I remember attending a lecture a few years ago where John Keeble talked about his experiences as a writer within that curious genre, nonfiction. His book Out of the Channel is a personal account--a direct observation--of the consequences of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound, now over a decade old in our memory, but still very much with us literally as we watch for the possibility of recovery. When the disaster happened, Keeble went to Valdez as a journalist. And what he found there is useful in understanding the sources of good stories.

When Keeble arrived, Valdez was a madhouse of human activity, which on the surface of things is familiar, perhaps as in, not all that foreign to the Alaskan experience in general--the Boomtown. An airport accustomed to six flights a day was now seeing hundreds of planes. Mass Media including TV news was there (of course) in force, meaning that the money was flowing--helicopters and planes and expense accounts and like a rowdy pack of wolves or a hungry mob, the press Corp. moved in unison whenever an Exxon official appeared or a marine biologist made a statement in a hotel or a government official offered an update or any "breaking" story about where the oil was going and what it was killing or what captain Hazzelwood had to drink before his ship went aground. In the mainstream, the reporters in the pack were ruthless, making a spectacle of themselves, but still there was no tangible way to get at any reliable information about what was going on. And the press Corp.'s very presence altered the information they were collecting. And, Keeble said, another strange thing happened. Despite the adversarial posturing we might imagine between Exxon and the people of the media, the reporters entered into a kind of symbiotic relationship with Exxon and the U. S. Government (for their very existence), a codependency of sorts. For to get any "news," one was trapped in Valdez, in the center, (so to speak) and what one encountered was vast amounts of hype or rhetoric from Exxon and a host of others, which was played out in collaboration with the press, in attempts to control the spin of information as it was pitched to the public. It was there in Valdez where Keeble arrived at his awakening. He would follow along with the pack, but he admits that he wasn't adept at this kind of journalism, which seemed to him a hectic and absurd way to tell a story. He ended his first trip (he ran out of money) and returned to the lower forty-eight somewhat bewildered and consequently contemplative about how one writes nonfiction. Again where do good stories come from?

In 1989, Keeble soon returned to the Sound (again and again), yet he decided to stay away from the city of Valdez, out of the center of the news activity. His desire to NOT chase the Press Corp. originated in his own preconceived notion about life on the edges. As a citizen of the West, Keeble had seen that the edge of the forest is where the real action is. He traveled to all the small fishing villages around the Sound and lived among the fishermen and the Native people. Here's what he discovered. Even though there was no vertical TV spectacle, no frenetic energy or visual intensity of cameras and flood lights and endless expense accounts, there was a wealth of information in these small villages--cultural information--about the rituals of place and the identity of the landscape and the hardy and yet delicate lives coexisting along this vast shoreline. The perspective of the fisherman and the native was to become a major part in understanding the impact of technology (and its failure) on human well-being and the health of all species living in this environment now weirdly definable only by the massive presence of crude oil. The cultural information available in these small villages, the biological knowledge acumulated through generations of living in this place, proved to be decisive in assessing the true damage to the living waters of the Sound.

A Kansas plant geneticist, a man by the name of Wes Jackson, in a book titled Altars of Unhewn Stone, wrote an essay called "The Information Implosion." Jackson offers a striking value claim. For though conventional wisdom holds that we are in the midst of an information explosion, more careful consideration must surely convince us that the opposite is true. Jackson notes, in particular, a species extinction rate of 1000 per year including the loss of plant species through the genetic narrowing of crops in his own research. According to Jackson, wheat seed "variety" is a misleading term referring only to a single seed species developed out of a much larger genetic variety--the new seed is a truncation or reduction of species inventory rather than an expansion. The problem is larger. According to Jackson, the loss in cultural information from the depopulation of the rural areas alone in the period from the 1930s until today is greater than the sum of information given by science and technology in the same period.

According to Jackson this implosion of information has the following characteristics. He speaks of "contemporary energy" which arrives from the sun and is harvested in a horizontal manner over the landscape rather than energy taken from a vertical well or mine. Contemporary energy is trapped by plants and later utilized by humans. Today we are dependent on old or fossil energy sources which come to us from mines and shafts, thus conceptually different from horizontal or "contemporary energy." This energy is vertical. Contemporary energy or horizontal energy has a LOW density per square foot; its supply is assured, but it requires large amounts of cultural information to harvest it and store it safely for future human use. When the density of the mineral is low, more thoughts and combinations of thoughts are necessary to make it available. More cultural arrangements are required. This is directly the opposite of burning coal in a power plant, which represents a high density per square foot. Accordingly, says Jackson, high density or vertical energy destroys cultural information.

I can explicate (in part) some of what Jackson suggests. Last year I was at the Rites of Spring Conference in Washington State where Julia Parrish spoke about the prehistorical ways humans have learned to navigate the globe. The recent discovery of an ancient human skeleton in California--April 10, 1999--suggests that we populated the North American Continent not so certainly by way of a land bridge, but by navigating the Oceans. Parrish suggests that vast amounts of cultural information, like the traditional talent of sailing the seas without technology, have been lost or destroyed as the world becomes more modern. She offered many stories from island cultures about navigating the oceans with cultural information only. She said that a man in a small boat could feel, by lying down in the bottom of the boat, the waves coming off islands that were beyond his visibility, beyond the horizon line. Writers like Paul Shepard offer similar arguments about the lost powers of human perception over time--urban life has dulled our senses and our perspectives in untold ways.

These are all compelling observations. They have applications to all spheres of our culture and it seems to apply to the process of storytelling itself. The link here between Jackson and Keeble? The city of Valdez, for Keeble, was high energy but low information. The villages out on the edges of Prince William Sound were low energy but high in information.

What does this have to do with our approach to writing a personal narrative, the curious designation of nonfiction? The very act of writing, according to the powers of the moment, is defined as a "process of inquiry," not into the well-lit centers of human activity, but a process of inquiry that begins at the edges of the light, and moves into the shadows of a simple, ordinary room where an old woman sits quietly in a wooden chair crafting something unusual with her hands--and nothing else appears to be happening. But there is a endless kind of kindness there, I whole tradition of humility and persistence, grace and magic.

Where do you start?

Try to see a family in Moses Lake, whose young son will someday shoot and kill his teacher. Who could imagine such a thing happening in this rural community? How do you begin to account for such a tragedy? Try to see that this boy's family once had dreams. Strive to know the mother and father, the details of their lives. The hopes of building a life around a farm, say, of a few hundred acres at the north end of the county. The mother's garden and the color of the kitchen. The words that were spoken there. See the mother beginning to fear something etched in her husband's face that she prays she imagined, intangible at first but gradually building to an accumulation of endless days of looking out the kitchen window. Something missing or present in the brazen behavior of her only son. The father working in town at the feed store and returning each evening to work again until dark and beyond in the dry fields and then gone again in the morning, the dust from his pickup truck rising off the gravel road, turning the low morning sunlight to crimson clouds that swirl across the landscape like Van Gogh's stars. The drought and the impending humility of failure, more acute for the father perhaps because of the expectations in this community that men must provide for their families above all else. The mother becoming distant, preoccupied, melancholy. The son, the burning questions he asked, the moments of rage in the night, the piercing sounds of the father and mother arguing in the bedroom. The intimate pieces of human despair that exist on the edges of agrarian life. This is a place far away from the vertical energy of the news headline or TV byte that reads "Student kills teacher in Moses Lake." This information is discovered through a process of inquiry, for it exists only on the margins, on the borderland of living in landscape and culture. This is where the story begins.