Mon 31 Aug, 2009
The Frontier Planner in Modern Fiction
Comments (1) Filed under: General, Planning, Planning and Zoning Fiction, Rural, ZoningTags: Alaska, Frontier Planner, Stories, Tom Bodett
Apparently we should designate August as the “Planners in Literature Month” here at the Building Place Notebook.
It is true that the dog days of summer are a great time to enjoy a quiet evening with a little light reading. We have a great “light” book to recommend today as part of the Building Place “planning fiction” series of short stories or vignettes.
Today’s posting is an excerpt from the Tom Bodett book, The End of the Road – a collection of light-hearted short stories about the people of the town of “End of the Road, Alaska.” This book is a rarety in that it includes a couple of stories involving a professional land use planner (Mr. Emmitt Frank) as a major character.
A summary of The End of the Road from the back cover:
It’s a small Alaska town where people leave their pretensions back where they came from, and urban planners push more snow than pencils. Where New Age missionaries make appearances at the bowling alley, and the police chief weeps over the plight of Bambi. And where the Mayor stays in office mostly because folks don’t want the bother of trainin’ up a new one….
Excerpt from The End of the Road, by Tom Bodett
The Expert
EMMITT Frank’s first impulse upon entering the Great Land was to start counting things. A professional planner’s tendency, I suppose. Before you can start organizing, you have to know what’s there to work with. He’d driven all through Canada without counting anything. He’d used his idle hours between driving sprees to study the background on his new home.
Emmitt cared little for history or custom. He was after the hard facts. Alaska: area, 586,412 square miles. More than twice the size of Texas. Population 450,000 in the last census. Highest elevation: Mt. McKinley, 20,320 feet. Lowest point: sea level. State Motto: North to the Future. The suitability of this motto was not lost even on Emmitt, whose right brain had ceased function and atrophied years ago.
Within days of losing his wife and job of twenty years, Emmitt Frank had applied for and been accepted as the new city manager of an obscure little Alaskan community curiously called “the End of the Road.” It was more than a new leaf for Emmitt. It was a challenge. Not just a challenge to his professional integrity, but to his broken manhood as well. He, Emmitt Frank, the most diligent and appreciative bureaucrat in the Association of American Municipal Planning Assistants, was coming to the Last Frontier to tame the wilderness, or at least classify it.
There would be zoning studies galore. He could see that at a glance. The map he had would go on sometimes for hundreds of miles without indicating a district boundary, residential, industrial, military, or recreational-utility zone. His mouth watered at the opportunities that lay ahead. The opportunity to organize and signify these 450,000 naive and shiftless residents, who probably didn’t even know what they were sitting on.
He would start with his charges at the End of the Road, but until then, there were things to count.
He counted moose to start with, but that got boring, so he made two moose categories. Moose beside the road and moose in the road. He soon became impatient with that as well, and formed cow moose beside the road and in the road, bull moose beside the road and in the road, and little moose in general.
Emmitt was a thorough and efficient counter capable of handling a lot of data, and he soon began counting mountain peaks, rivers, tributaries, glaciers, rabbits, and road graders.
It was a peculiar mind at work here. A mind that could look at moose after moose after moose after caribou, mountain after valley after glacier, and not once did a sense of reverence, revelation, or beauty enter his head. The only reaction was, one, two, three, four, and on.
It hadn’t dawned on Emmitt, and it would take some time before it would, that he was a stranger in a strange land. That perhaps a lot of what he knew was wrong, and that maybe there was more to be listened to here than told or counted.
There is much more to this “fish-out-of-water” story. Visit the author’s website or Amazon.com to read the rest for yourself!
Booksonfiction says:
great, thanks – I love fiction books.