Morquesla

Perhaps 5 people on this earth know about this, until now.

There was a place in Alaska, when I was growing up called, The Bridge to Nowhere. It was one of the many spots where I’d escape the goings on of everyday happenings and disappear to Mineral Creek where the bridge loomed across the water to end at an incomplete housing development that butted up against the mountain. It was literally the end of the road in Valdez. If you took the highway 900 miles from the top of Canada, past Fairbanks down the inland to Anchorage and split across the Matsu Valley and over the passes to Valdez – that very road ended on the opposite side of The Bridge to Nowhere. The last piece of civilized development before the town became a mountain range and then the sea.

Like all of my favorite hideouts, it was easy to get to and once I was there, it was difficult for anyone to find me. In Alaska, I had to want to be found for anyone to actually know where I was hiding, and that suited me just perfectly.

The first two years that I was in Valdez, I’d often race to The Bridge to Nowhere and climb beneath the concrete where I’d wander along the river gathering beautiful pieces of driftwood and dragging them back to my hideout where I’d build a fire and write. In the early or late summer months, the sun would set late into the night and I’d have hours to write and draw and act out my stories.

In those days when I’d wear my cloak, build bonfires and dance along the water feeling like some sort of fae adventurer, I wrote story after story, song after song and poetry until my notebooks only had room on the inside covers. It was the edge of the town, the last piece of civilization, The Bridge to Nowhere – beyond the bridge anything I could imagine was absolutely possible.

In the spring, the glacial runoff made the river a raging churning force of nature, by late summer we were charging the lessened rapids with four wheelers and bikes or rafting down Mineral Creek to reach the bay. While the autumn months it was more of an actual creek and in the winter, a creeping stream laden with ice. All year the river brought cottonwood drift logs from upstream, and most of the fall, spring and summer I was gathering those logs to burn and dance around.

It was easy to live in the frame of mind that dragons were real, when the tops of the mountains were so jagged and peaked with snow that a child’s imagination could conjure ice caves where the dragon races of the world had found sanctuary in Alaska.

It was easy to imagine the forests full of fairies and that they were governed by the king and queen that lived in a fortress at the edge of the water, where sea creatures swam to the front gates or drank glacier water from the delta of Mineral Creek. All of this I could see from my spot under the bridge – that didn’t in fact lead to nowhere – but to the world on the other side of the city that existed just outside the line of site for everyone who lived in my tiny town.

The Bridge to Nowhere led not to the bottom of the mountain, but to my world that I called, Morquesla.

When I was 15 I designed a world that I lived in when I wasn’t required to be anywhere else. Well, most of the time I kept things separated – but not always.

As Morquesla became more real, more vivid, I renamed myself as a character and began writing the story of my fictional adventure through this land of mythology. As this character, I was able to travel on a sort of “press pass” to my created world and I was accepted as a member of the imaginary kingdom as a kind of “documentarian” which was somehow less offensive to them than the term “journalist”.

When I was 16 I filled four journals with the details of my world; geography, languages, history, politics, characters, social customs, ideas and even the poetry of certain cultures.

At 17 I debuted my first stories in a creative writing class to much support and cheering from my classmates and the immediate and brutal attack of a guest speaker who was visiting the classroom to hear the debut of our stories. I remember clearly, that we were sitting with our desks in a circle. The guest speaker had been arranged by our teacher who found this guy at the local newspaper (which by the way, he was the photographer, writer, editor and publisher because the town was so small). Anyway, he went through each of our stories and shredded them all, “too much imagination” “too many colors” “too distracting” etc.

I was stressing out as he tore other kids apart, telling them that in this creative writing class, they should stick to the facts.

Then he got to me. And he didn’t hold anything back, he totally let me have it. He hated my metaphors, my language, my use of descriptive, the dialogue and the fact that my world had more than one moon.

And none of it even bothered me. He tore and ripped and judged and complained and all I could think was, “What happened to this reporter? When did he lose hid child eyes? Please god! Don’t ever let me forget how to see! Don’t ever let me be as hollow as him!”

When he was done and left the classroom in a heap of kids with bruised egos and dented imaginations, a couple of them had even been crying – we had time for someone to read for 15 more minutes. To my utter surprise and delight, my classmates and teacher asked if I had anything else to read so the class could have a story before the bell.

And so I pulled out my folder and picked another story and read to my high school creative writing group like kids gathered on the rug at story time.

It was this event that cemented for me that the imagination is a shelter. A place of sanctuary. It is a sacred duty to honor the imagination and to free the soul for flight from time to time. I lived in Morquesla ever day when I wrote about it – but I had never been able to give it to someone before – and when I did give it. People didn’t run away from it, maybe they even needed it and I found in that giving a kind of belonging. Like I had a place in this world.

I resolved not to fight the urge to write anymore, because sometimes I felt unworthy. I resolved not to put pressure on myself that I liked to live in a wholly fictional world sometimes or that I liked to press flowers into my way of speaking or thinking. I decided not to be down on myself because I was clearly not going to be the girl who grew up to create the proof for a great math problem or design the spaceship that discovers interstellar travel. I made peace with the fact that I was probably only going to be a writer and an actress and that would be a good enough contribution for this lifetime.

Morquesla was my beginning.

In later years I tried multiple times to wrap up that story, to close Morquesla with a final chapter, but I could never do it. Nor could I actually, send anything I wrote to a publisher. I’d written perhaps 1500 pages of story and had two giant Rubbermaid bins full of notebooks, failed chapters, sketches, and world building – but for some reason, this world was one I couldn’t publish.

I shared the stories with friends and family, but never submitted anything. Instead I still lug around those storage bins and tell myself I’m just carrying Morquesla with me when I move so I can stay close to her – since The Bridge to Nowhere is 3000 miles away now.

Meme knew my fictional name. She read most of the stories and saw the drawings. But very few others actually knew where I disappeared to when I was staring out the window during history. Few other knew that as I was gallivanting around Valdez with a sword and a cloak, I was re-enacting scenes I’d written. Obviously in later years, Morquesla expanded to include all my favorite adventure locations of my hometown, but it all began with The Bridge to Nowhere, that lead me to my bliss as a writer.

So it is with this coming out of the closet, so to speak, that I decided to break into those Rubbermaid tubs and resurrect the first world I created. I’ve decided to pull out the notebooks and see if I can still pronounce the languages and recite the histories. I might even brave looking at those high school sketches from 15 years ago. Maybe.

I’m going to spend the next while re-discovering the escapism of my childhood that I haven’t actually looked at or read in over a decade. I’m nervous and excited. Worried and giddy. It feels like making plans to fly across country and visit an old friend.

I’m certain that most of the writing will make me cringe, but I can’t wait to see through those eyes again. Just for a minute.

Because what I’m really hoping – is that it will remind me how to see without boundaries of what is possible.

I’ve lost my way in my current writing. I’ve wandered off the path and my imagination is seeing things an adult would see, expecting things a woman who works in an office would expect. I’m speaking in my writing like I speak at work – formal, without passion or fluidity.

I am hoping Morquesla will re-open my fiction eyes and help me remember what it’s like to live in one world and write for the other. I know it’s kind of a desperate measure – but you know, desperate times and all.

So now you know. Aria was not my first world. Nor was Linhelm. And I’m a little worried about dropping back in on my first world – because it’s entirely possible that once I’m there… I won’t want to come back.

So cross your fingers and stay tuned. The next post will be from the bottom of the Alaskan Richardson Highway at the end of the last town before the water, across The Bridge to Nowhere.

Stay tuned for the next post from Morquesla.