July 23, 2000
\nSunday<\/p>\n
I spent the day in Berks County, specifically Hain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Cemetery in Wernersville and the South Heidelberg Township park, which is on the south side of Route 422 part way up the mountain at about the same elevation as the cemetery is on the north. I went there because I needed to write one final scene in my novel for my fellowship application due by the end of the week.<\/p>\n
The scene I wanted to write takes place where the railroad tracks that run parallel to Route 422 pass the Wertz Mill, the place you have to cross if you want to go up to South Heidelberg\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s park. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s drawn on the story of the occupants of the carriage who were \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hurled into eternity<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in 1899, shifted to 1863 and imagined as changing the course of my central character\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life. But for fortune, she would have been in the carriage, but she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not, and for weeks I have seen her face as she turns and witnesses the tragedy. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen her hair, her dress, her shoes, even the attitude of her body as she walks up a little hill away from the tracks. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen it so clearly I can tell you she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wearing a faded red gingham pinafore over a gray shirtwaist, her shoes are heavy and one lace is frayed and hanging open, and her hair is in braids wound around her head with wispy bits hanging out.<\/p>\n The day was glorious \u00e2\u20ac\u201c warm with no humidity, a clear blue sky strewn with angel-hair clouds, and the smell of new mown hay. I set up my folding chair and footstool at the edge of the cemetery under a tree, not far from the gravesite of the people who inspired all this. I struggled with writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s block for about an hour (in me, this manifests as an inability to begin what is clearly mapped out in my mind), during which time I made a drawing of what that particular area of the cemetery looked like in August of 1885, when my central character\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s children were buried. (That is, I indicated which graves were already there \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it appears this section was opened in about 1880.)<\/p>\n I worried that I would get into the scene, write more than I have space for in the application requirements (they want exactly 20 pages and I already had 17) and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have to start cutting. Then I settled down, decided to just write what needed to be written, and had four pages of penciled longhand before I had to go to the bathroom.<\/p>\n That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the problem with this \u00e2\u20ac\u0153location writing.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an acceptably clean bathroom at the Hess gas station and mini-mart at the bottom of the hill, but that means packing up the chair, the stool, and the writing stuff, driving down there, and then setting up again \u00e2\u20ac\u201c about fifteen minutes\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 interruption. After the second such trip I needed to clear my head anyway, so I headed up the other side of the mountain.<\/p>\n South Heidelberg Park has everything except the sacred ground of my cemetery. It has a picnic pavilion where I can sit at a table, a bathroom in a free-standing block building at least as clean and well-appointed as a department store restroom, and a spectacular view of the farmland that sweeps down to 422 and the hill that goes up to Hain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s on the north. I was surprised that for such a beautiful day there was nobody there \u00e2\u20ac\u201c not in the picnic grove, nor the playground, nor the basketball courts.<\/p>\n I stayed there for another two and a half hours and finished the scene. After that I drove down to the Wertz Mill \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a garden store and ice cream stand now \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and had a hot dog and a dish of peanut butter ripple. Then I walked along the tracks to the spot where I imagine my character stopping and turning. I hoped that a train would come by, but none did (I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d seen, and heard, one from up on the hill about an hour and a half before). When cars drive over the tracks the rails and the wooden planks rattle and shake, and each time I felt the vibrations I saw a horse and carriage instead of a Jetta or a Jeep.<\/p>\n I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve typed it up, and to my amazement it fits perfectly into the space I had left. It needs to sit for a day so I can get a little distance from it and be able to see the awkward bits, the clunky turns of phrase, that I know are there but which elude me now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" July 23, 2000 Sunday I spent the day in Berks County, specifically Hain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Cemetery in Wernersville and the South Heidelberg Township park, which is on the south side of Route 422 part way up the mountain at about the same elevation as the cemetery is on the north. I went there because I needed to Continue reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gallivanting","category-my-letter-to-the-world-2000"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}