the where of it

the names of places, part two

• Posted by Summer Wood on March 16th, 2009 filed in books, craft of writing
• 2 Comments »

My novel ARROYO is named for a landscape feature.  It wasn’t an idle choice.  The arroyo of the title plays a crucial role both in what happens in the book, and in what those events come to mean.

The arroyo – a “small, deep gully produced by flash flooding in arid and semiarid regions of the southwestern United States,” according to one dictionary – is a line carved in the face of the earth by the action of water.  It is the visible evidence of water out of control. “Oh,” my friend Dorie Hagler said, when I described the book to her.  “So water functions in the landscape the way emotion does in the human body?”

I was floored.  Yes, I answered, nodding vigorously.  And wondered:  why hadn’t I thought of that?

On some deep level, I think I had.  Not that I could articulate it.  (I loved it when someone asked Amy Tan what her new book was about, and she said, “If I knew that, do you think I would have had to write 300 pages?”)  When I began writing the book, all I had was a rough group of short stories about characters sharing a landscape and showing up in each other’s lives.  I didn’t even think I was writing a novel.  It wasn’t until I drew a map of the place – this fictional town of Los Fuegos, and the landscape in which it lay – that I understood how deeply the land and the characters and the story fit together.

And how central this arroyo, this cleft in the earth, would be to the whole enterprise.

I still have that map, somewhere.  It was drawn in pencil on lined yellow paper, and had little houses with smoke coming out of their chimneys, and a gas station, and the place where Ricardo’s truck fell into the hole dug for a new septic tank (a story that never made it into the final draft of the novel).  It located mountains and the edge of the forest and where the creek ran; it showed whose fields abutted the cemetery; it had a squiggle for the path of the county road.

Locating landscape features, both natural and human-made, cracked open the story for me.  In real life, as in fiction, knowing the landscape features and the history they contain can provide deep insight into a place.  And it doesn’t take joint degrees in history and geology to gain that insight.  All it takes a good map.  One that hasn’t erased the names locals have given places and replaced them with bland, administrative tags. 

Estevan Arellano, cultural historian of northern New Mexico and champion of traditional agricultural practices, gave a wise and funny address on this topic to members of the Taos Land Trust.  You can find a transcript here (thanks to Ernie Atencio, Land Trust Director, for bringing it to my attention).  He remarks on how many of the place names carry with them remnants of three or more languages, offering a kind of shorthand for the history of diverse cultures found here.

There’s a kind of poignancy in his address, an understanding that many names reflect functions for places that no longer pertain.  He points with regret to the loss of la cañada, for example, which he describes it as “a space of land between two high points.  It’s also a road to move livestock which is usually at least 90 yards wide.”  When I moved to New Mexico nearly twenty years ago I was amazed at how frequently, certain times of year, I’d have to pause to let men and women on horseback herd their livestock – sheep, mostly, but also cows – from winter pasture to summer grazing in the forest service allotment.  I don’t see as much of that, now.  And as the uses change, sometimes the names change as well.

Sometimes, but not always.  There’s a stubborn persistence to names, a willingness on our part to call a place by its old name long after the naming event or person is gone.  Detailed maps provide a profound way to document the interaction between a physical place and its people.  “A lot of how our ancestors named the landscape was based on the human body and the human anatomy,” Arellano said.  We attach ourselves to a place by linking its body to our own, and weaving our stories into the weft of its physical narrative.

I know writers who mine phone books for potential names of characters.  Sometimes the right name can propel a character to life.

And sometimes calling a place by the right name can do the same thing.

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Note:  new writing prompts posted on the Seedbank page.  Check it out!