Deep Mapping Little Towns through Fiction

In a society of virtual realities, alternative facts, simulacra, Fox News, and video war, maps seemingly promise to pin down something we can rely on. As Geoff King points out in his book Mapping Reality, "To be included on the map is to be granted the status of reality. To be left off is to be denied."¹ That metaphor is reflected in our colloquial use of "on the map" and "off the map" to designate that which is real and important and that which has ceased to be of interest and fallen into the void. If you know the history of maps, however, you know that maps cannot guarantee the status of reality. Remember those maps of a flat earth with areas marked "Here be dragons"? The maps Columbus used in seeking India, and his colossal mistake that persists even today in labeling the indigenous people "Indians"?

Perhaps no part of the United States is more unimagined by its map than the Great Plains. On the map, the prairie states all look pretty much alike—a large, flat, empty area with no mountains, no great lakes, no forests, no coastline. We mainly see a scattering of small towns and interstate highways to enable the traveler to get across this space as quickly as possible. The map itself is a cartographic "flyover" zone.

Cartographers are chasing an ever-changing reality about which they make choices, estimates, and even guesses. We might say that maps are a genre of fiction, an artist's representation of reality. The converse may also be true: the novels we call fiction may also be very good maps, and equally real. Three of the most frequently visited small towns in the Great Plains are not literally "on the map," but thousands of readers could show you exactly where they are. These towns are Holt, Colorado; Pluto, North Dakota; and Manawaka, Manitoba. These fictional towns fill in the empty spaces with the back story of who lives there and what it means to be from that place. In deep mapping these small communities, the authors draw for us not only the geography of place but also weave the tapestry of local culture and history, our keys to understanding the complexities of regional identity.

Holt, Colorado, is the invention of Kent Haruf, who has made it famous in such bestselling novels as Plainsong, Eventide, Benediction, and Our Souls at Night, published between 1999 and 2015. Holt is on the eastern edge of northern Colorado on Highway 34 where it intersects Main Street right near the Gas and Go station. The town is about two hours or so from Fort Collins or Denver. They grow corn and wheat in the fields near Holt, and a little farther out of town it is mainly ranching, the pastures covered in sagebrush, soapweed, blue grama, and buffalo grass. On the west side of Holt the streets are gravel and the frame houses date from 1904. On the south end of Main is Memorial Hospital. Date Street runs past the grade school and its practice field, and Cedar Street goes past the Methodist Church, and then Birch Street where the Community Church is, and then over to Ash where the Presbyterian and Catholic churches are, and onto Main again with its failing hardware store. Shattuck's Café and the Chute Bar and Grill take care of the local cuisine. Holt is not a flourishing town, and we learn why many people leave for Denver and why the hardware store is going under.

Few fictional towns have been drawn in such detail or peopled with so many characters whom we meet from book to book since William Faulkner created Mississippi's Yoknapatawpha County in novels from 1929 to 1959. Around the globe Faulkner's county seat of Jefferson and the family trees of the Comp-sons and Snopes may be the best-known things about Mississippi other than the names of martyrs like Emmett Till, James Meredith, and Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, who were all...