I Hear Dead People

  Before I talk about the dead people, let's talk about a fascinating subject -- me. Not the part about the color of my hair (silver) or my eyes (gray-blue-green). I want to talk about the thing that it was that I had intended to do with my life, before reality intruded. In 1970 colleges were disgorging liberal arts majors upstream like spawning salmon.  In other words the job market for those of us in fields like English, Romance Languages, Anthropology and History was non-existent. And here I was a newly minted history major with my BA, ready to go find a employment doing...I'm still not exactly sure what. I had an idea I might teach but a couple of months substitute teaching clued me in that I was not cut out to be a teacher.

  It wasn't until ten years later while I was watching a National Geographic special on the excavation of colonial Williamsburg, that I discovered the job I always wanted to have, the one with my name on it: being the dig historian. What the dig historian does is commune with the artifacts and figure out what they were used for by the people who lived in the community being dug up. Of course, at that time, there was only one of those jobs in the continental US and that was in Williamsburg and it was filled.

  In the intervening years I have meandered along my life-line doing other things, because the bills have to be paid after all, but I have never lost my love of history.  There's something about how we got to where we are, why we are the way we are, the stories of the people upon whose shoulders we stand that I find captivating. I read all the time and much of what I read is historical in nature, whether it is non fiction or fiction.

  You learn some interesting things from history. For instance, maggots were used to heal wounds. It seems they eat dying tissue and give off emissions that have some antibiotic properties. The surgeon would drop a few maggots in a festering wound, bandage it up, an in a few days, voila! The healing would have commenced. The things you learn reading old journals. All of these arcane details have to be good for something. Eventually I discovered just the thing.

   I decided as an exercise, to write a novel.  You know, just to see if I could do it. In 2001 I began, finishing up the first draft three or four years ago. The novel now sits in a blue plastic tote under my desk where I can't see it. That way I don't feel too guilty about having only revised chapters 1-17 of a 36 chapter book. Maybe I'll get back to it some day, then again, maybe not. Writing a book isn't easy. It's not like you write it and you're done, not if you want it to be any good, anyway.

  But back to history -- one of the two story lines in the novel is about this area, here in mid north Indiana about three hundred years ago. We live at the junction of two rivers.  Back in the day, that was like living down the street from O'Hare. All kinds of characters used those rivers for navigation, travel and trade. Rivers were the interstate system of their day.

  The things I write about; essays about my own life as I try to figure out what I want to be when I grow up (The circus clown thing is still high on the list, but there are a couple other contenders -one being employment in the potato room at Frito-Lay-which really does exist by the way, I met someone who actually works there-I mean think of it, sitting watching all those potatoes go by on the belt and the only stress is picking out the bad ones. There are days when I could really dig that.) So I write about my own stuff as a way of figuring things out.  But the other thing I like to write is fiction. Fiction about this area of the world, three hundred years ago. Or two hundred years ago.

  A friend of mine once said that I must have lived that time in a past life because in her opinion the yarns I spin have an authenticity to them, as if I was there. So here's where the dead people come in. I don't know what I think about past lives or if that is even possible. Maybe, the universe is a very strange place, but human kind seems to be multiplying awfully quickly for that. Aren't there more people alive today than have ever lived since  Lucy was roaming around the Awash Valley in Ethiopia? It seems like it, and they're all trying to get through the Starbucks drive-thru at the same time I want to go through the Starbucks drive-thru.

  To get away from the crowds you will find me wandering around the historical sites in our county. I especially like to sit by the river and watch it run on a sunny day. And while I sit there,  people whisper to me. Not whisper like "Hey! We're trying to watch the movie!" kind of whispering. It's more like someone talking a couple of rooms away. You can hear the voices and get a sense of the subject matter, but it's quiet, somewhat garbbled. But down along the river, there's a lot of conversation going on. Folks want their stories told. They apparently think it's my job to tell them. Which I am trying to do. It takes a while and a lot of patience.

  Some of these people are shy.  It has to be teased out of them. There's one in particular, Eli Ross. It took me three years to get him to talk. I don't know if there was anyone really named Eli Ross who participated in the Battle of Tippecanoe, but that was the name, that when I hit on it, allowed me to get him to spill his story.

  People ask about process. How do you know what to write? Some people outline their work and plan every step. I once heard Toni Morrison speak and she said she starts at the ending and writes to the beginning. Wow. No way I could ever do that. Makes my head hurt just to think about it. It's like walking backwards and chewing gum at the same time.

   It doesn't work if I try to tell the characters what to do, what is supposed to happen to them or what they are suppose to do. They tell me. That's what all the whispering going on down along the river is about.  I listen to what I'm told and put it down on paper. And the best part is, I always want to know what happens next.