Time to write 4/19/12

This is what I need, of course. I’m hoping--praying, really--that I’ll be motivated now to get up and write for at least an hour every morning. This absolutely must be a practice. There are no excuses. Stopped drinking, so no more hung over mornings; not using the crappy laptop any more, so I’m tech-ready; and I have at least three different writing projects that I’m working on, so that means I’ll have plenty to write about.

Plenty to write about. Lancaster is the current “need” and I certainly know that this story needs to come out. Yet I feel that there’s something missing in my motivation. Something I need to better define. What is it exactly that the old man holds for me? How do I go about approaching his life? Perhaps the most compelling approach for me is through the personal yearning to overcome my own obstacles, while seeking my own path toward “the promised land.” 

The promised land. When I think of these words, my brain cringes. They imply a divine “promise” which is directed specifically at the “chosen ones,” those who believe from what their forebears tell them that they are to be the heirs of the universe, that the green side of the valley, the land of plenty is what they alone deserve. Knowing what I do, this providential exclusivity, the inherent inequity, arrogance, and general small mindedness of this way of thinking has always bugged me. 

Knowing what I do. It really comes down to this, and I don’t know that much. I know a little about Lancaster, and this will need to be a different document, but what I know of him is shadowed by somewhat tedious family lore (“his mother told him never to upset a single flower”) and mundane historical commentary (“he built the first paved highway of it’s length in the country....a poem in stone”).

A poem in stone. I need to crack that one. Such a trite statement it seems, yet behind it I think is Lancaster’s drive to bring the beauty of the Columbia Gorge to the people Let it flourish in the imaginations of those who travel the highway so that nothing quite so wonderful will supersede these images for at least as long as a fine poem might occupy the mind. This was Lancaster’s occupation with the road; what is mine with Lancaster?

What is mine with Lancaster? This is the real question that cuts much closer to the  core of why I feel I need to write the story. Perhaps it is the knowledge that he started so  humbly and followed a classic road of destiny himself, one we all take, which led him to create an homage to the environment he loved so dearly, but in so doing perhaps understood the flaw all along. He was a visionary. What did he envision?