The World More Full of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema

The town is ringed with farms, and forests, and
lazy back roads.
    Okay, now Henderson.
    Henderson is a small town in southwestern British
Columbia, a farm-town nestled in a crook of a river about
an hour and a half outside of Vancouver. A couple of days
each year the air is so heavy with the smell of fertilizer
from the fields that you almost taste the cow shit. Coming
into town, you cross a bridge over the river, and you drive
down either the front street or the back street. There’s one
high school, and in the mid-’80s a close group of friends
won the Provincial basketball championships against all
odds. There’s a library, and a couple of coffee-shops, and
down the road a piece is another little town, on the shores
of a large, mysterious lake. Every year in Henderson, there’s
the Harvest Festival (third weekend in September), and the
Harvest King is crowned. The town is ringed with farms,
and forests, and lazy back roads. Oh, and it has a movie
theatre.
    See? Completely and utterly different. (Note the movie
theatre.)
    I’m
not
being
facetious.
Or
coy.
Agassiz
is
not
Henderson.
    The trick, even to my mind, is to balance the “is not”
with the fact that, at some levels, it “is.”
    With so many of my formative years spent in that
small spot on the map, Agassiz is a wealth of memories
and experiences. It’s a veritable mine-field of resonance.
Walking down the highway from the house where I grew
up to my grandmother’s house alone layers memory upon
memory, some pleasant, some not so much. The smell of
the dust on that road in high summer is almost crippling
in the sheer amount of resonance it carries. That half mile
stretch alone has enough in it for a book. Or two. The
dusty air is thick with ghosts. And everywhere I turn in
Agassiz, there’s more, and more, and more. The past (Pang’s
restaurant, for example, where I lived every weekend for
several years, drinking coffee and eating wonton soup
and writing, always writing, while my girlfriend waited
tables) jockeys for position with the present reality (that
building burned down, for example, about a year ago). It’s
an absolute wealth of raw material, of emotion and memory
and questions. . . .
    To the point where I can’t write about Agassiz. I simply
can’t.
    And yet, I do. But I don’t. (Are you starting to see how
this works, in my head? Welcome to my head, by the way —
it’s a bit of a scary place.)
    Writers have their places, locales and sites that inspire
them, that give them homes and give them stories. James
Joyce had Dublin, and he was unrepentant about it. On
Bloomsday every year (which is, as I’m writing this, today,
as a matter of fact), devotees gather to follow the steps of
Leopold Bloom through Dublin and through Ulysses . An
entire industry has grown up around a single book and its
fidelity to its sense of place (which is even more impressive,
considering the novel was written in Switzerland, not
Ireland, but I digress . . .). To a much lesser degree (because
hey, we are talking Joyce here), I have Victoria. Walking
tours could, conceivably, be led from location to location:
Hillside Mall, Royal Jubilee, John’s Place, the cliffs off
Dallas Road, Pagliacci’s. Okay, it’s a much less interesting
tour that Joyce’s Dublin, but it could be done (and I suspect
that, hard though it may be to believe, there may actually
be more drinking involved in my tour than any Bloomsday
ramble).
    But I also have Agassiz. There are stories to tell, not of
the town itself, but of some of the ideas around the town,
some of the resonances. For better or worse, it inspires me,
in ways that are at once inextricably linked to the physical
place and simultaneously completely unrelated.
    I’m not alone in this. Look at William Faulkner. He
referred to Yoknapatawpha County as his “apocryphal
county,” based loosely on Lafayette County where he
lived. Similarly, Manawaka,