Nate Briggs's Blog - Posts Tagged "heartland"
The Charm of a Small Place
So where is Elsinore exactly?
It's in the Department of Imagination - AKA Fiction - so it's exact location is suitably vague. Probably a couple of days drive from Lake Wobegon. And maybe a little less than that from the Simpson's home town of Springfield. And, even though winters in Oklahoma can be pretty miserable, Elsinore is well south of Frostbite Falls.
You can get there by bus. But they took the trains away in the 1960s. The tiny airport allows private planes, but most people arrive by car.
According to conversations I've heard from people who live there, Elsinore is about an hour from Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City - and a morning's drive from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, if you stay within the speed limit.
Nothing much has happened there, specifically, in terms of history. Its most traumatic connection is with the Dust Bowl. It was a starting point for Okies headed to California when times got bad. It's modern historical connection is with the iconic Route 66 - the "Mother Road" - even after Route 66 has been swallowed up by I-40. (The publicity still is from the old television drama "Route 66". I doubt that anyone would tune in to a series called "I-40".)
My own Elsinore - my own home town - was bypassed by the Interstate system: giving that place an intense feeling of isolation: being "out, and away". But I wanted Elsinore to be near a big road - because sometimes it's convenient to include that kind of river of commerce as part of certain stories.
Elsinore is within easy driving distance of some attractive lakes. Since most people own their own homes, apartments are generally shabby, and hard to find. The town is very walkable - but almost nobody walks. And, like so much of the Heartland, there are more seniors than children because young people with energy and talent go away to School...and never come back. (More on this later).
It is an ordinary, unexceptional place. A green sign along the divided highway. A sign that slides along the passenger side window, and then is left behind. Which means that Elsinore, OK, only offers only hundreds of stories of life and death - love and loss - happiness and unhappiness within its borders. Unlike a place like Brooklyn: where all the possible stories number in the millions.
The advantage Elsinore has is that I know it: right down to the ground. And, like all the rest of us, the time I have for storytelling is limited.
It's in the Department of Imagination - AKA Fiction - so it's exact location is suitably vague. Probably a couple of days drive from Lake Wobegon. And maybe a little less than that from the Simpson's home town of Springfield. And, even though winters in Oklahoma can be pretty miserable, Elsinore is well south of Frostbite Falls.
You can get there by bus. But they took the trains away in the 1960s. The tiny airport allows private planes, but most people arrive by car.
According to conversations I've heard from people who live there, Elsinore is about an hour from Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City - and a morning's drive from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, if you stay within the speed limit.
Nothing much has happened there, specifically, in terms of history. Its most traumatic connection is with the Dust Bowl. It was a starting point for Okies headed to California when times got bad. It's modern historical connection is with the iconic Route 66 - the "Mother Road" - even after Route 66 has been swallowed up by I-40. (The publicity still is from the old television drama "Route 66". I doubt that anyone would tune in to a series called "I-40".)
My own Elsinore - my own home town - was bypassed by the Interstate system: giving that place an intense feeling of isolation: being "out, and away". But I wanted Elsinore to be near a big road - because sometimes it's convenient to include that kind of river of commerce as part of certain stories.
Elsinore is within easy driving distance of some attractive lakes. Since most people own their own homes, apartments are generally shabby, and hard to find. The town is very walkable - but almost nobody walks. And, like so much of the Heartland, there are more seniors than children because young people with energy and talent go away to School...and never come back. (More on this later).
It is an ordinary, unexceptional place. A green sign along the divided highway. A sign that slides along the passenger side window, and then is left behind. Which means that Elsinore, OK, only offers only hundreds of stories of life and death - love and loss - happiness and unhappiness within its borders. Unlike a place like Brooklyn: where all the possible stories number in the millions.
The advantage Elsinore has is that I know it: right down to the ground. And, like all the rest of us, the time I have for storytelling is limited.
Sunday Literary Life: June 4
Knowing what I know now, it should have been beyond alarming when my father decided to sell a house almost paid for, in a town that was neither better nor worse than any other town, to move out to a small village: with no one but my father believing that our relocation was anything other than an epic error in judgment.
I spent over a year in that place – waiting for my very young life to be jump started by...something – experiencing the village in all kinds of weather. But the permanent picture I hold in my head is that of a low, Flanders sky in a late autumn day drained of all color – navigating the muddy unpaved streets - walking to the post office to get the mail. The pivot of my day for most of that time.
Naturally, that time – composed mostly of confused misery – was with me when I began this novel – "Relentless Angels" – putting the narrator of that book, Rebecca Weatherhead, in a very similar place. A village called Utopia. As she introduces it:
“After about 20 minutes, the telltale trees appeared, Uncle Danny slowed down to make the turn, and we knew by the crunch of the gravel under the tires that we were in town. A village home to 214 Caucasians, mostly of Scandinavian descent. With about the same number of dogs and cats. And vermin past counting.
“Even after so much time has passed between then and now, I think I’m safe in assuming that nothing there has changed. Utopia was, and always will be, a grid of four blocks to north-south and three blocks east-west. A tiny collection of unpaved streets lying right next to the highway. Twelve miles from Elsinore, the nearest town of any larger size. A short length of asphalt marks the “central business district”. Otherwise, only dirt. No sidewalks anywhere. No landscaping. No statues. No fountains. And no monuments to anyone.
“In the Central Business District the town halfheartedly supported a café and a general store: with that store being the nearest source of gasoline, diesel, and packaged beer. Those enterprises just limped along: trying to make ends meet. The truly prosperous part of Main Street was a tavern: the Six Shooter. Known to almost everyone locally as the “Shooter”.
“The other storefront — at the west end of the village — had closed down, due to lack of business, even though it had the best location: at the very edge of State Highway 98. The last visible stop for gasoline before Elsinore. At the time of my arrival, that building was unoccupied: weeds growing up through cracks in the pavement, the windows filled with plywood.
“I don’t mention this building lightly. It does become important later on.
“At the time they took me in, my Aunt and Uncle had been Utopian for seven years. In the fashion of a medieval farmer Uncle Danny lived right at the edge of the village, within sight of most of his land. And he rode out each day to meet the gods of agriculture while Aunt Billie ruled the household.
“Their residential arrangement soon struck me as absurd: since it gave them the disadvantages of both town and country life. There was something of the isolation of the farm about where they were. A house at the very end of the street, at the very edge of town, in a town remote from everything. But they also lived their lives under the constant, unblinking gaze of neighbors. Across the street. And right next door.
"Small town people — with nothing better to do than keep an eye on each other.”
To her credit, Rebecca responds to her unpromising situation with some energy and some humor. Less to her credit: Utopia is also where she begins her occasional practice as a stone-cold killer.
But more on this later, as "Relentless Angels" – the Great American Novel revisited - is our featured book for this month.
I spent over a year in that place – waiting for my very young life to be jump started by...something – experiencing the village in all kinds of weather. But the permanent picture I hold in my head is that of a low, Flanders sky in a late autumn day drained of all color – navigating the muddy unpaved streets - walking to the post office to get the mail. The pivot of my day for most of that time.
Naturally, that time – composed mostly of confused misery – was with me when I began this novel – "Relentless Angels" – putting the narrator of that book, Rebecca Weatherhead, in a very similar place. A village called Utopia. As she introduces it:
“After about 20 minutes, the telltale trees appeared, Uncle Danny slowed down to make the turn, and we knew by the crunch of the gravel under the tires that we were in town. A village home to 214 Caucasians, mostly of Scandinavian descent. With about the same number of dogs and cats. And vermin past counting.
“Even after so much time has passed between then and now, I think I’m safe in assuming that nothing there has changed. Utopia was, and always will be, a grid of four blocks to north-south and three blocks east-west. A tiny collection of unpaved streets lying right next to the highway. Twelve miles from Elsinore, the nearest town of any larger size. A short length of asphalt marks the “central business district”. Otherwise, only dirt. No sidewalks anywhere. No landscaping. No statues. No fountains. And no monuments to anyone.
“In the Central Business District the town halfheartedly supported a café and a general store: with that store being the nearest source of gasoline, diesel, and packaged beer. Those enterprises just limped along: trying to make ends meet. The truly prosperous part of Main Street was a tavern: the Six Shooter. Known to almost everyone locally as the “Shooter”.
“The other storefront — at the west end of the village — had closed down, due to lack of business, even though it had the best location: at the very edge of State Highway 98. The last visible stop for gasoline before Elsinore. At the time of my arrival, that building was unoccupied: weeds growing up through cracks in the pavement, the windows filled with plywood.
“I don’t mention this building lightly. It does become important later on.
“At the time they took me in, my Aunt and Uncle had been Utopian for seven years. In the fashion of a medieval farmer Uncle Danny lived right at the edge of the village, within sight of most of his land. And he rode out each day to meet the gods of agriculture while Aunt Billie ruled the household.
“Their residential arrangement soon struck me as absurd: since it gave them the disadvantages of both town and country life. There was something of the isolation of the farm about where they were. A house at the very end of the street, at the very edge of town, in a town remote from everything. But they also lived their lives under the constant, unblinking gaze of neighbors. Across the street. And right next door.
"Small town people — with nothing better to do than keep an eye on each other.”
To her credit, Rebecca responds to her unpromising situation with some energy and some humor. Less to her credit: Utopia is also where she begins her occasional practice as a stone-cold killer.
But more on this later, as "Relentless Angels" – the Great American Novel revisited - is our featured book for this month.
