Outlining your plot can be a breeze, if you first set up a grid of characters, setting, and events.
MONDAY MORNING BROUGHT a brisk wind across the hilltop. The day before, all had been quiet; Dee and Mama had both rested all afternoon after the throngs of visitors departed. The reunion had been a great success all the way around, and with Abby, Ian, and Coriander delivered to the bus station in the wee hours, cleanup chores done, and Mama napping, Dee had enjoyed the first day of her entire summer free of responsibility for any other living being.
Coffee cup in hand, Dee stepped out on the porch. Her hair blew willy-nilly into her face. Back in North Carolina, a wind like this would be strong enough to kick up whitecaps on the lake. The lake . . . how long since she’d thought about her cabin? Or the water?
She was still standing there in her reverie, watching the branches flutter, when she heard Max’s truck turn off the road, pause at the gate, and rumble up the drive. She recalled that, when she was a child and kinfolks like Ruby Lee and Pearl would visit, from the porch you’d have plenty of advance notice—enough time to run back to your room and finish making the bed or put away the dust cloth before company knocked on the door.
Leaving Teresa to look after Mama’s few needs, Dee grabbed up the folder with Max’s completed manuscript and disk to turn over to him. She gathered the bag with her own notebook and camera, along with bug spray, sunscreen, and an old straw hat of Daddy’s. Mama had offered Granny Schmidt’s calico sunbonnet—but Dee’s vanity wouldn’t let her go that far.
“Morning, Dr. Dee—you ready for your field trip?” Max called out as he stepped out of the pickup. “Got your milk money and your backpack?”
“You bet I’m ready. First time I’ve left the county since—well, since that world-class event at Poplar Grove!” Dee was giddy as a Girl Scout at the prospect of today’s outing. The idea of an outdoor excursion had made her realize just how constricted her boundaries had been on the farm, as though she were once again an eight-year-old who’d never explored her home state. She regretted that she was just now going to range farther afield when it was time to leave.
They climbed into Max’s truck and were on their way, with Chester seated happily between them.
“What is that wonderful aroma?” Dee asked.
“Sourdough bread and oatmeal cookies, fresh from Wilson’s Bakery,” Max replied. “I hope you don’t mind a picnic for lunch—where we’re going, there aren’t any restaurants, although you can’t beat the ambience. There’s a great view of the river from up on the canyon rim. So I brought a basket full of the best delicacies Claxton has to offer. Along with Mrs. Vu’s homemade dog biscuits for Chester.”
“That all sounds great,” Dee said. Water—she would get to see water again! Bread and water suddenly started to sound like heaven.
She rolled down her window halfway to enjoy the breeze in her face. As they left the farm-to-market roads of Caprock County behind and turned onto the four-lane, the long, flat miles rolled by at seventy-plus, and soon they were making southerly tracks toward Abilene. Lush fields of knee-high cotton surrounded them in regular rows, often irrigated by enormous center-pivot systems pumping water from the aquifer far underground. Old-fashioned windmills like the one on the Bennett farm stood at intervals next to broken-down frame houses or newer brick ones, but these were only minor landmarks among the continuous pattern of vast ranches and agricultural sections.
When they crossed the river Dee could make out in the far distance a row of white posts topped by regularly turning blades, arrayed across a cliff like sentries, or children’s pinwheel toys stuck into the earth. The closer they came, the more fully Dee could discern their unique shapes. Each gleaming, slender white tower, as tall as a skyscraper, supported a large box from which radiated a trio of armlike blades spinning perpendicular to the ground.
“They make me think of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders,” observed Dee with delight, “all in a row, twirling their pom-poms!”
“I hadn’t thought of that myself,” remarked Max as they turned off the highway again, taking a dirt road around the base of the cliff and then, in a gut-wrenching series of hairpin turns, right up its side. The towers loomed above them like gantries. Dee held tight to the grab bar above the truck door.
“That road wasn’t a lot of fun last winter, when I came down here to photograph the project in a foot of snow,” said Max, as they surmounted the cliff edge and emerged on the high plateau. The vista from the heights was amazing.
“You have to come here in weather like that?”
“That’s one of my assignments—to capture scenic views of the project in every month of the year, for a wall calendar that goes out to the shareholders.”
“You do a lot of pinups, do you?” she teased.
“Well, you can’t beat the pay. Turkey Run will be the largest wind power operation in North America when they finish this phase next year, and the company’s putting plenty of money into it. There are more than a hundred windmills out here just like the ones you’re sitting under—generating enough electricity to power fifty thousand homes for a year. The company has had a huge public relations challenge, to convince residents that the turbines aren’t harming wildlife, they’re safe to humans, and they’re cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels.”
“That sounds like a tall order in Texas. Folks out here love ’em some oil and gas.”
“Yeah, but farmers who haven’t benefited from oil and gas leases are catching onto wind energy in a hurry. They can continue raising their crops like always, while the kilowatts are generated right above their heads.”
“Pretty impressive, I must say.”
Max turned the truck onto a side road that led right up to the base of a newly erected turbine, where he stopped and turned off the engine. The whirring of the windmills—low and steady, and not bothersome, at least to Dee’s mind—was the only sound they could hear on the deserted cliff edge. A construction sign proclaimed the site “A Green Generation Project of Texas Star Energy.” The company’s logo, a large blue-and-green star with a capital “T” superimposed, was emblazoned on the sign as well as on the base of the tower. “Let’s hop out here,” Max suggested. “The crew has finished with this turbine and moved on, and we’ll have the view all to ourselves.”
Chester gladly escaped the close confines of the cab and bounded across the sandy soil, where new grass was starting to come up. Dee got her phone camera and pointed it up at the blades directly overhead, producing a dramatically foreshortened composition with the sun, almost at its noon zenith, obscured by the boxlike structure at the top of the tower.
“What’s that thing the blades are attached to?” she asked Max.
“That housing contains the transformer that converts wind energy into electricity,” he explained. “It’s computer-controlled, so that the blades can change angle to capture the greatest amount of wind current. It also shuts down the rotation completely if the wind gets too high—if there’s a big storm—to keep the blades from spinning out of control.”
“I don’t think I’d want to be underneath one of these things in a gale.” As it was, the steady breeze kept the ranks of windmills turning in a smooth, almost hypnotic motion.
“I’ll tell you something else interesting,” Max offered, reaching behind the truck seat to get the picnic basket and cooler. “Everything about these turbines is precisely scientific, from the height of the tower in relation to any other trees or structures around, to the exact placement to produce the most energy. Those blades up there—with that twist in them that makes them look like high-tech aircraft propellers—are designed to perform best at wind speeds of exactly twenty-four miles per hour. That’s how the company initially decides where to install a wind farm—where climate data shows the greatest number of days annually that the wind blows at that speed.”
“Wow, how do you know all this?”
“The engineers talk to me while I’m working. Plus, I’m just nosy. I ask a lot of questions.”
“Well, I want to ask you some,” she said, smiling, as he unfolded an old patchwork quilt on the grass and opened up the lunch basket. “Friend to friend.”
They sat facing the valley, and as Dee closed her eyes and rubbed coconut-scented sunscreen over her face and bare arms and legs, she could almost imagine they were at the beach, the blue sky surrounding them like the ocean, the soothing hum of the windmills like the sound of the surf.
“Go ahead, shoot. Just let me get our feast prepared. Here we go: sliced brisket or honey glazed ham. Make yourself a sandwich on that sourdough if you like, and here’s your choice of mayonnaise or brown mustard. Dill pickles my mother put up last summer. Cold iced tea. And potato salad that I made myself, the way Mama taught me.”
“You are a man of diverse talents, Mr. Miller.” She took two slices of the loaf and spread mayo on them. “So—have you always been so adept with technical things? You realize this is coming from someone who can’t tell a wrench from a potato peeler and has never been very good with either.”
“Growing up in a military family, I about couldn’t help it. My dad was an army engineer. He could fix anything with gears, levers, switches, or wires—or make it if it didn’t already exist. Sort of MacGyver with medals. I learned a lot from him, because you didn’t want to not measure up to a guy like that.”
“You said you grew up in Texas?”
“Yes, in every corner of it from El Paso to the Red River. But then I joined the Air Force myself, stationed in San Antonio and San Angelo. Of course, freelance work takes me all over the West now. This trip to Colorado—I’ll be working for a rancher who has a huge spread near Gunnison with exotic game. Guys like that put together high-dollar packages for hunters and tourists. It ought to be something.”
“Mmm,” Dee said, taking another bite of the sandwich. “How’d you get into it?”
“Photography? That’s what I did in the military. Digital imaging. Everything from technical documentation to infrared photography.”
“Sounds like espionage!”
“Nah, other departments handled the cloak-and-dagger stuff. I just had the knack for taking accurate pictures. I did a lot of aerial work and night photography—things that come in handy when you want to shoot nature and wildlife, too. When I got out of the service it was just a natural step to commercial photography. And from there to fine art, like I’m getting into now.”
“Sort of the way my journalism assignments prepared me for creative writing,” she said, contemplating that. “I’d like to think that if you can capture any scene or character with precision, you can turn that talent into something more—lasting and influential, I guess. Something that people want to hold on to.”
“That’s a good way to put it.”
They finished their lunch, threw Chester the last scrap of brisket, and went for a walk along the rim. At midday the sun cast no interesting shadows, and the colors of the hills were flat and wan, but against the dramatic sky the windmills appeared majestic, Dee thought. She held out her arms and let the breeze move against them, feeling with fuller appreciation the invisible force that lifted airplanes, moved sails, and, here on the dusty plains of West Texas, brought light and cool and warmth to the miniscule humans living and working this very moment in communities out there, too far away for her to see.
Max came and stood beside her, anchoring his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans. “Storm’s coming. Can you feel it?”
“My daddy used to say he could smell rain twenty-four hours ahead of time. I never had that knack.”
“I suppose we’d better get back. It’s a long drive to Gunnison— isn’t it, Chester?”
She let her arms drop to her side but could still feel the power of the wind against her face. Max reached over to rest an arm on her shoulders.
“I have to let you out of my heart, Max Miller,” she said, not looking into his eyes, “but I promise, I won’t let you out of my mind. When I come back next time I’ll genuinely look forward to it—with a better appreciation for the place. I could almost say I love it. You made that happen.”
“So it’s hasta luego and not adios,” he said. “I could almost say . . . but I won’t.”