The Wild, Windswept West.
I’ve been lucky enough to always live in spectacular scenery. And when I say scenery, I mean the real thing. I don’t know if I can truly express just how much I hate the confines of cities. Skylines are not views.
My houses were always on the end of dirt roads and surrounded by substantial acreage. It’s heaven on earth, and there are no neighbors to complain about the noise that your wood shop makes. Not to mention you can absolutely blast some George (Jones or Strait, it all works) and have no repercussions.
Being originally from the Sonoran desert, I’ve always loved it, always loved watching the awe that overcomes people visiting. There’s nothing like it, especially when you’re nestled at the base of some pretty spectacular mountains. When I moved to Nebraska, it was difficult to adjust. It all seemed so…flat. And, as the state tells you now, it really isn’t for everyone, but I quickly grew to understand just now lucky I was to live there. Grassland stretches forever, cottonwoods seem to brush the sky, and man, those golden hours during the long summer days where the sun is turning the very air around you into liquid gold.
That being said, all the humidity in Nebraska meant my hair (very curly) looked absolutely ridiculous, but that’s beside the point.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I have a very large family. That includes my immediate family. We could never afford to fly back and forth between the places we needed to go, so I got used to long (when I say long, I mean twenty-four-hours-straight-through long) road trips in our very stylish conversion vans that allowed me to see pretty much the entirety of the West. I loved it. I would press my nose against the window and imagine all of the stories of the people who had lived in these places before I had the privilege of driving through. After all, my ancestors had homesteaded. I knew what roots meant to people.
I’m also a total history nerd, so I knew local histories, the things that had shaped the places I was seeing. As I got older, I would set out on trips of my own, stopping at all of the out-of-the-way places I could. Cities never interested me (I think I hinted subtly at that earlier), but I have never been able to pass up the opportunity to see more of creation. Sometimes I took people with me, but it was rare. My brother, in the picture that led you to this post, was one of those exceptions. He and I talked and joked at length about the kind of atmosphere each place had. We’ve also almost died more than a few times, but you’ll just have to read my books and see if you can figure out which ones you think those are.
That’s the key point here. The places we live, the places we see, those are just as important in a story as what’s going on interpersonally. That’s why I write about the West. You can’t live in a place out here without being impacted. It changes you. Now, I’m not going to start singing “Rocky Mountain High,” or anything, because the kind of impact I’m talking about isn’t some cannabis fueled, pseudo-spiritual “experience” that suddenly has you singing about imagining no heaven, no hell, all those people getting along, and a complete and utter lack of logic, but the kind that makes you realize what it takes to stand on your own two feet. Man and Mother Nature both have a whole lot to teach us, and you need to be able to stand up to both, but when it comes to Mother Nature, you also are forced to realized the true place you hold. Nothing like almost dying in a canyon (ahem…totally not me) or actually thinking you might be able to save your food even though you can hear the bear out there (obviously not me, what kind of idiot thinks that. Luckily this hypothetical idiot did not act on these hypothetical thoughts) or almost dying after hitting black ice (that one I’ll own up to. If you’ve lived in a wintery climate, you’ve been there) to make you truly understand where your limits are.
Thus, if, when writing, your characters are facing man-made turmoil, it only makes sense to draw the extremities of nature so as to truly capitalize on the situation. As far as it goes, you really can’t beat the inspiration to be found in the American West for settings. A Desert Dweller’s Field Guide to: Taking Down Criminal Enterprise is set in precisely this kind of environment. The one where nature is both your best friend and your worst enemy. Where the caprice of the weather can turn the tide of the plot. Where the perfect silence of a winter mountain morning is the only place to find solace when the rest of the world has crumbled around you.
Every place has its own tone, its own dangers, its own stubborn people who have learned how to survive there. A story is never whole without those elements. We are products of our environments, even if we learn to rise above them, they are what shape us. Nothing (in this case a plot) is complete without that context.
