CH 22: Kite Weather Backstory
Kite Weather finally resolves the long-standing question in the novel regarding how McGhee and Kate finally get back together. At the end of CH 13: Remember the Sea, McGhee has a chance meeting with Kate at age 40, then in CH 14: Holy Orders of the Olives, we know they are together at age 74. So what happened in the middle? For the best insight you’d have to ask my editor, Linda Lucey Lawliss, who was bothered by the gap and spoke to me at length about it. As for me, I was content to write this chapter to show how they got together, finally, at age 66.
The kind of corner I had in mind in SF… note the little shop with steps a few doors up from the corner. Courtesy Google Maps -- Street View.
McGhee is walking the city after waking from a nap and writing what he considers the best piece of his life. It turns out it was about the day he met Kate, and it’s this exact story he gets published in CH 14: HOotO! He’s in a bit of a fog when he turns a corner and literally crashes into (or more properly, is crashed into) Kate coming out of her photo shop in San Francisco. While it’s not a long chapter, it is a chance to tie up some loose ends and offer the reader some peace of mind before the epic CH 23: Signal and Noise.
This chapter is all about connections and things coming together. McGhee finally gets it right with his writing and achieves something of personal satisfaction. The winds, which have been steering him all over tarnations through the novel (whatever tarnations is) finally turn his way and blow him back toward the love of his life. If you missed the allusion to Ulysses here and the Odyssey, you’re forgiven, but it wasn’t coincidental. The book really is a recapitulation of the trials of Ulysses, though they don’t literally map to Homer’s original. In this case Penelope (Kate) is happy to have him back.
Regarding that reunion, I purposely made CH 5: Kite rather ambiguous concerning the dissolution of their relationship. Both were culpable but mostly both were too young to figure it out. Part of Kate’s role in that dissolution, however, was her career focus – perhaps at the expense of their relationship – so her utter lack of hesitancy is exactly what McGhee needs. That, too, was why she hung up his acceptance letter in CH 14: HOotO, which was further evidence of her support for McGhee.
The crash and “dislocation” which sends McGhee to the hospital seemed a nice way to illustrate McGhee’s careening after their breakup and was also a nice way for her to mend him metaphysically. Further bolstering that metaphysical healing we see the return of Officer Bill Kennedy, his “imaginary” cop friend from CH 7: Stones. Overall the chapter has a prevailing sense of unlikely providence but welcome redemption.
Courtesy Andrew Chase.
The final scene in the chapter happens as McGhee and Kate pull over in western Montana on a roadtrip. Kate spies a sunrise over the Rockies and pulls McGhee’s head out of his “map” to see it – you could supply another word there – to force him into the moment. I had such a moment myself in the fall of 1986 in western Montana, driving into the sunrise on my return from Alaska. The picture above (again, from Google) isn’t quite what I remember, but it does capture something of the moment I experienced. It was one of the truly best “perfect moments” of my life and connects to another, portrayed at the end of CH 4: One Certain Sunset.
