Pocket Books Leave No Trace Interview
with
Hannah Nyala
June 2002
As a professional Search &
Rescue Tracker yourself, how much of Tally Nowata is you?
A lot. But she’s also a complicated amalgam of my adult daughter, Taliesin (who took her name from this character two years ago, and had the change made legally). I’ve been working with Tally Nowata for several years, long enough that I’ve begun to think of her as family. She’s familiar now, but still surprising--which is fun.
While reading the book, a reader can't help but learn very important survival tips and techniques. Do you believe that everyone should know some basic survival skills in case of a "worst case" scenario?
The short answer is “of course,” but the problem is that you can’t simply collect a few skills somewhere along the way and expect them to be of any use to you in a real survival situation. Fortunately, most of us use outdoor survival skills every single day; we just don’t think about it. Some of the same tactics that keep us alive in cities and suburbs and farms are exactly the ones we’d need in the wilderness, so we’re not as far off base as we sometimes think. We just have to learn to think outside the box a bit.
The topic of "surviving" is hot now--your book, the television show...why do you think the public has become so fascinated with "surviving" ?
I think at least part of the reason we’re fascinated with surviving is that we suspect we’re not very good at it. Unfortunately, most of the emphasis we currently see on wilderness survival remains on the technologies: this cute piece of gear, this latest garment, that fancy little trick for getting water from cactus or some such thing. Survival TV shows tend to focus on the sexy aspects of being in the outdoors and either skip over or downplay the blunt basics (which is all you need in the real world). Movies overplay everything and lie about it all. And survival manuals, to which we should be able to turn for good information, often simply repeat myths or make everything so technical a reader would need a year to get literate in the barest fundamentals. As a result, ordinary people are caught in a maelstrom of bad information and lukewarm curiosity. And nobody gets anywhere close to describing the inarticulate: what makes one person survive on no water for three days and another die in eight hours? What makes one woman able to cross a mountain range in a snowstorm wearing only a light sweater and another, clad in the latest Goretex-studded gear, die midway up the first hill?
With Tally Nowata I’m trying to cover not just the technologies of survival, but the basics of it from the inside out: how does a person behave when she’s trying to save her own life? How does that change when she’s trying to save somebody else’s? What are the bare minimums for a person like Tally in different ecological settings? What really matters and what doesn’t when you’re locked into a life and death situation? It’s about the methods and means of survival, yes, but also about getting inside the mind of a survivor.
This is your second book, and the first novel you've published. How different is the writing experience for fiction and nonfiction? Do you find yourself bringing more to the process for fiction?
Writing, for me, is all about telling the truth, and I think I can tell it better in fiction than nonfiction. The latter is tied to real people, their feelings, their hopes, their dreams, their failures: some of it’s pretty and a lot more isn’t. Many authors have no problems splashing both pretty and ugly all over the place, but I do. Every single sentence in a nonfiction piece is potentially hurtful to someone, so it’s a pain in the neck for me to write. I constantly have to calculate whether I can tell all that I understand of what happened without being unnecessarily hurtful to someone else. So that’s one thing.
But in nonfiction there’s also the pressure to draw conclusions, to come up with a right answer, and I’m just pointblank not an answer person. Most of the time I honestly do not know the answer to the questions I’m posing either on paper or in the real world. Perhaps, then, writing is less about telling the truth than it is asking sincere questions and letting honest answers—in all their complicated glory—show up. In fiction, I am free to question truth as I see it without pretense to final conclusions. Almost always I wind up surprised. And for me that is the real joy of writing: I learn things that I never expected to learn.
The little girl, Josie, is quite a feisty and determined young person. Is there some Josie in you? Or is there someone in your life that resembles her?
Josie has traits that I had as a child, and she shares a quirk or two with my daughter, but she isn’t based on either one of us. I don’t consciously create characters based on real people, but I do pay attention to what’s going on around me every day, and my characters often raise questions I have about people’s behaviors and attitudes. Josie is no exception. Her parents, Miriam and Paul O’Malley, bear strong resemblances to women and men I have known personally, and their daughter mirrors some of their choices and negates others. Like life.
How do you do your research?
I am a trained ethnographer and historian and, while I don’t use any of those skills in an academically respectable manner today, I rely on them constantly in my work as a writer. Research for me is instinctive as breathing and never, ever ends. I carry small notebooks and a tape recorder everywhere; I keep pen and paper in my pockets, my car, my backpacks, on the nightstand and under the bed; and I listen and watch for and then note the oddest, dumbest little details you could possibly imagine: a quirky cadence of speech in a regional dialect; how someone turns on a light switch; what a child says in front of a crowd and what s/he mutters when nobody else is around. In addition, I devour stacks of books on natural history, culture, and folklore; I hike and track extensively in areas where I’m setting a story; I sit in local cafes and just listen to people talk; and I always work the problem my character’s facing.
For example, in order to write Tally’s situation in Leave No Trace, I did fieldwork: traipsed out into the desert in mid-summer with limited food and water supplies and stayed there for several days, tracking my own actions and thoughts as my physical condition deteriorated. I did ethnographic and historical research on not just Tally’s family (Potawatomi and Anglo), but the people who help her in the Tanami (white Australians and Warlpiri-speaking Aborigines). I slept sans tent beneath a white gum tree and walked barelegged through hard spinifex at midnight; I watched a wildfire sweep through and a brown snake claim his sector of the ground between us; I dug for grubs and got sick at the stomach trying to eat one.
In short, the best fiction for me is a story picked up from the real world, so I essentially try to get as close to reality as possible…which means I check facts obsessively: does this species grow after wildfires and, if so, how soon? That sort of thing.
Have you been to Australia?
Have you worked there in a search and rescue capacity?
Yes, I have been to Australia twice, most recently last summer, which I
spent hiking and tracking in the Tanami Desert and the MacDonnell Ranges of the
Northern Territory. My practice is to volunteer—in whatever capacity is needed
most—whenever I am near any national park. This I did in Australia last year
(did a spot of work on a trail in the MacDonnells), but I have not yet done SAR
in that country.