Don't Fence Me in

A favored landscape for me is the mesa-and-butte sprawl of Arizona, a place where in real life you can actually find stores that sell Wolf Brand chili, a place known variously as Keams Canyon and Second Mesa. In real life it is a hub of Hopi culture set in co-mingle with tourists, no nonsense truckers, skeptical Navajo, and the odd anthropologist. In alternate universe life, it is the landscape of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, those iconic figures of yesterday's entry who play out their dharma on a regular basis. In another alternate landscape, equally reliant on mesas, buttes, tall stacks of sedimentary rock, and a merciless summer sun, those icons of the imagination of George Herriman, the eponymous Krazy Kat, Offisa Pup, Ignatz Mouse, and an ensemble to rival The Wire.

Nice when one area can bring you three separate universes, all of them brimming with the potsherds of human behavior. Nicer still when you can close your eyes for a visit to each. Such is the nature of place in story: Place assumes the same relevance, distinct qualities, and individuality as a first-rank character, sometimes bristling with small-town eclat or intransigence, sometimes as sprawling and impersonal as a major urban center. Sometimes, by its nature, landscape is the very place where an event is least suited to take place, creating an immediate sense of cosmic uproar. Other times, landscape is inhospitable, treacherous, menacing, as cranky as a kid on a hot day who has dropped his ice cream cone.

Much as I prefer a gritty, noirish or mischievous landscape, certain of these improbable places become prima facie apt, their improbability trumping their surreal nature, a warning to me and the reader than familiar, comfortable surroundings in art and literature are music to fall asleep by. A university is endlessly improbable to me, so are court houses, hospitals, department stores, publishing houses, supermarkets. Each of these attracts ordinary persons with needs, then transforms them into some aspect of its own improbability. The house rules of Second Mesa, the Hopi way, make beautiful sense, a transformative ethos shared by the neighboring Navajo, who actually have a saying, Go in beauty. The house rules of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner are in their way the equal of our own Bill of Rights. The governing forces of the comic strip Krazy Kat are informed by a lovely, whimsical logic that convinces us in short order that life within this landscape includes the rational and the irrational, where love may not triumph but nevertheless trumps all other distractions.

Finding a landscape is as troublesome as finding the proper character imbued with the proper quirks and needs. You must, I believe, make your landscape a haven for what you seek, buried perhaps, not readily apparent, but somewhere close to the surface. Or it must be a place of anomaly or a place where what you seek has a second home, somewhere at a great distance. Ladscape has the personality and smell and texture of someone you love, some place that "feels" happy to see you whenever you return.