marrying the fly

Half a lifetime ago when I first read Natalie Goldberg's book Writing Down the Bones, one of her essays struck me as particularly relevant to my own writing. "Don't marry the fly," she says, in an eloquent passage about freewriting: that it's okay to let everything that's around you or your characters flow onto the page, but getting caught up in revealing the life history of the fly that lands on the narrator's hand is an excessive amount of detail.

My journey has taught me a lot about how I learn and experience a new place -- I can't just hop out of the car, take a few snapshots, trade stories with a few folks, and then hop back in. I want to know each place I've stood, whose boots covered this same path a dozen or a hundred years ago. I want to sit by each river I've crossed until I can tell north from south, east from west by their sound. My body wants to absorb and digest the wondrous totality of the beautiful things I find, instead of just taking a quick taste test and making room for more.

So in Oregon, I married the fly -- I stopped constantly along the road, exploring anything that looked interesting. The downside of fly marriage in writing is you'll bore the crap out of your reader. The downside in travel, you'll run out of time to taste everything you'd wanted between to and fro. I think the only thing I'd change about this trip would be to drive it in three months instead of three weeks. Good to know... for next time!