The World More Full of Weeping (11 page)

My sense of place, and its importance, is perhaps closer
to the surface when it comes to Henderson, the setting of
The World More Full of Weeping
, though the issues are a little
cloudier. Actually, a lot cloudier.

A little background to start: I spent the first seventeen
and a half years of my life in Agassiz, BC. Fourth
generation.

The joke in Agassiz is that there are people
from
there,
and newcomers. The dividing line is the flood: your family
was here before the flood, or you're a newcomer. Of course,
the flood occurred in 1948, which might give a sense of the
Agassiz mindset. A skewed one, but a sense nonetheless.

(Another aside: it just occurred to me that I grew up
in the distant shadow of the flood of '48, and with the
annual awareness of the river rising against the dikes. Is
it any wonder, given the universality of floods in world
mythology, that I gravitated to a mythic interest? Things
to ponder . . .)

Agassiz, at the time I was growing up, was home to
about 3,500 people. A very small town. I had a wonderful
and terrible childhood and adolescence; how I characterize
it typically depends on what mood I'm in when I'm asked.
Right now, I'm feeling a cautious warmth toward the world
(it's 5:44 a.m., the sun is coming up, and the coffee is kicking
in), so I can say that, despite the bullying and the pain and
anguish that came with chunks of my teenage years, I had
a pretty good childhood. I remember being outside all the
time, riding my banana-seat bike in the driveway with my
brothers, playing with the kids down the road, exploring
the woods . . .

The woods.

Always the woods.

Here's the thing: Henderson is not Agassiz. Agassiz is
not Henderson. I just want to be clear from the outset.

I mean, look at it objectively, side by side.

First: Agassiz is a small town in southwestern British
Columbia, a farm-town nestled in a crook of the Fraser
River about an hour and a half outside of Vancouver. A
couple of days each year the air is so heavy with the smell
of fertilizer from the fields that you almost taste the cow
shit. Coming into town, you cross a bridge over the Fraser
(which terrified me as a child, and terrifies me more now),
you drive down either the front street or the back street.
There's one high school, and in the mid-'80s a close group
of friends won the Provincial basketball championships
against all odds. There's a library, and a couple of coffeeshops, and down the road a piece is another little town,
Harrison Hot Springs, on the shores of Harrison Lake.
Every year in Agassiz, there's the Fall Fair and Corn
Festival (third weekend in September), and the Corn King
is crowned. The town is ringed with farms, and forests, and
lazy back roads.

Okay, now Henderson.

Henderson is a small town in southwestern British
Columbia, a farm-town nestled in a crook of a river about
an hour and a half outside of Vancouver. A couple of days
each year the air is so heavy with the smell of fertilizer
from the fields that you almost taste the cow shit. Coming
into town, you cross a bridge over the river, and you drive
down either the front street or the back street. There's one
high school, and in the mid-'80s a close group of friends
won the Provincial basketball championships against all
odds. There's a library, and a couple of coffee-shops, and
down the road a piece is another little town, on the shores
of a large, mysterious lake. Every year in Henderson, there's
the Harvest Festival (third weekend in September), and the
Harvest King is crowned. The town is ringed with farms,
and forests, and lazy back roads. Oh, and it has a movie
theatre.

See? Completely and utterly different. (Note the movie
theatre.)

I'm
not
being
facetious.
Or
coy.
Agassiz
is
not
Henderson.

The trick, even to my mind, is to balance the “is not”
with the fact that, at some levels, it “is.”

With so many of my formative years spent in that
small spot on the map, Agassiz is a wealth of memories
and experiences. It's a veritable mine-field of resonance.
Walking down the highway from the house where I grew
up to my grandmother's house alone layers memory upon
memory, some pleasant, some not so much. The smell of
the dust on that road in high summer is almost crippling
in the sheer amount of resonance it carries. That half mile
stretch alone has enough in it for a book. Or two. The
dusty air is thick with ghosts. And everywhere I turn in
Agassiz, there's more, and more, and more. The past (Pang's
restaurant, for example, where I lived every weekend for
several years, drinking coffee and eating wonton soup
and writing, always writing, while my girlfriend waited
tables) jockeys for position with the present reality (that
building burned down, for example, about a year ago). It's
an absolute wealth of raw material, of emotion and memory
and questions. . . .

To the point where I
can't
write about Agassiz. I simply
can't.

And yet, I do. But I don't. (Are you starting to see how
this works, in my head? Welcome to my head, by the way —
it's a bit of a scary place.)

Writers have their places, locales and sites that inspire
them, that give them homes and give them stories. James
Joyce had Dublin, and he was unrepentant about it. On
Bloomsday every year (which is, as I'm writing this, today,
as a matter of fact), devotees gather to follow the steps of
Leopold Bloom through Dublin and through
Ulysses
. An
entire industry has grown up around a single book and its
fidelity to its sense of place (which is even more impressive,
considering the novel was written in Switzerland, not
Ireland, but I digress . . .). To a much lesser degree (because
hey, we
are
talking Joyce here), I have Victoria. Walking
tours could, conceivably, be led from location to location:
Hillside Mall, Royal Jubilee, John's Place, the cliffs off
Dallas Road, Pagliacci's. Okay, it's a much less interesting
tour that Joyce's Dublin, but it could be done (and I suspect
that, hard though it may be to believe, there may actually
be more drinking involved in my tour than any Bloomsday
ramble).

But I also have Agassiz. There are stories to tell, not of
the town itself, but of some of the ideas around the town,
some of the resonances. For better or worse, it inspires me,
in ways that are at once inextricably linked to the physical
place and simultaneously completely unrelated.

I'm not alone in this. Look at William Faulkner. He
referred to Yoknapatawpha County as his “apocryphal
county,” based loosely on Lafayette County where he
lived. Similarly, Manawaka, Manitoba was based loosely
on Neepawa, Margaret Laurence's hometown. And look
at Stephen King, whose Derry and Castle Rock are clearly
more than inspired by the small Maine towns he knows so
well.

The question then, I suppose, is why? To get all rhetorical
and third-person-y about it: if you're going to write about a
place, and you've gone on at great length to clarify just how
important the place is to you and your writing, why not just
write about the place? For the love of God, man, why tie
yourself up in knots over it?

And the only way I can answer is to repeat myself: because
Henderson is not Agassiz. Except inasmuch as it is.

An anecdote might help.

Henderson was born in the early 1990s, on the main floor
of the Book Warehouse store on Broadway in Vancouver. It
was the third week of September. I was managing the Book
Warehouse location in Victoria at that point, and I was
working for a week at the flagship store, connecting with
the head office, getting to know how things were done in
the big city. It was a Friday afternoon. I had come back from
lunch at a little Chinese restaurant a couple of doors down
(wonton soup, naturally), and I was feeling the first buzzes
of an MSG reaction when one of the people working there
asked me what I was doing for the weekend.

So I explained that my wife was coming over from
Victoria and we were headed out to Agassiz for the Fall Fair
that afternoon.

The Agassiz Fall Fair is a big deal in the way that only
smalltown fall fairs can be a big deal. It's the equivalent
of homecoming weekend at your better universities:
everybody who can come back, comes back. It's a celebration
of friends and family, an annual opportunity to re-connect
with one's roots. This person I was talking to didn't know
that, however, so I had to explain the Fall Fair in detail.
And after I described the rides and the judging of preserves
and baking and crafts and the beer garden and how much
I missed the old days of the demolition derby, I explained
about the crowning of the Corn King.

“It's pretty prestigious,” I explained. “All the local farmers
who are growing corn that year are entered, and their fields
and their crops are evaluated by a panel of experts, people
from the Experimental Farm, that sort of thing. And the
one with the finest crop is crowned the Corn King. There's
a robe and a crown and everything.”

And that's the whole story. That's what the Corn King is,
more or less (if I were inclined to research further, I would
know exactly who to call — one of the benefits of smalltown
life). Except I didn't stop there. And to this day, I don't know
where the next comment came from, or how it came to me.
But came it did.

“And then,” I continued, completely deadpan, “at midnight he's sacrificed to the Old Gods to ensure a plentiful
harvest for the next year.“

She laughed (of course it was a she); it wasn't bad as far
as punchlines go.

I didn't laugh. And in that moment, my life changed,
and Henderson was born.

Because
all
that
stuff
about
the
Fall
Fair,
the
homecoming, the crowning of the Corn King? That's all
Agassiz.

The mythic, ritual, pagan sacrifice of the Corn King for
the benefit of the community, though? That's Henderson.
There are any number of perfectly valid reasons to create
a mirror-image of an existing community to use as a
location for one's writing. Hell, I subscribe to any number
of perfectly straightforward reasons to justify my having
done it.

Chief among these is likely practicality. Simply put, it's
easier to write about a place that you're making up because
you can include what you need. When you're writing based
in and on a real place, you're pretty much limited to the
existing reality. Yeah, I said pretty much; I haven't always
followed that rule, as my mentions of Sherry being treated
at Royal Jubilee in
Before I Wake
and the continued existence
of an antiquarian bookstore in the new novel where now
there is only a financial planning company should attest.
As a general rule, though, inventing a place gives you more
freedom. I couldn't, for example, write about characters in
Agassiz going to a movie, because Agassiz, during the time
of my existence hasn't had a movie theatre. Henderson
does, though. (Can you tell I'm still a little ticked at the
lack of a movie theatre in Agassiz when I was growing up?)
It allows you a larger freedom as well, the freedom to create
histories and identities and backstories. Again, if you need
it, you can create it. It's not like writing about Victoria and
needing, for some reason, to have the city destroyed in a
historic fire at the turn of the century. That kind of thing
just doesn't fly.

And then there's the issue of . . . well, let's call it civility.
But fear might be another way of looking at it. And deniability. Let's face it, if you're writing in the “real” world,
somebody, somewhere, sometime is going to get pissed and
assume that the very worst of the characters in your book is,
in fact, a barely concealed version of his- or herself. Nobody
wants a story filled with saints and piety (God, where would
be the fun in that?), but people don't want to think that
they're the basis for the very nadir of your creations. And
in the event that you're confronted by a 6' 2” refrigerator
of a man with a badge, who's drunkenly complaining that
the pants-wetting, alcoholic, child-molesting deputy in
your book must be him, being able to say, “No, no, it's just
a story! See! It's in a completely different town! Completely
imaginary!” might, just might, help you avoid the shit-kicking, which, let's face it, you probably deserve.

I'm sure the residents of Lafayette County and Neepawa
weren't always that keen on how “they” were depicted in
Faulkner and Laurence's writing, but what can you do?

And speaking of shit-kicking, there's also the issue of
cruelty. And this is, for me, a pretty pertinent reason to
distance a real town by creating a simulacrum.

Let's look at Castle Rock and Derry, two of Stephen
King's “wholesome” little towns. Jesus, what that man puts
those people through is nothing short of malicious. I mean,
killer clowns, fer the love of Pete! Does it get any worse
than that? And I bet he does it with a smile on his face.
No, I'm sure he does it with a smile on his face, because I've
been there. I've done that. The things that happen in the
Henderson stories . . . the mind reels.

And while the thought of burning the town of Agassiz
to the ground is reprehensible (and, yes, I realize, likely
psychotic), with Henderson, it's all right. No, it's better than
all right: it's the right thing to do. Well, given the context
and the events surrounding it.

Which is probably the key thing, now that I think about
it. The main reason for the creation of Henderson was that
it allowed me access to those stories I wanted to tell, and a
context in which to tell them.

Let's face it — I'm odd. I know that. Anyone who's spent
any time at all talking with me knows it; it's an undeniable
fact.