I smiled when I re-read Heartwood’s chapter five, remembering how much enjoyment I had writing it.
My two Siberian villagers, Pavel and Oleg, that start the storyline of the chapter travel to a fort on the Tunguska River where trappers rendezvoused to sell fur. Pavel and Oleg also bring the spruce log they sensed has strange properties, not the least of which a scent which entices the opposite sex.
My research on fur trapping in Siberia using the late 19th and early 20th centuries told me about the rendezvous and fort. American fur trappers did the same thing in forts across the western United States.
My description of the river trip derives directly from my experience on the Albany River in remote Hudson Bay Lowlands (Ontario). I used a helicopter and float plane to travel there, not a small river boat handled by an indigenous boatman. In Hudson Bay, he would have been an Inuit.
Peatland water runs black with tannic acid from decomposing organic matter. Despite it, fish thrive in the water, sturgeon included. I’ve seen moose and otters in my peatland research and included them too. Magnificent animals.
On the Albany River, we camped on a large gravel bar much like Pavel and Oleg did.
We didn’t fish for food. The photo above from the trips shows containers of food in a tent. I’m the person on the right and my colleague Paul Glaser leans over inside.
Alexander Pushkin wrote the tale of the fish and the fisherman that Oleg tells in my story. I modified it a bit, as did the Brothers Grimm in their fairy tale, the Fisherman and His Wife.
The line Pavel says over dinner on the gravel bar, “I wonder what rich people eat in Moscow now,” I asked a girl friend and her parents in Minnesota while on their houseboat in the middle of a clear lake on a Fourth of July. But in Minneapolis, not Moscow.
I had cooked T-bone steaks on a grill mounted on their boat and we enjoyed them with cold beer in what indelibly remains one of the greatest meals of my life, given the circumstances. Oleg and Pavel did not eat steak, but, rather, pulled off chunks of roasted sturgeon with their fingers. This too I did, but not with sturgeon.
When I worked for Hope International in southern Ethiopia, my guide took me to what CNN Africa called the best fish restaurant on the continent, a dirt-floored shack on the shore of a rift valley lake. Dogs, cats, and goats walked freely among diners and begged for pieces of tilapia, literally pulled out of the lake a few minutes earlier, quickly gutted and scaled, dusted with flour and bright-red Ethiopian berbere, chili powder, and finally deep fried in a caldron of oil.
The fish arrived the table whole, mounted vertically, complete with a cherry tomato in its mouth. We grabbed pieces of the fish of the carcass with our fingers and dipped them into more berbere before popping them into our mouths.
My heavens, that was amazing food, each bite a bacchanalian experience with no utensils. I had to put the incident into my book and once made the dish myself with a live tilapia I got at a Chinese market. It was almost as good as the one in Ethiopia, but my friends at the table were grossed out eating a whole fish with their fingers. Pooh on them!
With respect to the amulet that Oleg carved from the star-struck log’s sapwood, I initially wrote far more graphically about its erotic power. Prostitute Sonya really loved it in my first draft.
Early reviewers I respected, however, told me the text put them off, and suggested I be more discreet. Professional fiction writers taught me to always take the advice of readers since if I want them to read my writing. Why write so readers don’t like it? Just for myself? Nope. That’s like intellectual masterb..well..you know what I mean.
My writing mentors also told me, when I initially objected to the recommendation, that my notion of “writer’s prerogative” only applies to those incredibly skilled at the craft to pull it off—James Joyce and Salmon Rushdie types. So I changed what Oleg carved from being a well-known sex toy to an amulet. My reviewers were right; subtlety and leaving things to the imagination works better when it comes to erotica, today’s porn on the web and streaming platforms notwithstanding. Think of some of the graphic episodes in the series Outlander if you want to know what I mean.
As for the Romani Boldo Hanzi, I found an engaging picture of a gypsy man from the late 1800’s. Coupled to the personality of one of my PhD students (who looked like him), I gave birth to Hanzi in my book.
I liked Hanzi, not the least because I love gypsy jazz. You may have heard it in the wonderful magical realism movie, “Chocolat.” Below is Django Reinhardt’s Minor Swing from the movie that stared Johnny Depp as the gypsy clan leader who played it. Do try and see it.
Enjoy chapter five. Would you like an amulet of your own? I’ll see what I can do.