Storylines

Where do storylines, story ideas, come from.

So was driving for a few hours the other day and, as the mind does, the thoughts wandered. Driving through the forests and townships which in early 2009 were devastated by a horrific bushfire/wildfire.

It is not clump of trees, or a mountain, burnt out. It is half an hour of driving at a 100 kilometres an hour, through blackened twisted skeleton forests.

The mountainsides are extraordinary - because you can see them. Because the forests which once covered them have been scorched free of the leaves and small branches on the trees.

The trees become so many silent blackened stooped sentinels standing naked on the mountainsides. Old men broken by the flames.

Which, after the usual thoughts on Nature and mortality (as regrettably more than a handful of people died in the fires), turned to storylines. Everything is grist for the writing mill.

Where could this be? What had happened here? The twisted disfigured trees? The mountainsides of crazed cracked rock due to the fire's intensity. The sheer enormity of the devastation, and this was just what I could see  as I drove along from the road.

Mordor.

Tolkien's mythical land of evil in "Lord of the Rings".

This is the land of Mordor a year after the fall of Mordor. The landscape devastated. The very ground, after centuries under the black clouds of Mordor, broken, the trees shattered and blackened.

Some trees, with the freeing of the black cloud of Mordor, are abruptly suddenly headily crazily budding. Tiny shoots, tendrils, and leaves sprouting up and down the main trunk and branches of some trees. Their reaction to stress. They look green and furry.

Other trees, and there are whole glades and hillsides of them, will never recover. They are stripped bare of all greenery, charcoal black bites dot their trunks and dismembered limbs where the fire fed.

Many trees have fallen, or stand drunkenly propped up by a more solid and less weakened neighbour. There is no consistency to the devastation. The fire in its speed and ferocity sometimes racing ahead of its own anarchistic intentions and missing a tree or clumps of trees. They stand as lonely reminders of what once was.

The rule of Sauron, sovereignty of Mordor is no more. Finally vanquished and consigned to history it is the earth, the trees, which still show the horror of the place; the toxic effect of Mordor on the world.

End#

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