SFWC --- Latourel in Normal entries

Your challenge is to create a short story where the setting is a character and plays a role in what happens. It should be an active setting. It might be a phone booth that travels through time or it may be white room with no doors or windows. It can be a town or a city, a planet or the inside of a genie's magic lamp. Make your story one that depends on the setting though. It can be as elaborate or as simple as you'd like. --- A longish prompt from hoops because I hate to kvetch with clean hands

There’s three parts to Latoural. If you’re driving along the scenic highway, scenic is the highways first name not an adjective, there’s a little turnoff into a parking lot. A few picnic tables, parks and recs restrooms under the bridge, a paved path going down as far as you can see and one going up as far as you can see. You can’t see very far; it’s not your fault. The pitch upwards is steep and even if it weren’t you’d be looking at sky, the trail, dirt, takes a hairpin turn. The trail downward is obscured within ten yards by outcroppings of rocks and foliage.

It’s an easy walk down to the base of the falls. There’s a red cedar bridge where you can stand, the spray blows you back, and the water rushes underfoot to the Columbia. The walk up takes some stamina, but it’s a short walk to a brick wall. There is a bench. It’s a panoramic view. The cliff face resembles tubes like an inverted pipe organ, round and abutted. There is lichen that seethes on these organ rocks that is almost phosphorescent. It does not glow in the dark, but it does glow in the day.

For the tourists or families out for a Sunday drive from Portland the bench and the bridge are all the further they will ever go. On the upward path they are trying not to pant or look warn out, but the dirt path looks just as daunting, and there are flashes of switchbacks that take your breath again. It’s less than a half mile, though, to a bridge over the top of the falls. The wood is too weather worn to tell what it is, probably sterner stuff than cedar. You feel a sense of accomplishment. The two trails going upwards from the bridge are covered in foliage, look like they haven’t been used in years. That’s just how things grow in the rain forest, for the better part of fifteen years I knew for a fact that at least three people had been down both of them at least twice a year; me and my two kids.

If you’re careful not to get tangled up in blackberry, if you don’t try to fight the ferns, if you look for the path, it’s not very far to get back to a third bridge and a second falls, or, in the other direction, you connect with a broad trail system that traverses all the falls and leads to larch mountain. I would take the kids back there because it was easy to imagine it was all our own. Later when it was uncool to hang out with their old man, I took my best dog back there; it was the sort of place where a pit can be off leash.

My favorite place at latourel was much tamer. If you follow the downward trail it ends in a park. There is a gazebo and picnic tables with bolted down hibachis. The gazebo has a fire pit. The grass gets mowed. There was a tree there. It was how I thought of Oregon when I was an Oregonian. I was a rain forest Oregonian, not a coastal one, not a desert one, not a mountain one. This tree was symbolic of how the rain forest encourages life. It had been split by lightening; from the base of the trunk upwards to five feet tall and wide enough where, before the inevitable middle aged spread, I could stand in it without crouching too much.

The was no guts to the tree, no insides, lightening had ripped them out and there were scorch marks like a cauterized wound. Yet it had new leaves every spring, some sort of climbing vine twined around and inside it, that phosphorescent lichen grew up it. Nothing really dies in the rain forest. I don’t mean it gets reclaims, though that happens too, I mean it doesn’t take much of a spark to drive the green fuse.

Now that I am far from my Oregon every tiny detail of every small moment is how I think of Oregon.

I know this isn’t what hoops was driving at. I left out the whole him seeing a tv show with the writers for breaking bad talking about place being a character. No offense, but I did that stuff in playwriting 201 and comp 323, thirty years ago and I wasn’t even a very good student. I mean I didn’t care for being a student, I didn’t try very hard, but I aced things like that.

I like breaking bad, I think those guys had run out of things to say. It’s not the show I’d pick to demonstrate the setting as a character or the camera as a character, it’s a plot driven show with strong characters playing characters. One or two episodes would be good examples, like when the Meth RV is out in the desert in the first or second season.

I wrote about Latourel because I’m homesick. I’m more homesick than I am in need of writing fiction. When we started back up with Flash Fridays I was so homesick that I needed to write fiction. I needed to hold everything in a tight little ball and let it spring from my hand rushing down the rocks in a free fall association.

I could have made anything fictitious happen there, in the spring the trail is muddy and narrow and if you slip the only thing to keep you from riding the falls to the Columbia are blackberry brambles, thick and thorny.

I have a feeling I won’t do another one of these. I mean extended over qualified prompts. I might write something very similar with prompts like; home, cycle of life, fall.