction is fallible, so I had plenty of layers, a flashlight, my phone, and a liter bottle for water, as well as the map (still, don’t hike unfamiliar/improvised trails alone, you guys!). I stood on the hill until Katie and Shane drove up to rescue me in his borrowed ranger’s truck. I tried to express my gratitude but it’s like photographing those landscapes—what I’m equipped with is never big enough to meet the magnitude of what I’m approaching. We went back to the lodge and played Big Buck Hunter.
I only wrote for 2 or 3 hours today, but figured out a huge amount about The Conversion while I was walking and wrote a lot of notes on it when I was done writing for the night. I finished the Colt chapter today and read it out loud. I’m not used to loving something right after drafting it, but I love this piece and think I can make it into a self-contained story of diminutive length, something I haven’t done in at least 5 years. The deer prints from today’s walk are like the science to this piece. I watch the deer, study them; we look at each other for as long as we can stand it. It’s a low year for regional mule deer populations, but there are still so many.
12.1.11. I wake up later and later because I’m up later each night. When I first got here, I’d go to bed at 10 and rise with the sun and feel clear and focused, but more and more the night is where I find focus, clarity, the banishment of distraction. Decided to expand the POV in The Conversion, spread it between a few characters. I think I”ve been following the wrong main character.
