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... Following Interstate 15 to U.S. 93/20/26 in Idaho, the farm fields, railroad tracks, and Indian reservations around Pocatello gradually disappear, as the sharp grey rocks and pine trees dotting the hilly landscape, diminish into flat prairie. The golden grassland is bordered by distant sandstone cliffs and a virtually empty, sun stroked, blacktop two-lane.
We made a stop at Energy Breeder Number 1 the first nuclear reactor to produce electricity in the U.S. With both my kids raised on Homer Simpson's employment in a nuclear power plant, the self-guided tour was a must. But this historic outpost of technology was no cartoon.
A few miles ahead is the small town of Arco, which boasts "First U.S. town powered by nuclear energy." It also bears the distinction of enormous granite boulders towering on a steep hillside, tattooed with the class years of local graduating high school seniors stretching back into the 1890's. The painted boulder field looks like an art project from another planet.
Crater's of the Moon National Monument is further east on a spur road, a short and easy trip.
Heading out to Craters, the heat quotient rises in the summer and the roadside scenery changes again, quite dramatically, to what resembles the surface of a charred black moon. The shiny black obsidian rock and grey volcanic ash hold the sun's heat, making the landscape shimmer and sun-screen melt.
Oatman, Arizona/Laughlin, Nevada
Looking for the real wild west? You'll find it here on the banks of the Colorado River. Laughlin is Las Vegas circa the 1950's, with a boardwalk along the river, koi feeding machines, and shuttlecraft tooling folks up and down river from Harrah's to the Edgewater and back. The inexpensive cruise is more than easy transportation, its a nice way to view the sunset and neon streaking across the river.
Riverfront hotel bars offer big, cheap drinks and a view; the casinos are a lot more mellow with admittedly less mainstream, big name entertainment than Vegas. There's also a lot fewer of them, no theme park atmosphere, and a larger proportion of senior citizens and bikers than the high rolling Vegas crowd these days.
The big, open western sky line and the glittering river are all the theme you need, toss in a little cowboy with reasonably priced steak houses or a Mexican cantina, the most popular cuisines in the riverfront hotels.
Pools are utilitarian and decently sized; stark brown mountains the backdrop, a little bougainvilla here and there. On a nice night the boardwalk gets crowded, with not just the drink and gamble types but the stroll and ramble types too. Famlies feed the fish, eat at cheap buffets and 50's diner knock offs, fast food abounds as well. You can jet ski up river, there's a sand beach just out of town at the Indian reservation casino.
Cross the river and you're in Arizona. Bulldog City's suburban sprawl - the bedroom community to Laughlin - is devoured by the desert sun and sand soon enough, and there's the turn to Oatman, forty minutes from Laughlin's high rises.
A twisted road takes you up mountain, and just as your ears begin to pop and the pines replace the cactus and sprout like vagrants along the roadside, you've reached this former silver rush mining town. Now the rush is in tourism, but not a big enough rush to take the charm away.
Original buildings are just as likely to be forlorn and boarded up or inhabited by eccentric locals as they are to be converted into a General Store selling hard candy and semi-precious gemstones. Work by local artists and second hand treasures are worth exploring too. There are a couple of restaurants, most notably in the Oatman Hotel, where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard once honeymooned....
CHARACTER COUNTS
Character is everything. Regardless of what genre you're writing - or even if you are writing fiction or non-fiction - the characters you are writing about are the substance of your book.
It is because of who your characters are that certain actions take place and become your plot. It is because of who your characters are that they speak in a certain way, reside in a specific place, interact with other characters who in turn shape your story and your characters' world.
Think of your book as if it were a living, breathing being - after all, it is, isn't it? If the action of your book is the spine, and your theme or purpose is the heart, what is the life blood? What makes the story work, the heart beat? The characters.
All too often we become, as writers, focused on "getting the story down." We focus on the theme, the wisdom, the point of the book, and we walk our characters through the mechanics we've set up for them without exploring the reasons they are walking.
And you finish your book and you find that in all ways it is competent, it is what you meant to write about, the language may be beautiful, the plot structure superb and yet there feels like there is something missing. That it doesn't quite work.
What could be missing is character depth, the point at which your characters are rich enough, full enough, three dimensional enough that you know what they'd order when they walk into a diner, what they'd wear to bed, what they think about when they first wake up in the morning.