WILDERNESS, ECOLOGY AND THE LITERARY LANDSCAPE OF UPSATE NEW YORK.
Tell stories about nature that appeal to our hearts as well as to our minds, says actor Mark Rylance in a recent Guardian article.
He’s calling for the arts to awaken compassion for nature and quotes the award winning film My Octopus Friend as an example of ways to create empathy with nature through telling stories. A keen environmentalist, Rylance feels it is time for the arts to remind people they are part of the natural world. Well, some of us have been doing that for a while…
HUNGER MOON is a story I wrote about two disenfranchised teenagers, American Jack and English Kiki, who run away together to escape their troubled lives. Emprisoned by weather in a cabin in a remote mountain wilderness, Jack and Kiki are forced to face up to their demons against the backdrop of a gathering snowstorm.
I set the book in America, a place spliced into our collective cultural consciousness through the dominance of American TV and film, a landscape of possibility, a landscape big enough, and wild enough, for dangerous things to happen, out of the ordinary things.
I have a legitimate connection. Many of my closest relatives and friends live in and around NYC and Upstate New York. My father was from the east coast, and my Polish immigrant grandfather left NYC to settle in in Scranton PA where he established a fur business in the late 1920’s and 30’s. He was a commercial descendent of the Native American and French Canadian fur traders who traded their beaver pelts along the length of the St Lawrence River in Canada and the Hudson River in New York State.
The road taken, in reverse, by my protagonists.
Once I had decided to set the story in America, I began to research the landscape virtually. I was short of time and without the funds to get there, but with a little help from Google I found could let my imagination roam free, just like my characters. A big challenge for me in writing the book was the sense of place – getting it right, so that the reader would believe in it, so that I could believe in it. It was hard, maybe just as hard as writing convincing characters, and in some ways problematic because I was writing about a specific place I’d never visited.
By then I knew my female character, Kiki, had moved from London and now lived in NYC. I discovered that Upstate New York was a landscape of madness, literally full of abandoned insane asylums. As Kiki was very much on the edge, it felt right that she should get lost in this landscape.
And the perfect wilderness was the Adirondack National Park. Because of my love of walking and snow, I’d spent a lot of time in remote-ish snowy mountains, and stayed in a few log cabins, including a particularly isolated one in the Badlands of New Mexico. If I could isolate my characters and give them not only the problem of each other but also the problem of survival, then I had found a worthy opponent.
The Adirondack National Park is more than 6 million acres, the biggest National Park in the USA, although most people are more likely to have heard of Yellowstone or Yosemite. The wilderness goes all the way up to the Great Canadian Lakes, making a convenient stopover for my characters en route for the Canadian border. A great place for them to get lost!
A harsh, wild landscape, rich in Native American myth. The blow downs, snow and ice storms which shaped the forest landscape were a natural challenge for my characters, just as they were for the Mohawk Indans who lived and hunted there long before the invading French, Canadian and British armies and European settlers.
As I got further into my research, I was reminded that this East Coast wilderness was one of the earliest areas of settlement for refugees from the Old World, where the ideas of Independence and Liberty were forged, revolutionary values, through the founding fathers and the constitution.
This wilderness is also a literary landscape, a landscape of great dramas, struggles, hopes and dreams, a romantic landscape informed by ideas of the Sublime. A place of the imagination where my characters could escape to, outside of the normal humdrumness of the everyday.
Fennimore Cooper and Thoreau, Jack London and Robert Frost have all written about the Adirondack Wilderness.
These woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
Everything I read fired me with ideas and seemed to be significant in some way, especially Walden. Thoreau wrote his famous book Walden in the mid 19th century, at about the same time as the Brontes (Jane Eyre, with its pathetic fallacy of landscape and weather was another inspiration). This was a time when intellectuals and writers were re-evaluating societal norms and advocating change, a period when many of our modern ways of thinking and ideas about wilderness were being evolved. Thoreau was deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, advocating self reliance in order to discover life’s true and essential needs. His interest in ecology, was the precursor of modern day environmentalism and his ideas became highly influential. In the last year of the 19c, during his time as governor of New York, Teddy Roosevelt made the forests of the state a focus of his policies, which led to some of the most progressive conservation and wildlife protection laws in the country. It is ironic that in spite of this attachment to the idea of Wilderness, the very symbols of nationhood which come from that area, the Bald Headed Eagle and the Maple tree are now under threat, fighting for their survival.
So my protagonists, Jack and Kiki, stranded in the Adirondack mountains with no internet or telephone, cut off by snow, are in a sense thrown backwards in time, re-encountering a lost America, a Romantic place of ideas and founding values. Leaving behind their urban, problematic lives they find momentary catharsis in this snow-bound landscape, only to fall under the shadow of the inescapable, as the landscape reveals its true nature, a battleground past and present, a Darwinian stage for the struggle to survive.
