life experience

Alas, my last days at Stegner House were such a whirlwind I hardly had time to write. But that's ok, since part of the craft is spending time out in the world, getting life experience.

On Saturday I finished a rough draft of the treatment I had come to Eastend to write, so I felt it was time to celebrate. The hockey playoffs were on, and with no TV in the Stegner House, we headed to the Cypress Hotel bar to have a few caesars and watch our team (they lost). It could have been a dismal evening, but in came a huge group of locals for a birthday party and things started to look up.

The town mayor, a large, gregarious man, broke the ice by buying us a round. We joined their table and he introduced us to everyone. There was a wide range of ages, from 19 to 70; all the men over 40 were ranchers, and all the men under worked in the oilfield. All the women worked in health care, except for two: an agricultural scientist and a petroleum engineer. They were a lively bunch and regaled us with heated political debates.

But as the night wore on, they opened up more and more. After jokingly calling me a "commie" for my left-leaning, big city politics, one young rigger told me that although he has all the money he could ever want, he is deeply unsatisfied with life. As he looked me deep in the eyes, I could see that under the tough exterior was a sensitive soul trying to live up to the manliness of his rough surroundings.

Fifty years ago, in Wolf Willow, Stegner wrote about the role-playing masculinity of his day, calling it "the code of the stiff upper lip. [....] An inhumane and limited code, the value system of a life more limited and cruder than in fact ours was." He was referring to the life of the wild frontier before the land was settled, when "men were men" as the saying goes. An aftertaste of that brutal period still survives.

Among these young men, the political creed may be "every man for himself" yet they all band together to save their neighbors' homes from the rising flood. They love to shoot guns yet, as one confessed, he feels terrible whenever he kills an animal. I've never known a people so rich in contradiction, so steeped in subtext.

No matter how imaginative you are as a writer, you can't hope to conjure all the complexities of life from scratch; little details absorbed from conversing with strangers, or doing things you wouldn't normally do in places you wouldn't normally be can come in handy when trying to add depth and character to a story. Fiction is often grown in the fertilizer of fact.

As I closed up the Stegner House in the bright sunshine of long-awaited spring, I was thankful for both the peaceful reflection and the colourful encounters I experienced during my time there. Not much has changed in this town since Stegner's day, and my secret hope is that it never will.