Often when I overhear the conversations of strangers I will do three things: 1) immediately attempt to give these speakers some backstory in my imagination in order to enrich the usually out-of-context conversation I'm hearing; 2) I'll transfer their real time, verbal interaction to a fictional script - this is a writer's cheat, if I were to write this dialogue how would it appear on the page?; and 3) I wonder if they knew that a stranger was listening if they'd alter their speaking in any way? Like, how authentic is this dialogue I'm hearing right now?
This happens in grocery market lines, waiting rooms, cafes, and the most falsely intimate place of them all - the locker room at the gym. Intimate because we're all in various states of undress (often complete) and false because we (generally) are not acquainted in that naked way. I've seen countless body shapes and sizes, ages, stages and ways of trying to change outfits without revealing any of those things. Voices, though, are often less successfully concealed - I've heard about the husband who left "because the fucking dogs were just too much, I told her not to let them run her life just like her kids did!" To the exasperated mom who just didn't know how she'd fit kids, friends' kids, carseats, groceries, pets AND strollers into her SUV and did her friend have any advice because she was about to have a breakdown? ("Make someone else drive.") The Korean church camp was there to swim one day, a bunch of adolescent girls changing for the pool and one says to another, "I'm a fat cow and no one should have to see me." The other said, "Nuh-uh, that's stupid! You're awesome! Come on," and they slipped-slapped bare feet out to the pool together.
Today, I was getting ready to swim and in the next row of lockers over from me, unseen, three older women talked about salmon fishing on the Kenai. "Well head of household can take twenty five this year!" "He said in his seventeen years of dipnetting that his record was four at a time. This year he got five all at once - can you believe it?" "How do you even get that many home?" "We take suitcases and fill them with frozen fish and race back to Anchorage." "By the time you pay for gas, food and lodging it's almost worth it to just pay ten dollars a pound." "Gas is nearly five dollars a gallon. I remember when it was 89 cents for the love of Pete!" "We could drive more than five times further back then, couldn't we?"
When I heard "for the love of Pete!" that's when I started #2 or transferring their conversation onto paper - what writer would ever have a character exclaim "for the love of Pete!" I'm wagering not a lot because it would sound folksy, forcing a "fishin' country" vernacular on a buncha hearty, but quaint, Alaskan dames in the wild untamed north! And yet here I was, in a YMCA locker room looking exactly like every other YMCA locker I've ever been in, here smack in the center of urban Alaska, where three fairly well-off women (as in, not in scruffy overalls, chewing on toothpicks) discussed the fishing this year and then, later, they might go home to their not-shacks to prepare a salmon dinner for guests, choosing the perfect Sauvignon Blanc to accompany the dinner, or maybe they'd grill it while watching their grandkids play in the backyard (#1, backstory), or maybe they'd just do some canning while streaming a movie. I don't know, but my point is this - if some writers (me, maybe) were to write this conversation, it could very likely end up as one of those "ain't we a tough bunch of small-town individualists who don't care what no one thinks but our hearts are warm and we're probably more tolerant that you city folk give us credit for kinda situations now come over here and have a beer with me - a chug and a hug, honey." Which has been done to absolute death.
Where are those real representations of Alaska (or any imagined "novelty" locale?) with real people who stuff giant frozen salmon in their suitcases to speed back to town in order not to miss the symphony Saturday night? Or is that, again, foisting too much "character"? I think that's a situation ripe for plot development - a traffic jam (caused by a moose maybe!) fouls up the plans and smells up the car of these fisherpeople in a hurry. How will they get back to town in time and what sorts of events/meaningful conversations/realizations will they come to while on this unexpected waylay? And one of them is pregnant/up for violin first chair/diabetic without extra insulin/late for the child custody pick up? But mostly, how will they keep the fish from not going bad?
That's the reality, honestly, of many people in Alaska (with a tad less dramatic flair... or more, who knows?) and here's an example. Whilst cycling today (16 miles through the middle of this state's population center and, I might add, I never once had to cross a street with cars so thoughtful is the bicycle trail system in this town) and I passed sinewy-legged marathon runners, groups of teenagers walking and absently plucking the tops off tall weeds, women my age in rubber boots walking dogs, casual joggers, other cyclists bent over handlebars lycra-ed legs pumping, kids on trikes, old folks stopping to chat and stretch in their silky striped running suits. It all proved that here are a bunch of people you'd see anywhere (at any YMCA or jogging/biking trail) in the country who go to concerts and whatever else with their friends and families and dogs but here, in Alaska, there is a large wild animal roaming free on the trail. And it's no big deal.
A moose caught in my peripheral vision, munching near Chester Creek, its giant brown body, much larger than me and my bike, startling the crap out of me. But then I got a little nerdy-excited that I would get to be the person who warned those I passed coming the other way, "Hey - there's a moose on the trail just ahead of you." Which I did, and no on seemed too bothered, they just said, "Okay, thanks," and kept going. I told maybe four people then figured that was good enough, put my earbuds back in and had to laugh, thinking, well there's another verbal interaction I'd never think to write because it would sound ludicrous.
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