By Rob Scott, author of 15 Miles.
Three years ago, I spent time in Richmond, researching the ghosts and legends of the famous Jefferson Hotel. I’d been toying with the idea of using the hotel in the next instalment of the Eldarn Sequence and had a few dozen pages of notes and scribbles I hoped to turn into an opening chapter. My wife and kids had left our home in Northern Virginia with plans to meet my sister’s family at Lake Anna, a popular spot with DC suburbanites because the water is conveniently warmed by a nearby nuclear power plant (nope, not joking).
Since Lake Anna is about halfway between my house and the Jefferson Hotel, and since I had nearly torn a rotator cuff patting myself on the back for my groovy idea to feature the Jefferson in an epic fantasy novel, I decided to meet my family at the lake using only back roads (I-95 can be such a bore) and my Swiss-engineered inner compass.
15 Miles by Rob Scott
Right: stupid choice.
I don’t have an inner compass, never mind one from Switzerland. I would have settled for a plastic compass from Wal-Mart or a GPS, but my wife and I keep our satellite navigation system in her mini van. This is because we wouldn’t want anyone to get lost between our home and the kids’ elementary school two miles away.
Fifteen miles outside Richmond – I think I was in Goochland County; I still don’t know for certain – something was wrong. With nothing... let’s say that again, because that part is critical to this story... nothing but soybean and tobacco fields, an abandoned Calvary Baptist Church, and scraggly hardwood forests as far as I could see in any direction, the prospect of ever reaching Lake Anna became strikingly uncertain. But I didn’t cry for my mother, not yet anyway.
Behind every wrinkle in the landscape, I imagined a platoon of ragged Confederate soldiers, each of them hopelessly lost and well over a hundred and seventy years old. I’d load them all into the back of my Chrysler and together we’d chew tobacco and stare in confusion at a map of the stark, unabridged nothingness north and west of their Confederate capital. It would break my heart to tell them that Richmond now sported a Starbucks on every corner and a Victoria’s Secret in every mall – both worth fighting for, if you ask me.
Twenty minutes later, I ran across my first tarpaper-over-concrete hovel (READ: meth lab) and understood that it would take a bloodhound with an Olympic gold medal to find what was left of me by morning. Now I did cry for my mother, after peeing down my leg in abject fear. (I’d appreciate you not sharing that last bit with friends and family, however.)
Rather than knock on the meth lab’s screen door and ask for directions, I pressed on, and with no cell signal and only a half bottle of Diet Coke, I picked and backtracked my way east until I reached Ashland and the comforting predictability of Interstate 95 with its legions of armed commuters charging north at eighty-five miles an hour. Safe at last!
I eventually arrived at Lake Anna with its glow-in-the-dark water. I kissed my wife, encouraged my children to slather themselves with SPF 2000, and huddled in the back of my sister’s boat, sketching an outline for what would eventually become 15 Miles.
Robert Scott
Virginia, USA
August 2010
