The End of the Line, the Start of a Book

by Lance Weller

The Washington coastline near the Ozette Triangle

The old man smiled. “There’s no place to go. There’s the ocean to stop you. There’s a line of old men along the shore hating the ocean because it stopped them … Every place is taken. But that’s not the worst—no, not the worst. Westering has died out of the people. Westering isn’t a hunger any more.” - John Steinbeck, The Red Pony

When I first began my novel, Wilderness, the idea of westering was the furthest thing from my mind. I simply wanted to try and tell a good, simple story about an old man and his dog. But then the American Civil War intruded upon it and then the old man was alone on some dark beach somewhere and I realized he’d come west despite whatever my intentions for him had been. So Wilderness became a novel of westering as much as it was a novel of violence, war, and redemption but not the westering of whitetop wagons and endless prairies but, rather, the endpoint of those mythopoeic tropes.

Early in the writing—before really even knowing what the book would be about but still feeling it bubbling up and hard to ignore—I hiked the Ozette Triangle in the northwestern corner of Washington State. A loop trail that runs from the misty cauldron of Ozette Lake through a dark forest of Sitka Spruce and Western Hemlock to the ocean and back, there is a place, after you pick your way down the steep bank to the beach, known as Cape Alava that is the westernmost point in the contiguous United States. From here, you can go no farther west. The hogsback of Ozette Island rears up from the seething grey water a few hundred yards out but you can’t walk any farther west upon this continent. It is very much the end of the line and feels it.

The Washington coastline near the Ozette Triangle

On that day, my mind was filled with thoughts of my book—what shape to give it, how to get it done, how to keep myself fed as I did—and I remember realizing that this was the place my character, Abel Truman, would end up. So the certainty of Abel’s history, nebulous before, suddenly became clear to me amidst the sea-stacks and salt spray. There was no other place that would draw him like this remote landscape, this terminus of dark surf and dark trees and the endless western sky of packed grey clouds. And Abel would be pulled here not for the new beginnings the West has typically promised the American heart, but because he was broken and utterly bereft; because, whether he realized it or not, he needed a place with a horizon that was annihilating and that showed him nothing to remind him of his past—his family dead and his war gone by.

I knew that Abel would stay in this place, watching the nightdark ocean and trying regenerate from the heartbreak and outrageous violence of his life. I knew that his interior journey must match his exterior and that the westering impulse—given in to by so many—would, in his case end not in a hatred of the barrier of the ocean, but in a turning back from it. As I stood that day on the terminus watching the water, I had just an inkling of the broader shape Wilderness would take: that Abel Truman, after a time of solitude and healing, would be pulled away, this time back to his antecedents, back to the east again, just like the loop trail I followed that day.

Photos courtesy of Lance Weller

Lance Weller is the author of Wilderness upcoming from BloomsburyUSA, September 2012. His short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, New Millennium Writings, Quiddity, The White Whale Review, The Broadkill Review, and Terracotta Typewriter.

See an excellent video of Lance talk more about his inspiration on Wilderness's Amazon page.

The book release date for Wilderness is September 4.  Pre-order now it at IndieBound or at Amazon.