Where

Once upon a time and long ago, this guy I know worked nights. He was going to school, too, at that time, so despite the job he hadn’t much money. He owned a truck but never seemed able to fill its tank completely. Sometimes on the way to work he’d run out of gas. He’d have to coast to the side of some silent thoroughfare. He’d swear, sigh, and then start walking, plastic gas can in hand – walking in the dark, in the rain, toward the bright lights of a gas station. Around him the city slept.

I always wondered what he encountered along the way. Surely each of these late-night hikes was a little adventure. What might he have encountered on a rainy night in Portland, back when Portland was a smaller, grubbier city?

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I just finished reading Orson Scott Card’s book Shadow of the Giant, which was engaging but frustrating because I just couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t visualize the characters or their surroundings. Card didn’t provide enough detail. He’d write: The main characters went to Yerevan. Period. He never said if they’d gone to Yerevan during the day or at night, in winter or spring; he never said whether Yerevan was a tall modern noisy city or a short old musty village. Was it in the mountains or on a plain? Were there pine trees, or was it desert? They were in Yerevan; that’s all he said; so I couldn’t imagine the scene.

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This past weekend my husband and I celebrated our anniversary in Portland, then drove home along a circuitous, scenic route – a driver’s route, really, following the kinds of unpopulated, narrow, serpentine roads that you see highlighted in Evo magazine. It was thrilling. I cinched my seatbelt.

When we got back on the highway (a one-lane state highway with no traffic; it was fun driving, too), my husband exclaimed at the gauges on his BMW. “We may run out of gas,” he commented. Oh, said I. Hm. We were just outside Dufur (population: 500), an outpost among rolling hills of wheat – hills rolling on and on, as far as one can see, covered in wheat and then patches of sagebrush and then wheat again. If we ran out of gas there, at dusk on a cold autumn day, what would we do? Try to hitch a ride to the next town, I guess. Maybe we could hoof it to a rancher’s house; surely ranchers have spare gas?

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In the event we did not run out of gas. We made it 60 miles to the nearest (sizeable) town with plenty to spare. The whole way, though, I kept thinking about how the story “We ran out of gas, and then…” hinges on where one ran out of gas. The setting determines the action. Setting matters.