Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Jonathan Howland writes about Native Air, published by Green Writers Press.
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I’m drawn to novels that spiral around a single, cataclysmic event, typically a reverberant loss or grief. In life and in literature, I abide the Faulknerian premise that “nothing ever happens once and is finished.” As in Faulkner’s “The Bear” (and Absalom, Absalom!, where he coins the phrase), or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, Native Air continually circles back to revisit, recover, and savor — both to understand the past and to animate and invigorate the present.
The novel centers on a friendship and climbing partnership that is both anchoring and unbearable for Pete Hunter and narrator Joe Holland. They meet in college and spend most of ten years yoked together in the service of their climbing objectives, but their needs are distinct, and eventually Joe spins away to pursue the ministry. Much later, Pete’s grown son Will calls Joe back to California to complete the last (and unfinished) route Pete and Joe attempted when they were together.
My research, as it were, was fashioned out of lived experience. What follows is an attempt to trace some veins.
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Early Sources
The origins of this novel are in my early climbing experiences in the mountains and deserts of California.
In the fall of 1981 I spent a grim, disillusioning season in Yosemite. That winter, in San Francisco, I tried to fashion some fiction out of it. 33 years later I started writing Native Air.
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Narrator
I grew up in the church — my father was a Presbyterian minister, as was my maternal grandfather, and an uncle. My mother’s sister is a theologian.
I come by narrator Joe Holland’s “ultimates” preoccupations honestly — including his “tendency to position climbing as something philosophical, less a physical endeavor than a form of moral striving.”
But he’s not me. For one thing, I’ve had less trouble heeding Pete’s quip to Joe: “It might be an awesome enough responsibility just to enjoy your life a little.”
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Grief
I took notes for this novel in June 2013 on a rest day during a climbing trip — initially in Pete Hunter’s voice and from his point of view.
In December of that year my friend and climbing partner Bill Beckwith died in a motorcycle crash. Joe’s voice was birthed out of the grief I felt for losing Bill. Just months later I wrote the first several pages, including the letter from Will to Joe that opens the novel.
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Pete Hunter
I’ve known and appreciated and climbed with several manifestations of Pete — the talented, driven, charismatic, visionary, obsessed. Each is named in the acknowledgements at the back of the novel (alongside many others).
Pete is one person I am practicing becoming.
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Eastside
The Eastern Sierra is my other, wilder home — the very 100 mile stretch of high desert and alpine peaks depicted in the novel. In the past two years I’ve spent months in a tent not far from where Pete’s trailer was situated — climbing, hiking, writing, enjoying sunrises over the White Mountains and too-early sunsets (esp. in the cold months) over the Sierra.
Sage, stars, pinyon pines.
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Climbing
Of the climbing in Native Air, I draw on many of my experiences if often re-positioning and/or re-purposing them. The homoerotic passage up the Lighting Bolt Cracks in Part One, for instance, is based on Jason Wells’ and my ascent of the same route in 2009 — though we climbed it in conventional style and without interpersonal strife. Other climbs & routes are entirely made up, including the prominent Northeast Face Direct on Mt. Moriah, which doesn’t exist.
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Exposure and Vitality
Faulkner’s “The Bear” looms large to me in rendering the mythical, meaning-manifest magic of wildness. What young Ike encounters in/through Sam Fathers, Old Ben, and the “puny” white men who “live in herds to protect themselves from their sources” left me, in life and in literature, looking for a consonant experience of exposure.
Climbing and writing are my hunting.
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Storytelling
I came to fiction and poetry late — in my teens and twenties — but have not lacked ‘for what is found there.’ I’ve been troubled and quickened and fortified by the ‘heart in conflict with itself’ evoked by dozens of writers dear to me.
The standard Joe sets for himself in composing this book — “So long as it’s a story I can believe” — reflects his resistance, and mine, to the tidy, moralistic, and/or triumphalist stories of his pastorate and of our common (American) culture. Related: the layered, un-time-bound narrative structure of the novel corresponds to my experience of how life is lived — re-hashed and messy, the present punctuated by the past and inextricable from it.
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