Landscape
I drove down to Chicago yesterday with my father, and I let him pick the route. Instead of taking the freeway through Wisconsin, which I have done many times and which takes about 7 hours plus meal and gas stops, we drove down the west bank of the Mississippi. The first part, St. Paul to La Crescent via Highway 61, I’ve done many times; it’s a slower drive than the freeway, but prettier, and at La Crescent you can cross the river and pick up the freeway or continue down the east bank.
This time, we continued down the west bank. By that point, the river is wide and cluttered with islands and swampy areas, large parts of which were iced over. We passed several tugboats pushing barges downstream through sections of chopped-up ice, trying to beat winter and the river freezing over. In that section of the Mississippi, both banks are lined with river bluffs – steep, rocky, tree-covered hills that are the nearest thing to mountains that you can find in the Midwest for several hundred miles in any direction.
We’d had a serious cold snap this past week, so parts of the bluffs were covered with thick clumps of icicles where the water from the last rain had soaked into the top and poured out through cracks in the rock. Lots of that area is wildlife refuges, and we saw at least ten bald eagles – four in trees, two that practically buzzed the car, and a number of others at varying heights and distances.
After a couple of hours, we started passing through little river towns. Some of them had the slightly grimy look of a working port; some had clearly cleaned everything up for the tourists, and some were a kind of weird hybrid, with large car dealers who seemed to have nothing on the lot but shiny new pickup trucks, shiny new RVs, and ancient trade-in pickups and RVs, right next to a McDonalds, a quaint old storefront building in a style that was clearly from the 1800s but with suspiciously clean brickwork, and a church with an unreadable seal above the door in faded blue and peeling gold paint.
In one of those towns, I made…not so much a wrong turn as an unintended one, and ended up heading out of town on a county road instead of continuing down the Great River Road as intended. It was like unexpectedly ending up on another planet. The road had wound upward through town without being particularly noticeable, and we emerged on the sort of flattish rolling farmland that is familiar to anyone living in the Midwest, where you can see a thunderstorm coming two hours away. There was no sign of the river or the river bluffs, and I don’t think we’d gone even five miles. If we’d headed west, we’d have been in for several hundred miles of the same, the main difference being that the rolling would grow less and the flatness more through Nebraska until suddenly the Rocky Mountains show up on the western horizon (I’ve driven it; it is very, very long and very, very flat). But heading east, within five miles, we’d have been in the river bluffs and the partly-frozen river and the islands and marshes and the determined tugboats.
Landscape can change rapidly, or it can stay the same for a really long way. A lot of writers assume landscape of the type and scale they’re accustomed to: if they live where you can walk five miles and go from cliffs and rivers to empty farmland, that’s what they write; if they live where you have to go three hundred miles in any direction to see any change at all, that’s what their characters encounter.
And it is very difficult to give the feeling of the space and size of countryside, which affects how you get across whether it is changing rapidly or with excruciating slowness. If the characters have to travel a long distance with nothing happening, the pacing of the plot usually demands skipping lightly over many days, which means the reader can go from mountains to plains to coastal city in two pages, even if the text clearly says it took the characters a month or more. By the same token, characters who are only traveling for a day or two, but who have a very plot-dense and incident-heavy two days, can make the reader feel as if they must have covered hundreds of miles instead of five or ten. It’s a problem of style as well as pacing, and therefore something that each writer has to work out for him or herself…but first, as always, one must be aware that the problem exists.
