CH 18: McGhee's Road Backstory
That thin ribbon along the right (western) flank of Mono Lake in the picture above is CA-395, quite possibly the most beautiful drive in the United States. At some point during the writing of the novel, I realized McGhee needed to take a solitary road trip, and once I knew that, the choice of road was clear. I’ve loved 395 since the first time I saw it in the late 80s, and the chance to recall it in some detail proved irresistible to me. I took the photo above from the pull-out McGhee mentions in the story.
Though the entire chapter consists of rumination (there is no dialog in the chapter), 395 plays a major role in organizing some of those thoughts. For me, it was a great metaphor for McGhee’s life to that point: meandering, a little bleak at places, but full of a lonely beauty best trotted out a mile at a time.
Bodie, CA, ghosttown. Courtesy AmusingPlanet.com
Fundamentally, McGhee is an introspective man, so it seemed natural to chronicle a small slice of his experience. As a writer, that presented challenges to me. Other than this chapter, the narrator mostly stays out of McGhee’s head, or functions as a parallel set of eyes experiencing what McGhee does. That wasn’t possible in this chapter (or it would have been extremely dull). My objective was to strike a voice that wasn’t overly intimate with the subject, while allowing the reader to plumb McGhee’s psyche. That necessarily is impossible to do, but I wanted to maintain a bit of space between McGhee and the reader to honor some of his privacy. This in part has to do with the reality of the Epilogue, but I won’t get into that here.
Toward the end of the chapter, McGhee stops at a diner on 395 named Nicely’s. You can see an image of the menu from this real restaurant below. I was little hard on it in the chapter – the real place is a welcome respite from the road. Part of what I was going for in the writing is the peculiar mindset which arises from hours and hours behind the wheel – a kind of numbness and separation from the rest of humanity and its operation. This, too, felt like a nice metaphor for McGhee’s general experiential trajectory. To further mix the metaphor, he’s a bit like a car stuck between gears and never quite fully engages his mental transmission with the those around him. Personally, I resonate with that message quite a bit – I think it’s the writer’s problem in general. So then again, such images reinforce the emerging identity McGhee is discovering (finally) that he’s a writer, for better or worse.
The poem which appears in the text was written specifically for this chapter. It was meant to fold in various bits the reader has encountered along the way, either in this chapter from recollections, or from other chapters as experiences are laid down to memory directly. For this reason, this chapter needed to land in the batting order in the high teens (hence 18), versus much earlier in the story. As you can see, the ordering of the chapters was rather emergent as the novel came together. There’s considerably less fiat in the order than one might otherwise expect.
One last note on that poem: the last edits to it involved inserting “the blood takes the handle” which was a late addition to CH 1: On the Margin. As you may recall, it was from a dream the young McGhee had just before he left Alaska for the first time around age 23. McGhee relates the dream to Matt on the way to the airstrip. I had that very dream myself as it turns out and really liked it, though I had no idea what it could mean. I was revising CH 1 to improve it as an “initial” chapter when I had the dream and decided to insert the reference. I liked that it was cryptic and the challenge of making it make sense. Sometime later on my third or fourth pass through CH 18 it occurred to me to place that line, finally, in the poem. As written it becomes a shorthand for instinct in lieu of intellect, specifically as it relates to charting one’s course through life.
Getting back to chapter order, I’m not sure it’s clear to readers why they are not arranged chronologically. The end of this chapter illustrates a good reason: the failed attempt at calling Les to break the silence has additional poignancy since the reader has already (ostensibly) read CH 10: Losing Les. Throughout the novel the reader experiences again and again a sense of perspective impossible for McGhee himself. Simply reordering the chapters permitted this to happen. So while the specific order of the chapters in total isn’t that important, some chapters placed as they were made extra sense.
