A few weeks back I had reason to visit Northampton, Massachusetts. It’s a small-ish town, home of Smith College, less than two hours outside of Boston. I stayed in a “historic inn.” A thick, goose down of a snow fell like the kind of snow pictured in movies, not the kind of snow I know best.
Back in Oregon, I’d left the landscape still struggling to get out from under in a thick coating of solid ice. We’d had days of trees falling, heat and electricity knocked out, cars immobilized. One neighbor said that his car was hit by a massive fallen tree from across the block, but the layer of ice over the car was so thick that the tree only cracked the ice. The car was fine, once it thawed. The ice was dense enough to withstand the kind of tree that could crush a roofline.
The surface of the moon faces temperature swings of something like five hundred degrees, from three hundred below to two hundred above, as it moves through its cycles in relation to the sun. I imagine it best suited for tardigrades, those water bears or moss piglets, “slow steppers” …But as one news clip put it: “New research shows that some pits or caves on the surface of the moon might maintain an average temperature that is comparable to a regular day on Earth.”
A…regular…day on Earth, they said, as though that’s a thing…
I walked out in the falling, soft and honestly not even very cold snow, and thought, again, “I’m in a New England winter!”
I’ve been in plenty of blizzards. I’ve been snowed in, and without heat. I’ve driven in a blinding storm. Those days were in the Midwest, or up on Mt Hood in Oregon. In Northampton, it wasn’t the same snow at all. It fell so gently. Honestly? It almost…seemed…fake….ha!
I walked past old stone churches and a small cemetery and thought it again: The famous New England winter! It was the kind of thing I’d read about in books. I checked my geography. Was that area even within the boundaries of New England…? (It is!) What is so-called New England, anyway?
Even the trees were so different from those at home…(in part, because they were gracefully standing, and not iced or swaying, not dropping branches, not threatening…! Ha! And I LOVE Oregon’s trees…!)
I was a West Coaster on a short trip taking in a new place, with all the questions of being new to the area.
When I started writing, decades back, I’d always have to include the second part of our major address, “Oregon,” after telling anyone back east that I was from “Portland.” Little tiny Portland, Maine, somehow overshadowed us.
To say a place “has character” comes close to recognizing that place is a character. Most often place, as we live in our places now, is a constructed, sometimes mythical character surrounding us while stories and lives unfold in a time and place, in weather and architecture.
There are writers who detail setting so completely that it becomes a catalogue. Others may leave much out.
In my novel, Clown Girl, I swapped Portland for the fictional stomping ground of Baloneytown, because the language was more fun…but also because, at the time, it seemed as though too few in publishing had given much thought to the anti-consumerist, wayward, deeply discursive, highly political, often questionable situations and the rest of it going down in Portland…Or…eee…gone….
Creating a fictional name while drawing on a real place and the ways some of us lived allowed me to focus on the details the story needed without sinking into explaining the larger systems, the deeper history. It was both focused and freeing.
What are the specific, revealing, interesting details of the locations, the setting, real or imagined, or work you might be drafting, writing, revising, now?
Wherever you are, enjoy the day! Enjoy the place.
Enjoy a “regular day on Earth,” of sorts, if you find one.
Get to know your setting the way you’d know your characters, your friends, your family. Right? Then get it on the page. Be a tour guide to place, and shape the tour to serve the story, the work, the words.
Hope you’re well. I appreciate you.
M
ps—"Where are you going, where have you been?" is of course, Joyce Carol Oates, an unforgettable story: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
That’s the first I’ve heard of ice protecting a cat from a falling tree, amazing. I’ve gone through more ice melter than usual this “winter”, but nothing like the tree destroying freezing rain.
@seattlesnowflake has me under strict orders never to talk about tardigrades…
I Zoomed-visited a North Dakota high school English class and one kid asked why I write so much about one town—my reservation. And I said, "Because I know that land better than I've known any other place."