the where of it

landscape with figures

• Posted by Summer Wood on March 30th, 2009 filed in books, craft of writing, places
• 1 Comment »

Years ago, reading Cormac McCarthy, I learned an important lesson:

GET THE FIGURE IN THE LANDSCAPE.  QUICK.

While some writers have successfully broken that rule (check out the first ten pages or so of THE GRAPES OF WRATH), it remains a useful guideline.  It is difficult to retain reader interest with pages and pages of descriptive writing.  Introducing characters early on provides both scale and narrative movement.  Similarly, an unmoored character – one deprived of setting – can lack depth and insight.  Bringing the two together can balance and energize a piece of writing.

Every so often, the landscape and the figure are so deeply entwined that they can’t be thought of separately.  Introduce the character and he brings the whole sweeping terrain with him:  the geographic locale, its cultural peculiarities, the weather and customs and landforms and history.  In some way, that person embodies his place so thoroughly that any story that includes him will, almost by default, intimately describe that specific landscape.

Twenty years ago, I met a person like that.  Floyd Trujillo kept his cows on the land adjacent to the little tumbledown adobe I rented on the Rio Costilla, and he’d come by nearly every afternoon to check on them.  They’d see him and come running.  Cripes, I thought, he was like a northern New Mexico Heidi.  I was waiting for him to start yodeling.  For a couple of days, I thought of him as a charming stereotype.  The small-time rancher.  Good country people.

Boy, was I dumb.

Good?  Absolutely.  Country?  Pretty much.  Floyd fit the stereotype in its most superficial way, but as I came to know him better – and as I was drawn in friendship and circumstance not just to Floyd but to his wife and his grown children and their children – I discovered a man whose life experience had been thoroughly conditioned by the magnificent confines of that valley and the mountains that sheltered it, and who, in turn, played a role in shaping that landscape.

Floyd told me stories from his life; hilarious stories, usually – even when they revealed him in moments of despair and dereliction.  And he taught me things.  How to keep a fire going in a woodstove at 8000′.  How to get sheep across a fast river.  How to get my dog to stay in the bed of my pickup.  On a walk one day, I asked if I could eat a berry that grew wild in the brambles.  “Sure,” he said, and I popped a handful in my mouth.  “Course,” he added, “they’ll kill ya,” and laughed as I spat them out, spraying the toes of my boots.  When my old truck punked out, he took me to a tiny dealership an hour’s drive away and helped me bargain for a used replacement.  He told me whom I could trust; which places to avoid; and how to get, by foot, to the uppermost jewel of the lakes that lay like a chain of gemstones overlooking the valley.

By coming to know Floyd, I came to know the place.  Not quaint (although irresistibly charming), not stereotypical, but hard and heartbreaking and absolutely unique and possessed of so breathtaking a beauty that I did not pass a day there without remarking on it.

It’s rare to come upon a character in literature as deeply rooted in place as Floyd Trujillo is – and remains – in the Rio Costilla Valley.  Hemingway nailed it with Pilar in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS.  Flannery O’Connor’s work comes to mind, as does Annie Proulx’s.  But for my money, the writer to accomplish this most spectacularly is James Galvin, with the character of Lyle, in his gorgeous (astonishing; essential) novel THE MEADOW.

If you haven’t read it, I cannot recommend it highly enough.  Let me know what you think.  And if you have other suggestions to contribute to the list of characters who embody place, I want to hear from you.  Email me at summerwood@thewhereofit.com, or comment below.