Using Place to Explain People and Plot
A free sampling of the new weekly column available to paid subscribers!
In the future, the weekly Community Day column will be available to only paid subscribers of Governing Right. But to show one form this column will take, this initial installment is free to everyone. Community Day (both the column and the novel) explores many of the same topics as Governing Right but does so using fiction.
Community Day is about truth and stories, isolation and social bonds during these difficult times. The setting is especially important. Without it, the characters wouldn’t be who they are, and the novel’s tragic event would not have occurred. I worked overtime to have place be central to the story. I wanted it to be inseparable from the novel’s people and plot.
Almost all of the novel takes place in a neighborhood outside of Grangerford, a fictional town in an unnamed state, likely in the Midwest or Mid-Atlantic region. Grangerford—importantly, an allusion to one of the two rural, feuding families in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—is a “lightly populated town that’s nevertheless the largest in the county.” The narrator purposely describes its location vaguely, suggesting that places like it are found everywhere. To find his neighborhood,
Leave the strip-mall sprawl of any given suburb; cross a bridge or drive to where the speed limit jumps to 75; pass four seasonal farmers’ markets, three vape shops, or two tattoo parlors; turn left at the Elks Lodge that hosts book-release parties for retired men who self-publish tendentious histories of forgotten naval vessels; and then turn right at the American Legion that hosts poker ‘fundraisers’ that are legal because the sheriff likes kick-backs. From our door, it’s about 17 miles to the closest library, which is next to the sprawling consignment shop that settled in the space Best Buy abandoned a few years after taking over the lease of the shuttered Ames. A bad traffic day on that stretch of road means getting stuck behind a harvester. There are no office parks or even big shopping centers around, and the nearest major city is 90 minutes away, assuming no harvester has other plans for your schedule.
It’s a place of “law and order, faith and family, tradition and morals, big trucks and small government.” Most families have been in the area for generations. But because of the region’s deterioration, those who still work are mostly employed by “the prison, the school system, or what’s left of farms in the Ohunka Valley and a few industries extracting what’s remaining in the hills to the south.”
The dying Ohunka River and its decaying wetlands loom large in the novel and in the lives of the characters. It is a fictional waterway; “Ohunka” is derived from a Lakota word for "false" or "untrue." The word also relates to a traditional Sioux evening story with imagined characters. The novel’s use of “Ohunka” underscores the narrator’s unreliability—it is not always clear which of his stories are true, exaggerated, or entirely fabricated.
The narrator describes the river as “nymph-departed,” an allusion to T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.”
The Ohunka mopes through six counties and empties itself, exhausted, into the lake up north. Occasionally during the spring, the water is high and the current active enough to allow for a couple weeks of splashing and tube floating in a few spots. But generally it’s so shallow and stagnant that it attracts more mosquitoes than humans. Two centuries ago, they say, it was perfect for rafts transporting provisions among settlements; later, barges carried lumber and stone between the region’s mines, mills, and towns. In the generations since, though, drought and irrigation projects drained its volume, and trains and trucks stole its purpose. Depressed, the river idles away the time, days melting into months melting into years, collecting fertilizer and pesticide runoff from the corporate farms that devour families’ land and expel chemical waste.
Most locals try to ignore the river. Generally, the only souls traipsing around its banks are outsiders taking pictures of the algae blooms, “vibrant patches spread across the surface, preventing sunlight from reaching underwater vegetation and decimating aquatic life: Smiling observers creating a photographic record of the Ohunka’s unvoiced suffering.” This changes during the pandemic, as the “Wayfarers” (depressed, lonely, scared locals) descend on the river. They walk silently along the river at all hours of the day and night. These “palliative peripatetics” mirror the behavior of the narrator, Blowtorch Len McGregor, and Nelly (three key characters), all of whom walk or jog in suffering.
Key to the story is that the river’s decline caused or at least mirrors the region’s decline. The Ohunka had been the connection between the otherwise landlocked county and the outside world.
Grangerford became the county seat because it had been a way station for merchants, politicians, adventurers, and vagabonds. Lewis and Clark passed through. Our county and our town may not have been polished, but they were abreast of news and culture, seasoned in interchange. Approachable, assured. The Ohunka’s demise was the region’s. Isolation doesn’t only lead to loneliness. It breeds insularity, then vulnerability, then suspicion. Approachable and assured no more. Locals now see the river as a jilted lover sees the ex who still lives nearby: the cause of what is and the constant reminder of what was and could’ve been.
The river’s decline had a profound effect on the now-bleak wetlands surrounding it. “Grays and browns, rotting trees and wildlife, non-rotting plastic litter, stench. Oppressively muggy. Thick, mosquitoed air. As though the nearly departed souls of the terminally ill river and its expiring flora and fauna were forced to hover above the sludge until the merciful flatline.” The wetlands serve as a metaphor for the region’s suffering residents. With less and less to do and less and less asked of them, they atrophy and then wither.
Wetlands are nature’s riparian guard—filtering water, thwarting erosion, slowing floods. Their meaning, their pride, is attached to the rivers they protect. Wetlands don’t want to be praised for their beauty; they want to be admired for their utility. When the Ohunka River gave up, its wetlands lost their purpose. They were now attendants to an impotent king; armed guards of an empty vault. Created to serve a larger cause that no longer existed, the swamp, without a river to defend, had no reason to defend itself. It didn’t become useless because it deteriorated; it deteriorated because it became useless.