On Writing Adventures
My mom still has the first book I ever wrote. It was a paperback, tacked together with those little gold paper fasteners. Construction paper was involved. Many colours.
It was a book about fish. Specifically, snorkeling with fish in the Bahamas. I think I was around six. There weren’t many words. Lots of colourful fish. I did a lot of snorkeling as a kid, living and traveling on a boat. I knew the names of all the fish.
As an adult, writing is good for stretching the imaginative legs. I’m fortunate to have a fairly active travel life via work and otherwise. When I travel for work, I’m usually alone, and after my day of socialization is finished, it’s an indulgence of mine to take some time and wander around wherever I am. Sometimes, I’ll head out a day early and take the whole day and slide into an observer role, watching how people interact with the landscape and each other.
I’ve never really written about somewhere I haven’t been. As someone that doesn’t writer terribly descriptive prose, it’s certainly possible to do it, but it helps me a lot to get in the right mindset when imagining what people would do and feel in a specific place, because it’s been my experience that places feel very different when you’re actually there versus how you imagine them.
In October, within the span of three weeks, I was lucky enough to visit the setting of both Campbell, and the second book in my trilogy, West. Initially, I picked the town that would become Campbell on Google maps, because it was midway between lots of things, and unremarkable in many ways; just another town, similar to the one I’d grown up in population wise, with a few historical highlights (Brokeback Mountain was filmed there), but nothing that would interfere . I noted a few things about the town that made the story plausible; proximity to farms, the US border, a few Aboriginal reserves, and started writing. Over the years, I’ve been to Calgary a couple of times for work, so I had a general feeling for the terrain, and the type of people that live there, so it didn’t feel like such a stretch to imagine a town about an hour south.
I ended up back in Alberta for work this fall, and through a series of strange coincidences, ended up in Lethbridge for the day with a rental car. When I wrapped up for the day, I decided to take the twenty minute drive to Fort Macleod, because, realistically I probably wasn’t going to do it otherwise. It’s out of the way, and as much as I like Calgary, it’s not exactly high on my list of vacation destinations.
Southern Alberta is flat, but not. It’s boxed in to the west by the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and while most of it is flat, there are these giant dips called coulees that drain down to the rivers that snake the landscape. The drive down from Calgary is striking, and I had the perfect day for it, with blue sky forever and warm temperatures. Because it was October, everything had dried up, leaving the prairie golden yellow.
Fort Macleod was, as I expected it to be, which, as a place I wrote a book about, was reassuring. It was small, surrounded by farms and fields as far as the eye could see. There were a few advertisements for upcoming subdivisions with property prices so low I wanted to throw up a little, coming from Toronto, and even Calgary. Founded as a RCMP post, Fort Macleod thrived for a while, but, like so many towns on the way to somewhere bigger, faced a series of population and employment challenges. I loved that the Wikipedia page describes the town’s most notable occurrence as a UFO sighting in 1956. Other websites noted the town’s rivalry with Lethbridge as a point of interest, and the seemingly endless disputes with the Canada Pacific Railway, which pulled out of the town and left it to die in 1912.
I thought, perhaps, I’d have dinner in Fort Macleod. The community’s downtown is a designated Alberta heritage site, with many buildings dating back to 1878. I thought, if nothing else, I’d pick up some piece made by some local artist to remember the town by.
Unfortunately, by the time I arrived there around 5, the town had all but boarded up for the night. I managed to find a gift shop, but nothing in it was locally made with the exception of the fudge, which I purchased, almost out of obligation to leave a little money in a town that I’d mentally spent so much time in. I only got to talk to one person, the woman at the gift shop, and she immediately asked what I was doing there, in a way that indicated that not many people were just ‘there’. I explained that I worked in publishing, and that I had been in Lethbridge for the day for work (perhaps I hit on a nerve there), and that I’d googled towns around Lethbridge (rubbing salt in the wound, maybe), and that I thought I’d come and check out the downtown, since it was a heritage site (I wasn’t quite ready to say I’d bastardized her town in fiction).
Her next question was if I was traveling alone. I noted that I was (I travel alone habitually), and she said that wasn’t very safe, for a young woman like me. I explained that I did it all the time, and I’d never run into any problems. She wrapped up my fudge and wished me the best of luck.
It was in that moment that I knew I’d nailed Fort Macleod in Campbell.
After departing with my fudge, I decided, since it was still full daylight that I’d take a drive to Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump. I knew I’d missed the UNESCO World Heritage Site museum, which closed at 5, but I thought it would be an interesting drive, and it was. When I got there, I was met by a group of Blackfeet that worked the site, and they invited me in, despite being closed, while they were cleaning up. I wandered around a bit, looked at the stuffed buffalo, and spent some time taking in the amazing scenery, nestled in the foothills. It was easy to imagine Lucy and Bull exploring the site as kids, talking about Blackfoot things, and getting to know one another off the pages of the book. I didn’t hike around too much because the manager of the UNESCO site gave me a bear warning, so I spent my half hour there and headed back to Calgary, in time to catch the prairie sunset.
I’ve been to Los Angeles twice. I’m really lucky to have an amazing group of girl friends there, who are always welcoming and accommodating, and oh, so much fun. My friend I stay with lives a run to Pacific, and was really fantastic about driving me to a checklist of locations that I’d written about in both Campbell and West, and pandering to my silly questions about earthquakes and the weather (though I didn’t explain why I was asking them at the time, I think she understands now). It was interesting to imagine dystopian Los Angeles with a much smaller population, less busy freeways, smaller, tighter pockets of people living in the most prime locations in the best houses left behind. A Los Angeles without laws, or rules to keep order. It wasn’t hard to imagine lawlessness changing all that much in rural Southern Alberta, but in Los Angeles, the stakes would be entirely different.
It’s all interesting to think about.
Next up: Florida for the holidays.
