Near the Lewis & Clark Trail

Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Master's Theses Graduate School 2001 Near the Lewis & Clark Trail Chad Colin Husted Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Husted, Chad Colin, "Near the Lewis & Clark Trail" (2001). LSU Master's Theses. 1020. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/1020 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Master's Theses by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NEAR THE LEWIS & CLARK TRAIL A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in The Department of English by Chad Husted B.A. Humboldt State University, 1991 December 2001 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT iii PART ONE: MAGIC KINGDOM A SHORT STORY CYCLE 1 OPEN SPACES 2 LATE NIGHT CABLE 22 NEAR THE LEWIS & CLARK TRAIL 30 HUGO STORIES 48 OROFINO 59 HALF-TIME 72 THE COSMOLOGIST’S NEPHEW 75 ORANGE COUNTY FABLES 91 MAGIC KINGDOM 105 PART TWO: AFTER THE GOLDRUSH AN ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY 128 VITA 242 ii ABSTRACT Near the Lewis & Clark Trail is a creative writing thesis that contains two distinct parts. Part one is a short story cycle: a collection of interlinked narratives that together, tell a larger, cohesive story. Many different points of view, narrative techniques, and non-linear time sequences are used in order to provide a pastiche of different voices, points in time, and perspectives, that ultimately form an overall narrative structure. In addition to the stories, there are several fictional documents that are used to separate the work at critical times, and to provide subtext. In between the stories are: a letter to a county judge, a fake police report, and a fictional newspaper article. Because these documents are meant to seem real, they are in different fonts, which offset them from the rest of the text, and are consistent with the fonts used in real life for these documents. The second part of the thesis is an original screenplay titled: After The Gold Rush. This is an adaptation of the first short story in part one, and also incorporates several plot points from the story cycle. The screenplay can be looked at as a singular work, or an exercise in adaptation. iii PART ONE: MAGIC KINGDOM A SHORT STORY CYLE 1 Open Spaces I got disoriented on the prairie. Most of the roads were gravel and only a few had signs. Nobody up there needed them. Tourists usually stuck to the interstate, on their way up to Grangeville, or down to the Lewiston Valley. Who knew where they headed after that. It was a big part of the country, lots of space under the sky, and it seemed like people were always headed somewhere else. I’d been like when I was younger…a few months in Vegas, then to Seattle, up to Alaska, and then back down to California. I’d traveled the west like an old pioneer and that was the place I’d stopped—The Camas Prairie, in Idaho. The rolling hills looked the same in every direction, or at least, they looked the same to me. “Go back to the Suburbs,” my father-in-law would say, “there’s plenty of stucco houses down there for you to navigate by. Up here we use a couple new fangled things like, oh, I don’t know…north, south, east, and west! You ever heard of those California?” Most people called me Cal, but my father-in-law, he called me California, and sometimes I had to answer for the sins of an entire state. During that time, though, he was gentle, almost fatherly, and would just sigh and take one of his big, meaty hands and squeeze my shoulder. We knew that words were flimsy and avoided them when things mattered. He talked a lot more after his wife passed away, but that was just to fill 2 in the spaces she’d left behind. It had been almost two years since and none of us had expected another funeral so soon. Henry and I had driven out to one of his plots near Big Canyon. He thought the bluegrass might be ready to cut, and stopped by to see if I wanted to drive out there and check. He'd been a champ through the whole ordeal. I told him that the best thing I could do was to keep busy and let Jil work through her own grief. She wouldn't talk about it anyway, just sat around and stared at old pictures of the three of us. The day before I'd come home from work and she'd picked off the tips of her fingernails and lined them in two neat rows on the coffee table. "Jesus honey!" I said. "Are you okay?" She looked up with disgust as her eyes came into focus. "Of course I'm not okay. Just go... go do something. I want to be alone," she said and went back to staring at her fingernails. Henry was my brother-in-law, and during this time he stopped in almost every day and took me on some farm errand or another. He was one of the only people I could tolerate being around and that was because he didn't try to say too much. We talked about farming and sports, but he never asked if I was okay or if there was anything he could do, and that's the way I wanted it. The sympathy of that town was crushing me; people bringing food by, helping out with chores, not bringing their children with when they came to the house—it was too much. We got out to the field after driving miles on a skinny dirt road that curved like a spine over hills covered with wheat, bluegrass, and bright yellow canola fields. Behind the hundred-acre parcel of bluegrass, which 3 wasn't blue at all, but a deep dull green, was Big Canyon. Suddenly, everything fell in on itself and there was an immense canyon with rock walls that broke in smooth, angular slices that carved through the landscape for miles before opening up at the Clearwater River. We parked and Henry jumped out immediately and wandered into the bluegrass field. Then he pulled one of the heads off, broke some seeds loose, and cradled them in the palm of his hand. I walked over slowly, taking in the view, and by the time I got there he was chewing on the seeds and I could tell he was deep in thought. Hank took farming real serious. He studied new techniques, played the market with his surplus grain, and was always looking for new ways to improve their yield. He threw the left over seeds down and spat. "It's too hot," he said. "We're gonna have to cut at night or else some of the heads will shatter and we'll lose a decent amount of seed." Henry said these things for my benefit. I'd grown up in Los Angeles and didn't know shit about farming so he always told me why they did things a certain way. "You wanna start cutting tonight?" I asked, looking for something to keep me from going home before ten-thirty, when I had to get ready for my real job at the Juvenile Detention Center down in Lewiston. "You wanna put in a couple hours out here with me before you head down to the valley?" he asked, knowing I'd say hell yes. Hank could do most everything himself but often pretended to need my help. We decided to get started right away. He called his wife Kathy on the cell-phone and asked her to tell Jil—which was a relief, because then I didn't have to. We drove into town, got the swather, and I flagged in the 4 truck, driving out front with a radio, so I could warn Hank if any cars were coming. He plodded along behind, barely doing ten miles an hour. The swather was used for cutting grass crops and seemed alive when it moved. The cab was raised a good four feet above the axle and resembled the shell of some giant insect. Out front was a ten foot steel rod that sat horizontal to the ground and was covered with thousands of six inch steel flanges. It looked like a giant row of teeth. I pulled ahead once we got off the main road and parked on a rise so I could tune into the college radio station in Moscow while Hank caught up. The sun was starting to sink and there was a yellow glow on most everything and it seemed to illuminate an old decaying barn in the distance. They were everywhere, barns from the turn of the century that were never torn down and had been cooked by the sun into a grayish brown color and crumbled in on them selves. Jil and I used to take pictures of all the old relics of the prairie: half buried tractors, burned out grain silos, and those beautiful dead barns. There was so much space up there that people just left things where they stood and moved on.

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