A History Of Wild Places

“The past sputters through me, images reflected against my corneas, revealing the strained, awful looks carved into the faces of those who’ve gone missing. Who’ve vanished and never returned home. I see them in a sort of slideshow staccato, like the old black-and-white nickel films. It’s a terrible talent to hold an object and see the likeness of the person it once belonged to, their final moments shivering and jerking through me as if I were right there. Witnessing the grim, monstrous ends of a person’s life. But such things—such abilities—can’t be given back.”

Ernshaw characterizes Travis Wren by representing his ability to see the pasts of those associated with objects he touches. Travis’s ability foreshadows themes of memory and identity that recur throughout the novel. The simile of old films and the alliteration of “slideshow staccato” are literary devices that emphasize the ability’s impact on Travis.

“Perhaps we are like two old people who have lived together too long, a lifetime, a hundred years or more. The cobwebs of tiny mistruths, little papercut deceptions, rooted in our joints and slung between rib bones. We’ve built ourselves on these microscopic lies, so small we can’t recall what they were. But they’re all the same, binding us to one another. But also ripping us apart.”

Ernshaw’s description of tiny deceits implies that it is a collection of small lies, rather than large ones, that do the most damage over time. The imagery is primarily tactile, with the idea of cobwebs and papercuts located deeply within the body. Ernshaw thus emphasizes the theme of the Insidious Nature of Deceit.

“If you turn north, the road takes you into the heart of Pastoral, dead-ending at a small parking area where two dozen cars sit rusted and pillaged, weeds growing up around their flattened tires, some with hoods propped up, their parts stripped clean, others are missing doors. Even an old school bus sits on its rims: the same bus that the founders drove into these woods and never drove back out. It’s a cemetery of bent metal and steering wheels and spark plugs long corroded. Mementoes of old lives.”

Ernshaw provides vivid imagery of the run-down vehicles using a complex, run-on sentence. The syntax reflects the jumbled items present in the scene. Ernshaw also uses metaphor and polysyndeton—multiple coordinating conjunctions—in the final two sentences to emphasize the long, implicit history of the parking lot.