Here's the second part. I'm presently in the middle of writing part 10 out of 90 or so. More to come.
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Fourteen years earlier...
So, let's start this scene in the rain too, since that makes about as much sense as anything, and since they're tree planting, and anyone who's ever tree planted knows that it seems to rain a lot there.
Right now, we just see a clear-cut. Get used to this scene, because this story is full of them:
Take a mountainside that's full of trees, and then cut all of them off--tens of thousands of them--in a few days. We know we're looking at a B.C. clear-cut in late spring or early summer. We can tell that because of the towering mountains all around them whose tops disappear into the clouds, and we know it's late spring or early summer because this clear-cut is turning green.
Now, you take a clear-cut in spring, and it's about the ugliest thing you can imagine. It looks like a graveyard. That got run over by a bulldozer. After a war.
Dead tree stumps everywhere, gouges in the earth made by the machines, piles of left-behind tree garbage--called "slash"--all of it grey, brown, and dead.
But once a bit of time had passed--six weeks, maybe, which would put this scene somewhere in late June--the clear-cut always turned green. Plants that hadn't grown there for eons suddenly did, because there was space, and sunlight, and no giant trees to compete with. So this whole clear-cut, despite being hammered right now by the wind and the rain, is a moving, shimmering ocean of green, rolling across the bulk of a whole nameless mountain.
A wolfish-looking dog appears, seemingly from out of the mist--he's wet, of course, and sniffing the air and the ground.
And now, from both sides of the scene, human figures come into view, in slow motion. A shovel, slamming down into the earth, spray flying everywhere, a heavy spiked boot, rain pants, an arm and glove, yellow rain coat, cut to real time--boom, their shovels drop, the tree slides along each of their hands into the holes, the boots kick them shut, then move on, slowly, slowly, repeating this same motion up the mountain and into the rain.
Pull our camera view back now and they're just three small specks, only Adam's yellow rain coat showing up at all, and all around them is mountains, clear-cuts, trees.
Far-below river valleys that vanish in the endless rain.
5 comments:
Is this a screenplay or a book?
heh. well, it's a book, i guess, but i've always had it in mind as though it were a screenplay-- narrated as though it is, i guess.
i like that b/c it creates a nice (and easy) visual effect, and also b/c the book is so much about the act of narrative--how narratives and myths are built, constructed, created, etc, and so the screenplay idea becomes part of that whole aspect.
obviously, i still have lots of editing decisions to make.
this here is almost the first draft (well, the SIXTH draft, actually, but the first draft of the sixth version), cleaned up a bit to be blog-worthy.
so these things will be worked out as i go.
This is shaping up to be a powerful piece. I didn't see my first mountain until my late 20's. The site for me was tainted as they all had looked like someone took a giant electric razor up the side of them. I didn't even know that people were replanting until I met you.
I'm assuming you're shopping around for recycling publishers?? lol
heh. recycling publishers indeed. :)
yeah... clear-cuts are shocking. those big empty spaces on the maps of northern MB, ON, AB, SK, QC, and BC, are not empty at all. they've all had the beejeezus logged out of them.
in northern MB, actually, they've literally logged every single piece of high ground in most areas, and are now slowly moving down the hills and highlands and into lower-grade timber, hoping the replanted stuff will be ready to harvest by the time they're done clear-cutting the swamps. it's crazy.
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