The Silken Tent
      My Letter to the World
      July 2000

       
      July 23, 2000
      Sunday


      I spent the day in Berks County, specifically Hain’s 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.

      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’s park. It’s drawn on the story of the occupants of the carriage who were “hurled into eternity” in 1899, shifted to 1863 and imagined as changing the course of my central character’s life. But for fortune, she would have been in the carriage, but she’s not, and for weeks I have seen her face as she turns and witnesses the tragedy. I’ve 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’ve seen it so clearly I can tell you she’s 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.

      The day was glorious -- 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’s 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’s children were buried. (That is, I indicated which graves were already there -- it appears this section was opened in about 1880.)

      I also worried that I would get into the scene, write more than I have space for in the application requirements (they want exactly 20 pages -- I had 17) and I’d 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.

      That’s the problem with this “location writing.” There’s 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 -- about fifteen minutes’ interruption. After the second such trip I needed to clear my head anyway, so I headed up the other side of the mountain.

      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’s on the north. I was surprised that for such a beautiful day there was nobody there -- not in the picnic grove, nor the playground, nor the basketball courts.

      I stayed there for another two and a half hours and finished the scene. After that I drove down to the Wertz Mill -- it’s a garden store and ice cream stand now -- 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’d 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.

      I’ve 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.

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