Meg Files enjoys researching and uses what she learns to set her stories and to inform her characters.  In the excerpt below, 19-year-old Hanna accompanies her father, who is researching for a magazine feature article, on a car trip to a Western rendezvous.  Using modern characters with an interest in traditions of the West, Meg sets up Hannah’s predicament against a convincing backdrop.  You will notice that what Meg has learned about Western traditions allows Hannah and her father to share in a new experience while talking about the most important current issue in their lives.

To track the way Meg uses her research, notice the details in the excerpt.  What is Hannah speaking about with her father?  How does her exposure to the rendezvous and its participants allow us to better understand her emotional state and life situation, which are quite separate from the distraction of the rendezvous?  How does the setting and information from Meg’s research help bring her characters to life by giving them a present, a now that is interesting.

A note before you begin the excerpt:  Marion is Hannah’s boyfriend and the two of them have known each other since the sixth grade.  Duke is Marion’s father, a good guy who killed himself after being implicated in a mine explosion.

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They wouldn’t be allowed to stay overnight at the rendezvous site itself, not unless they outfitted themselves with early 1800s clothes, utensils, and shelter. Hanna stuffed extra jeans, her nightgown, and a couple textbooks into a pack. She could study, she figured, while her dad was out interviewing a bunch of wannabe mountain men playing elaborate games. She put the framed picture of Marion in the backpack. She zipped the pack and put a couple pencils and a paperback in the outside pocket. She wished it really were possible to go back to simpler times. She unzipped the pack and set Marion’s photo back on the dresser. Face down. Then face up. No, leave him face down. It was only overnight.

They headed east through the canyon in the old Blazer. “These rendezvous deals have been going on for a long time,” her dad said. “A lot longer than the real thing. Which was only fifteen years.”

She watched the river, running high, frothy, and milky brown.

“Okay, let’s have the history lesson,” she told him.

She wished she’d brought the picture along. Staring at Marion as he was a year ago, up on Red Mountain in his jeans and red plaid shirt, champagne-buzzed and still half of their unit, was necessary to figuring things out. Let her dad lecture on the mountain man game-playing. Better than dwelling on the little mass of pulsing cells, or whatever it would be at this stage of the game, that was dwelling in her. Except it wasn’t a game.

 “To give you some perspective: first there was Jefferson’s huge land purchase. He paid fifteen million for the west, sight unseen. Then he sent Lewis and Clark to see what was out there. Then came the mountain men. And that was all about fashion, if you believe it. The beaver hat was the big style in Europe.”

“So someone had to go forth and slay little furry animals,” Hanna said. She was feeling carsick as the road switch backed up the hills beyond the canyon.

“It was a tough job, but someone had to do it. No, actually — it must have been a good excuse to light out. Get on a horse and head out into the great unknown. Just imagine what it would be to see all this — “ his arm swept the panorama of river and mountains — “and Yellowstone and the Tetons, all of it, for the first time.”

“Yeah, and without any people or roads or litter or telephone wires or golden arches.”

“Except Indians, of course,” he said.

“Dad? Could you take the next rest stop?”

“Well, that’s not ‘til — you need to stop now? You look like you’re about ready to lose breakfast.”

“Oh, don’t say breakfast,” she moaned. “I’m kind of carsick. Oops, better stop.”

She went around to the back of the Blazer so he wouldn’t see her throw up. When she got back in, he handed her the canteen and she rinsed her mouth out.

“Sorry,” she said. “Wow. Oh, lots better now. Okay! Onward. Let the history continue. Wonder what the mountain men did when they got carsick.”

He pulled back onto the road, just shaking his head. “They probably had some prodigious hangovers, after the rendezvous. But I don’t think you have a hangover. I don’t think you’re carsick, either.”

“Tell me about the mountain men,” she said. “Man against nature, man against beast.”

“You told Marion yet? Or —” He gave her a sudden look and the Blazer jerked toward the shoulder. “It’s not Marcus, is it?”

“I wish I could be a mountain man. Just ride away from everything, all

alone. No, it isn’t Marcus.”

“Okay, daughter mine. We’ll figure something out.  Here, Kleenex. Let’s just think on things. We’ll take ourselves out in the woods with those fools in fringe and coonskin hats, and then we’ll figure something out. At least there aren’t going to be any wolf packs or grizzlies out there. Things could be worse.”

The rendezvous was way the heck off the road, deep in National Forest land. They pulled in among the Pathfinders, Broncos, and other Blazers, most newer than theirs, where signs said Day Parking. They walked through the long-term parking and the night holding camp, registered and paid, and made their way past the portapotties, the sign proclaiming “End of Modern Camp,” and Dr. J’s Medicine Show, Featuring Dr. J’s Indian Tonic & Elixirs, also homemade root beer.

Matthew Blackwood went into interview mode. His daughter knew it, but probably most people he talked to didn’t. He jotted notes as they walked from tent to tent, checking out the traders’ goods, shot pictures, and just talked to men costumed in leather, wide belts, elk and buffalo hides, just talked in that monosyllabic, understated way she’d noticed men talked to each other.

“Nice capote,” he said to a man in a blanket coat.

“Hunerd percent wool,” the man said. He had a long white beard.

“Hudson Bay.”

“They don’t cut, but tear.”

Man talk — what all was being communicated here? There were 285 tents and eighty traders, they learned, everything pre-1840 authentic. You couldn’t have your flashlight or your foam mattress, your propane or your plastic. You could for sure have your flint and steel to start your fire, your powderhorns, your tomahawk, and your black powder guns.

“I didn’t think there’d be women here,” she whispered. Mostly older, but a few young, probably some fanatics’ daughters, they all were clearly with their men. They wore buckskin dresses or wool dresses trimmed with ribbons and cowrie shells or pioneer dresses. It’d be fun, really, she thought, to trick herself out in beaded leather, fringes and all, and furs.

“Nice, um, teeth,” she said to a woman in a dark green dress trimmed with beads and the teeth of some animal.

The woman, at least as old as her mother, said, “Elk.”

And Hanna thought she’d mastered the man-speak game. Or maybe it was Old West-speak. It was sort of intimate, implying both parties had traveled the land: enough said.

But then the woman said, “Hi, I’m Ruth Cunningham, but you can call me Root Beer Ruthie out here. Isn’t this a hoot? I’ve got three kids and two grandbabies so far, and I thought Jack was nuts when he started brain-tanning leather, but darned if I’m not really into all this, as my son would say.” And she proceeded to tell Hanna about cooking Dutch-oven supper — meat, potatoes, celery, carrots, onions, and the secret, apples — buried in coals, and how you get your patterns from Tailor’s Guide, and you don’t put a seam on the inside of the legs for a man’s pants because it’s uncomfortable.

Hanna looked down at her jeans. “Yep,” she said, still working on man-speak.

“Honey, for those bugs?” Root Beer Ruthie said. “Go get you some of that sage and rub it on. It’s only good for about twenty minutes, but hoo-boy, you’ll be glad.”

What other ancient remedies do you know? Hanna wanted to ask. Can you stop a baby? Can you bewitch a wandering man?

But Ruth Cunningham was just playing the game — and it was her brain-tanning husband’s game, at that.

Hanna made her way back to the portapotties and threw up. No secret cures here.
She woke in the motel that night. Her dream-spoken Huh! echoed in the room. But her dad slept on. Or faked his light snores very convincingly. In the dream, her insides were a pouch, and a furred man was rubbing it with animal brains and sticking a burning branch up her.

In the morning they drove back to the rendezvous and walked among the white tents and tipis. Blue woodsmoke rose in the cold from firepits and the tops of tipis. Smoke holes, her dad said. They watched a rifle shooting competition and men throwing knives and tomahawks at playing-card targets.

“Duke would have loved this,” Hanna said.

“Maybe,” her dad said. “Or maybe he’d have found it foolish.”

He’d been gone for three months. Not merely gone but dead. “I miss him,” she said. “I’m probably just under the influence of too much buckskin.”

The sky was low, with dark gray clouds among the sunlit white, and a line of bright blue ran along the ridgeline to the west. I loved him, she thought, startled. She wouldn’t say it to her dad. They both knew too much: ball of flame, bags over the methane sniffers, don’t be a wussie, and fifteen miners dead. But she loved him, and not just for the connection to Marion. Duke was the other half to her dad, and together they made a whole father.

By eleven a cold rain began. “What do you say?” her dad said. “Ready to blow this pop stand?”

They ducked from tent to tent along traders’ row. Her dad stopped to talk to a pipe-smoking man chipping an arrowhead. At the next tent, tables were piled with long strings of beads and leather bags, fringed and beaded, with elkhorn buttons.

“Maybe you’d like to trade some frog skins for one of those,” a man said.

She smiled and shook her head. She wasn’t about to ask what frog skins were. Then she saw a tiny pair of moccasins trimmed with white and red beads.

“How much are these?” she asked. She quickly handed over the dollars and tucked the moccasins up under her sweater, and hurried through the rain. She was under a canopy eating frybread when her dad caught up. She was actually hungry.

“I keep thinking about the real mountain men,” she said on the way home. “Yeah, yeah, big adventure, freedom, no one lording it over you, no responsibilities. Be one with nature. Live off the land. Ah, the simple life.”

“But —?” her dad said.

“But it’s just a myth. I mean, what would the reality be? Even besides the wolf packs and the mountain lions and the grizzlies. No doctors. Hostile Indians. Gotta kill a buffalo for meat. Can’t even start a fire with a simple match. We know what winter’s like, and we live in a heated house.”

They’d driven out of the hard rain, into drizzle, and it was a good thing, because the passenger side wiper blade was torn and flopping.

“Sometimes it must have been boring, too,” she said.

“I imagine it took a certain type,” her dad said. “Probably it appealed to the loners.”

One of these days, she’d look back on her childhood the same way, pure myth. Right now, she looked and saw only the boy and the girl destined to find each other. Marion had to return, he had to, and they would go forward into the rest of their story.

But she wouldn’t bring him back with force or guilt or duty. He would come back for love alone, ninety-nine percent pure unadulterated love. She’d never have to wonder.

And she was protecting him: she believed she was. He needed to stay in school. She’d protected him when she’d protected Duke. He never needed to know the guilt of the noble man-of-the-Western-code Duke. Of course, she hadn’t been able to protect the man from his own guilt, if that was why he’d put his booted prothesis and his ceremonial jacket on and taken himself out of the picture.

She could protect the son, though, from guilt or grief. Whatever she did — one of the A words, it was down to, adoption or abortion — she could keep the wonderful story of their twosome real for him. The wonderful, engaging, heartwarming story of true love. Oh yeah.

“You’re not going to tell Mom, are you?” she said when they entered the canyon.

“If she knows anything, it’ll come from you. I did wonder — what about the pills?”

“What’s the point? Marion’s in Ohio. I didn’t exactly have any warning he’d be back in April, you know.”

Her mom had her unhappy brother Keith to worry about, busy making ink by the barrel, and her wild little brother Davy, way too cute for his own good, and an out-of-work, depressed husband, and now, with her new job as a police dispatcher, all those desperate calls she couldn’t do a thing about except pass along — wrecks and break-ins and prowlers and fights, all kinds of men run amuck, all kinds of women scared. The last thing she needed was a daughter who’d gone and gotten herself p.g.

That was the last thing.

She was protecting her mom.

“I don’t even know why,” she said to her dad in the old Blazer. This way through the canyon, they followed the river’s direction, down from the Continental Divide, westward. “I just can’t tell her. I don’t ever want her to know.”

She was protecting herself, but from what she did not know.

“You pretty much just made your decision, then.”

“Give me a couple days. I need a couple days.” The baby moccasins were in her pack.

“Time’s running short, you know.”

Now even her dad, for whom she could do no wrong, was mad at her. “I hate this,” she said.  Whatever this was.