Spoiler alert for The Corpse Bloom: there’s a car crash in the book. But don’t worry. You’ll discover it for yourself about a hundred words into the novel. I was getting close to the end of the book’s first draft when I dug in to do what any novelist does to make you believe their fiction is real: research. And though the craggy coast of Maine might afford ample opportunities to stage the kind of sail into the sea I envisioned for my particular scene’s end, I needed the kind of details for it that I won’t reveal. The last thing I want to do is spoil the tale that unfolds after the climactic peek I penned at my story’s start.
Night after night, I searched and clicked, trying different Google prompts for leads before pulling up Google Earth to take a satellite-powered spin around my little part of the planet. But when I finally found a spot that I thought might work, no written description, photo, or digitally-rendered depiction of the place could really verify that it would work for me.
I was hoping for a little company for the road trip to the location I had in mind. But I was skeptical that my wife, Danna, would be up for this one. Maine’s Schoodic Penninsula is a three-and-a-half-hour car ride from our home in Cape Elizabeth. I thought going that far north in February would be a tough sell to the Florida girl I married. But when I proposed the trip to Danna, I’d forgotten that our cabin fever was peaking not only because we were stuck in mid-winter, but mid-pandemic as well. After being cooped up with a husband who handled Covid by diving into his book every evening, the only question she had was “when do we leave?”
An OCD author like me just had to plan every detail of the trip first, so I had a few more emails to send before we got in the car. The Schoodic is known as the “quiet side” of Acadia National Park, so I dug a little deeper into its online profile to get to know it better before finally shooting a few emails to park employees. The right one landed in the inbox of Chris Wiebusch, Acadia’s lead ranger.
I’m continually amazed by the kind of generosity shown by the pros like Chris I reach out to for professional guidance when researching the details critical to making a work of fiction plausible. Chris went way beyond answering my questions about his regular beat. He volunteered to scope out possible locations for my crash scene in his next patrol around the peninsula’s tip. Now that I was ready for my own, I studied the map and shots he sent me to make the most of my drive.
Once we got to the aptly named town of Winter Harbor, Danna took the wheel so I could start taking pictures and making notes on my iPhone of the entire route around the peninsula. I pointed and clicked to record every detail that might help me zero in on the right spot as well as noting the kind of sensory cues that make the best fiction pop on the page.
We took a right at the tip of the penninsula to check out position number seven on Chris’s map, then continued on to the very tip of the Schoodic to get a feel for the place where its point meets the sea. There were only a couple of other cars in the parking lot for the scenic vista we got out to survey. The scene in my story would take place later in the year than February, but the harsh beauty of this isolated strip of land was just what I was looking for to match the emotional frame I was building for my scene.
We got back in the car, and by the time we got to position two on Chris’s map a few minute later, I knew I’d found my story’s pivotal spot. When we got to the top of Blueberry Hill, I had Danna park so I could check out the drop from the peak into the slate gray waters churning below.
You can get a sense of the place from the video below, as well as Danna’s concern for my obsession with my tale’s plausibility. She tapped the horn a few times when she saw me approach the edge of the ledge to make sure I didn’t go overboard in my desire to get the details I needed to make the look and feel of the crash as real as they could be.
The trip up the other side of the penninsula was a lot tamer, but just as valuable. I’d woven in some key scenes in the novel to stage the backstory of my protagonist’s childhood on the family farm farther up the coast. I got out to scope one on the way home. And though its fields were bare and frozen, it helped give me a better sense of the interior of the long finger of land Danna and I circled that day.
Our mid-winter adventure was just what I needed to get my story going again once we got home. I didn’t even think about hitting the snooze on my alarm when it went off early the next morning. I grabbed a cup of coffee, fired up my Mac, and got the place I now had a real feel for down on the page.
BRYAN WIGGINS 