The Writer at the Dump

One of my fondest memories from childhood has to do with the dump in my hometown of Kalispell, Montana.  I don’t know what kind of waste facility that city uses now, but, at the time, there was a large open pit where people would back up their pickup trucks and just throw things in.  Bags of garbage, paper, old sinks and toilets and sofas….and bicycles.   I only have one clear memory of being there, and I can’t have been more than five or six years old, as my father was there, and he died when I was seven.  There isn’t much of a memory - seeing the downslope into piles of things - and lots of flies - my father’s hand holding mine, the sound of his voice.  

What I do know about that memory beyond doubt is that it was part of my father’s gifts to his kids.  My family couldn’t afford to buy bicycles for six children, but my father had a full home shop.  At the dump, he salvaged parts from multiple bicycles and back home at his shop, built three bicycles for the three older girls in the family.  One was painted red, one blue, and one black.  Those three

bicycles were, over the years that followed, shared and passed down among all of us.  When I visited my mother’s home in my forties, the red and the blue still leaned against a wall in her garage.  It wasn’t possible to look at them without being flooded with memories- my sister Jean riding up the front walk on the red one, laughing until she fell off;  riding the blue one through a column of ants that invaded the town the summer I was twelve;  my sister Kathleen and I riding both down a hill east of town one year when we were home for a family reunion.

Those bicycles were made from bits and pieces, flotsam and jetsam discarded by others, and they evoke bits and pieces of memories - flotsam and jetsam rising out of the murk of years past.  My father knew there was value in those discarded parts, and he sanded and polished and oiled until all of them came together in three brand new bicycles for three very excited girls.  Finding the value in memories takes no less work.  

I am currently reading Joshua Foer’s excellent book, Moonwalking with Einstein - in which he examines a movement to retrieve the kind of memory power that was the cornerstone of early civilization - the ability to remember huge amounts of information at a moment’s notice.  He details many methods for improving memory and recall, and he examines, sometimes humorously, the current efforts to offer everyone the training to perfect memory.  

The nature of memory has been a theme for me in my writing and in my studies for as long as I can remember. Theories abound.  But the nature of memory, how it functions within human consciousness, is elusive.  My favorite was a proposal mused aloud at a conference once by psychologist Karl Pribram who muttered, in discussing the nature of thinking using the metaphor of a hologram, “Perhaps the world is a hologram.”   He supposed that the entire nature of the human brain could be gleaned from any small piece of it, and the same with memory, and, he supposed, the same with reality.  

That notion suits how I think about the world.  And how I think about writing.  It took only the random thought that I needed to take some things to the dump to evoke the flash of memory of my father’s hand in mine, and the bikes he built, and the site of my sister Jean Marie laughing under her fallen bike, and sister Kathleen arms spread wide, speeding down an eastside hill ahead of me.  And it’s not much of a leap from there to the nature of the kind of life I’ve led, to an understanding of something essential to it.   

As students of writing, we are always being told to “show, don’t tell,” don’t bury your reader in exposition by telling them what kind of person your character is - instead, lead them to understand the character by showing the reader the life the character has lived.  Don’t write a biography (unless you need to for backstory) - build a picture of his life by showing the reader small pieces, like my father built a bicycle from parts taken from here, and from there. Build the character from the flotsam and jetsam of her or his memory. A red and a blue bike, leaned against the grey wall boards of an old garage, leading to an awareness of a full life.

To really bring your reader into the world of your character, you need to mine the depths of your own memory, find what it leads you to, and pay attention  - those memories will show you how a world is built, so that when a character steps into your mind, the world you build for that character will be one that will bring your reader home to their own memories.         

Gorillas in the Namib Desert - Why Writers Need Solo Time

“No, mémé, you should not do that.”   The matron at the school stood looking at me, her brows furrowed, shifting from foot to bare foot in the courtyard sand.

“Why,” I asked, “is it dangerous?”  

She hesitated, pulling a the strings that fell down from her collar.  “A woman can’t….a woman does not do this alone.”

I did not quite know how to respond.  It was clear she was worried about me, but whether it was about my safety or my reputation was not clear.   I’d been working here, at the Eluwa Special School (‘special’ because it was for deaf and blind children) for four months, and it was time for me to leave.   The group flight carrying the forty volunteers in the country back to the States did not leave for  two more weeks, but my school  ended its term more quickly than the other schools in-country that took volunteers, so I had time on my hands, and I wanted to go out to see the south Atlantic and the African coastline.  I also knew that the two women who supervised the American volunteers in country - Maggie and Josie, both considerably younger than I - regularly drove around the desert, from village to village where volunteers were placed, alone.  Perhaps that was acceptable because it was for their jobs, condoned by the Namibian government - but I intended to go adventuring, and that was different.

I’d already found a place to rent a car - I’d rented one once before to take a group of fellow volunteers to visit the nomadic Himba tribe in the northeastern reaches of the country.  In nearby Ongwediva - a semi-westernized town with markets and a few stoplights (called “robots” by the locals),  the office of a rental-car company whose name I recognized from American ads was  in an upstairs office in a cement block building without elevators or AC.  The young man behind the desk recognized me from the first rental, and was happy to take my American credit card again - as it turns out, continuing to submit charges on it for six months after I had left Namibia, until I finally had to close the account.  I believe that I got the same car both times - a little white coupe of some European make that I didn’t recognize, with deep red upholstery inside.  

I suppose there was danger.   Two of my fellow volunteers had suffered attacks and thefts in the city of Windhoek during our initial orientation, and certainly there were dangers in the desert.  Long stretches of lightly maintained roads, in a countryside filled with wild animals and few people - but a childhood in Montana, where vast reaches of land could be driven without encountering another soul, and which was also filled with its own share of wild animals, did not make this particular caution seem too problematic to me.  I had never felt unsafe in Ongwediva, the town where I worked, since I’d arrived, and I’d enjoyed the other (briefer) trips I’d taken around the countryside by myself or with other volunteers from nearby villages.  I’d walked the six mile stretch of desert road between Ongwediva and Oshakati alone, I’d been to cuca shops alone, and ridden in back of bakkes (pickup trucks) bouncing across the desert, and risked my life many times in the rusted metal carcasses referred to by the locals as ‘taxis,’ once accompanied by five other travelers, a stack of luggage that would make a burly baggage handler  blanch, and a goat.  I wasn’t afraid of driving around myself in a relatively recent model rental car.  That  was, perhaps, foolish, but, nevertheless, off I went.

Three days - and a considerable amount of adventures - later, I arrived at the wild south Atlantic coast unharmed.  I had a destination -  Walvis Bay - but took my time.   I was raised in the high mountains of Montana, and there were sights that, as a child, I never would have been capable of foreseeing:   thousands of pink flamingos gathered in the shallow water of a sheltered bay; an enormous gorilla sunning himself in the middle of the desert road, not seeming to realize how

completely out of place he was in the desert;  the amazing red dunes of the Namib sweeping down to the foam-white Atlantic.   I’d stayed overnight at a roadhouse meant for those on safari, where the doors didn’t lock and all night the hot breezes through the window shifted the necessary mosquito netting around the bed.  At breakfast the following morning, I’d spoken with travellers from all parts of the world.  I’d passed through multiple road blocks with men in camoflauge and rifles slung over their shoulders.  I’d encountered three women in an unlikely roadside stop which had an ACTUAL bathroom, and who spoke the remarkable “clicking” language that area of the world is so famous for, but spoke no English at all, and yet we were able to communicate.

So many memories - accumulated on a trip taken entirely solo.  It isn’t the only solo adventuring I’ve done - and it wasn’t my first.  I recall once, travelling to an archeological dig, I discovered that there was not a campsite for the volunteers (or ‘diggers’) but a few local camp sites were

recommended by the assistant archeologist organizing the dig. Checking in to one near the river, a small campground surrounded by deep forest, the somewhat grizzled  site caretaker looked over  my shoulder, checking out my jeep and its contents.  “You’re camping alone?”  I nodded, digging the campground fee out of my back pocket.  He shook his head.  “Well, you’re brave.”  There were adventures on that trip, too - some in the daytime as I worked with fellow volunteers at the dig site, others in the solo dark nights at my camp.

This morning I was saying to a friend from my Africa trip that it would have been nice to have someone to share memories of that solo trip with, but, almost immediately, I realized that I was wrong.  It was their very solo nature that has made those memories so much to be treasured - that I am the only one who knows what happened with the gorilla, or at those roadblocks, or what conversation was passed around the breakfast table at that safari-inn.  None of these memories will be passed around a bar table over beers shared with friends, laughed at and shared in mutual memory, because there is no mutuality to them - they are mine.

It is these kinds of memories the writer needs - the un-shared ones, as much as the shared.  Perhaps needs even more.  It is these memories which shape us in the privacy of our minds and hearts. Not just the big memories - gorillas and guns on an African highway - but the little ones - the stretched-out-in-bed alone time, or the sitting-on-a-park-bench thinking time.  It is through these moments, taken and experienced alone, that we understand who we are, which is the only thing that makes it possible for us to understand who our characters might be.