A master of description

[Jerry Peterson]

A couple weeks ago, I told you about Gerry Spence, a master of our craft of writing, and I gave you an example of how he describes characters, drawing the example from Spence’s autobiography, The Making of a Country Lawyer.

Today it’s back to Spence and his autobiography for an example of how he describes place, a setting. Spence’s father was a hunter. Every year, he would go into the Wyoming mountains for a week, to shoot elk and deer for the family larder –


The first day of the season he had taken off on foot in the dark of the early morning. He hunted alone. He said other hunters made too much noise. But the real reason he liked to hunt alone was because alone, an ineffable sense of being filled his experience. One is keenly aware of every movement, the needles of the lodgepole pine flitting in an errant breeze when all else is still, the small shadow of a mouse scampering. One sees everything, the eye-drop rust-colored petals of the kinnikinnick, its berries red, the imprint in the tall forest grass where an animal has lain, the ferns growing out of a rotten log, proclaiming that life is the fleeting product of death. Alone, one experiences the total feast, and looks for more, feels for more in the holiness there, in that sanctuary more perfect than a cathedral. Alone and silent in a forest, one dissolves into the forest. One would never speak out, never even whisper there any more than one would stand up on a pew in church and shout. Walking softly, one looks ahead to spot where each foot will meet the ground so that no crunch of crumbling twigs or crushing needles will sully the silence.

. . . To him [Spence’s father], Mother Nature was a friend, and the wilderness a place of peace, and if there were a God, which I suspected he privately questioned – at least a God with a long white beard – God would be in the mountains.


Makes you want to be there, doesn’t it?

Tomorrow: Going to war . . . in a book