Behind the Book: The Trackers

The Trackers began about ten years ago. End of summer, I was sort of on vacation in an Appalachian mountain town with a main street post office complete with a New Deal mural of Daniel Boone leading a wagon train westward. I spent several afternoons in a walking-distance library pulling armloads of books from shelves and reading about the public art programs that spread similar murals coast to coast during the Great Depression. I took many pages of notes in a notebook I promptly lost.

What stuck in my head from those library days was a black-and-white photograph of a PO mural in progress, taken in the late 1930s. My phone at the time didn’t have a camera, so I had to rely on memory.

For years the image in my mind was two youngish men in work clothes standing on a scaffold made from two ladders and boards. I remembered the mural behind them on the wall as barely begun, a faint pencil sketch of Western landscape—grassy plains and distant rocky mountains, horses, cowboys, Indigenous Americans, a great deal of sky. Standing down on the floor, a man and woman in much dressier clothes looked up at the artists. I focused on the expressions, wondered about the possible relationships among those four figures occupying a particular instant of time and place—the Great Depression and the American West.

The photograph felt like an implied narrative, a hidden story.

I set that kernel of an idea aside and wrote another book, but I thought about the image off and on for years. It conjured memories of my own time spent out West on family road trips as a kid, and later when my wife and I lived in Colorado for the better part of the eighties. It reminded me, too, of the stories I’d heard from my parents and grandparents about how profoundly the Great Depression had affected them, the sense of hope that New Deal programs had inspired.

Nearly five years later, I started researching and thinking about a shape for the narrative. Reading about the turmoil of the 1930s—the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the rise of fascism in Europe—I sensed many ominous echoes of that era in our current time.

From the start, I wanted this book to focus on personal entanglements and a sense of movement, maybe even a road trip or two, so I read Euripides just to watch the way he jumps into a narrative with both feet and then starts running. I also read the surviving fragments of a Sophocles satyr play in which Apollo—sometimes given the epithet “Long Shooter” due to his skill as an archer—has lost something valuable to him and promises great rewards to a bumbling squad of satyrs if they’ll help him recover it. The title of that play is Ichneutae. The Trackers. 

Once I started writing, I went down many dead-end roads, inventing and scrapping and reinventing characters and narrative, reshaping that old photograph.

The two men on the scaffold got whittled down to one—Val, a young muralist with a New Deal assignment. The older man in the suit became Long, a wealthy cattle rancher and former WWI sniper. Early on, an elder cowboy named Faro who’d lived through the violent days of the Wild West appeared. The woman in the photograph became the central character, Eve, who has gone from riding the rails as a homeless teenager to singing in a Western Swing band to marrying Long.

The entanglements among these four grew and tightened, and soon Eve propelled the story outward from Wyoming, pulling Val away from his mural to embark on a series of road and airplane trips to Seattle and Central Florida and San Francisco.

A couple of years ago—nearly eight years since I had first seen it in that library—I wanted to see the photograph of the PO mural again, and I finally found it online. It turned out that I’d been misremembering it all along, reimagining it from the start.

— CHARLES FRAZIER