HW Ryan discussed his first novel, The Incident at Terlingua, in a recent interview with journalist Warren Vieth. The discussion focused on Ryan’s reasons for writing the book, its semi-autobiographical elements, and the inspiration for his two central characters: Jake Plumb, the engineer-turned-drifter who is haunted by the collapse of a bridge he helped build, and Charles Chavez, the small-town sheriff who is struggling to keep dyslexia from derailing his career. The interview was lightly edited for the sake of length and clarity.
Q: Hugh, you’ve been around for a while. What motivated you to write a book at this point in your life?
A: I've written little things throughout my life, going back to when I was 9 years old. After I retired, my wife and I moved to Houston. I gave up a lot of activities I'd been doing. And I started to kind of wind down. That is a common experience for individuals who retire after an active work life. To feel better, I ended up taking a writing course in Galveston.
One weekend, I took a trip to the Big Bend region, including a town called Terlingua, which is right on the Texas-Mexico border. I hung around there for the weekend, and an idea for a short story occurred to me.
On returning, I wrote the short story featuring the character Jake Plumb. It ended differently for the character than it did in the book. He ended up committing suicide.
I had the opportunity to read the story in the writing class and reacted positively. So, I thought about working with the character in a book. I wrote a couple of preliminary chapters. I felt Jake had the potential to do more.
I returned to Terlingua. By chance, I had breakfast in a bar, and there were two law officers sitting and having breakfast. It occurred to me I could build a story with two characters: one a law officer and the second being Jake. It would give me the opportunity to see how their relationship developed as they interacted.
So the character of Chavez came out of the morning breakfast. I brought Chavez in, and his backstory became clear to me as he took shape. I needed something to drive them forward as a team, and the notion of a deadly pathogen occurred to me. From there, I just kept writing.
It became important to me to keep going. My career in systems development taught me to think of a new system first in terms of the shape of the development. That was called the system's architecture. It seemed as if I wrote the early chapters; I was defining the architecture of the story.
The book reminded me of some of the great character combinations in literature, like Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call in Lonesome Dove. They seemed to occupy opposite ends of the personality spectrum, but they complemented each other nicely. They used each other's strengths and compensated for each other's weaknesses.
That is a good description of Jake and Chavez’s relationship. I classify my book as a thriller, but the true core of the story emerged for me when Jake and Chavez realized that, by working together, they were better individuals than they had believed themselves to be.
That was really why I was writing this story. It was to see people who were in a certain way beaten pretty badly, to rebuild themselves by depending on each other. That theme fascinated me, I think in part because that was kind of the way my life had gone.
Jake is pretty badly busted when he turns up. Somehow Chavez realizes, “He's got stuff I don't have.” Then Jake realizes, “He's got stuff I don't have.” The two of them working together made a strong team.
The theme of growing through difficult times by learning to depend on others fascinates me. I'm writing a second book now. I've got three damaged people I'm trying to pull through it. But each of them has a strength, and they’re evolving towards a strong team.
Is it fair to say that Terlingua is semi-autobiographical?
Yes, not so much on facts as on the theme of recovery through life’s experiences.
I had a fairly difficult upbringing. From my point of view, my parents abandoned me for about three years.
At a certain point, around my sophomore year, I made decisions that proved critical for my future; they didn't always make sense. But in retrospect, they were the right decisions. It was a series of non-decisions decisions that went the right way. As part of the process, an older fellow took me under his wing and provided guidance and patience with my career issues. As time went by, I slowly began to kind of collect the pieces. It took a long, long time — decades — but by working with people I came to trust, I gradually came to understand my strengths and weaknesses. This took decades and, honestly, I’m still working on it.
Progress came from being able to say, “I got that right. Not sure how it happened, but I did,” and sometimes, “I got that wrong,” and reacting to correct the situation. A big part of the effort was learning to work with and depend on others. You can see that theme in the book.
I assume that Jake is the character that embodies…
There is me in him.
What about the “demon vulture” that chases Jake from place to place? Has there been a vulture trailing you at times?
Yeah. I had vultures chasing me occasionally. My wife noticed I was always looking over my shoulder for risks. Once again, a good trait in developing systems, but one that leads to a lot of self-doubt. After we’d been married quite a while, Carolyn said, "I’ve realized that you're afraid of everything, aren’t you?" And I said, "Well…” And she said, “You know, it's surprising, with all the worries and fears, you still got up each morning and went to work.”
I’m told I am a high-functioning depressive. My depression drove me to go out and do things. I was fortunate. I know many people with depression find it very difficult to function.
When that vulture's just behind you, you keep running pretty fast, or he's gonna catch you. And I couldn't allow that because I had family, and I was there to support them. So that drove me to keep working.
Your book is set in a desolate area of southwest Texas, close to the Mexican border. It has a strong sense of place. Was that informed by your childhood in West Texas? Have you always been drawn to that kind of landscape?
If you drive out there and you haven't lived there, you might ask yourself, why would anybody be in this godforsaken place? But if you grew up there, it just seems right.
The people there are settled in. This is where they are and what they have. My experience is that they're friendly. I once had a flat tire while riding a motorcycle on a road into Silverton, New Mexico. It was the middle of the desert, with the town 50 miles ahead. A fellow in a pickup stopped and said, “We’ll put it in the pickup and get you to town." The man literally picked up a motorcycle and put it in the back of his pickup. Folks out there realize it is a country where people can get hurt pretty easily, and they attempt to help those in need.
I like the austere country. I just like the way it looks. And I like the people who live there.
We talked about Jake and Chavez and their relationship. What about Indie Manx, the physician’s assistant who keeps a close eye on Chavez, and Kelly Clark, the waitress who befriends Jake? They seem to be unusually strong and resourceful women. What inspired you to kind of create characters like those?
My wife. I look at her and what she put up with because of my work for 35 years. I couldn't have had the life I've had without her being who she was. She understood what was driving me and realized it was causing shortfalls in me as a husband and father. And she adapted to make things work. For example, she would plan weekends so we could be together as a family doing things.
I think wives play a huge role. If your wife is willing to tolerate what you must do to be comfortable, that helps a lot. If they're not, then there’s going to be trouble. In the 35 years I was on the road, my wife only called me twice with problems, and those were resolved over the phone. Otherwise, she took care of everything for 35 years. What she put up with, very few women would have tolerated. She was amazing.
One of my favorite scenes is when Chavez asks Jake why he spent the last few years drifting. Jake responds by describing the difference between being “here” and wanting to be “over yonder.” He says to Chavez, “You know what happens to over yonder every time? Over yonder becomes here. Every. Damn. Time. It goes bitter, spoiled, and you drift again to another over yonder.”
In those 35 years on the road, there were almost always two to five cities a week. So over yonder always meant the next place. But it would have its problems and worries. It was the break between the places, the sense of motion that gave some respite, if usually only for hours. And yet the next place seemed golden in departing and in transit. The “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” thing. I know that makes no sense, but it was always magic to hear in your mind, “Some traveling music, maestro.” And for a while, the move to the next place was magic.
I'm retired now. Now I travel in my writing. So it's kind of a continuation without all the airplanes.
Let's talk about the Brew, the deadly pathogen that turns people into dust in a matter of minutes. I initially thought it made a great plot element, but certainly couldn't happen in the real world. Then I read the book Biological Warfare by Annie Jacobson. She described a scenario involving a genetically modified plague bacteria, based on an actual program that the Soviets conducted during the Cold War. And I thought, maybe this is not as far-fetched as I thought.
The Brew is totally made up. I gave it the features I needed to make the story progress. Whether something could actually turn you to dust in minutes, I don't know. But I don't think there's any question that pathogens could make things very difficult for many people.
I read recently that the uranium that's used in atomic bombs is a gas. If you put it in the back of a tank truck and drive through downtown New York, it would begin killing people almost immediately. It could be the poor man’s atom bomb if they wanted to do it. So I guess there are potential “Brews” out there.
I had some initial difficulty with one character, Laura Mitchell, the Navy fighter pilot who decided to dust Terlingua with the Brew. On the one hand, she was very altruistic. She devised a plan called Project 80 in which the entire world would benefit from lower and more stable energy costs. Yet the plan called for the extermination of Terlingua to set the stage for Project 80’s adoption. In your mind, was Laura a good person? Is a certain amount of collateral damage justified if it accomplishes a greater good?
What I was really trying to point out with Laura’s character is the prevalence of PTSD among military personnel. I think of her as a good person. However, she is so troubled by what she has seen of what “collateral damage” means. She fears she has done such damage and is trying to help those who might have been harmed.
Think about it. We have been at war for years now. I was a teenager when Vietnam was going on, and it's never really stopped since.
I remember the way we treated those men and women when they came back. They were doing what the country said needed to be done. They should have been honored for that, and instead we ripped them up.
I was trying to get the point across that those people have done so much for us. And some things they have done or experienced haunt them as they walk the streets. I have a deep, deep sympathy for what we've asked those men and women to do and for the damage some of them absorbed.
In a sense, Laura’s character ties into the theme of damaged people and suggests that this happens when we can't help them.
You're working your next book. Is there anything you want to say about the plot, or would you rather keep it under wraps?
It’s another thriller. It involves a plot that ultimately ends up in Taiwan.
Do Jake and Chavez make return appearances?
Chavez and Jake come back.