Disclaimer: I do not own Glee or The bridges of Madison County
Quinn Fabray
On the morning of August 8, 1965, Quinn Fabray locked the door to her small two-room apartment on the third door of a rambling house in Bellingham, Washington. She carried a knapsack full of photography equipment and a suitcase down wooden stairs and through a hallway to the back, where her old Chevrolet pickup truck was parked in a space reserved for residents of the building.
Another knapsack, a medium-size ice chest, two tripods, cartons of Camel cigarettes, a Thermos, and a bag of fruit were already inside. In the truck box was a guitar case. Quinn arranged the knapsacks on the seat and put the cooler and tripods on the floor. She climbed into the truck box and wedged the guitar case and suitcase into a corner of the box, bracing them with a spare tire lying on its side and securing both cases to the tire with a length of clothesline rope. Under the worn spare she shoved a black tarpaulin.
She stepped in behind the wheel, lit a Camel, and went through her mental checklist: two hundred rolls of assorted film, mostly slow-speed Kodachrome; tripods; cooler; three cameras and five lenses; jeans and khaki slacks; shirts; wearing photo vest. Okay. Anything else she could buy on the road if she had forgotten it.
Quinn wore faded Levi's, well-used Red Wing field boots, a khaki shirt, and orange suspenders. On her leather belt was fastened a Swiss Army knife in its own case.
She looked at her watch: eight-seventeen. The truck started on the second try, and she backed out, shifted gears, and moved slowly down the alley under hazy sun. Through the streets of Bellingham she went, heading south on Washington 11, running along the coast of Puget Sound for a few miles, then following the highway as it swung east a little before meeting U .S. Route 20.
Turning into the sun, she began the long, winding drive through the Cascades. She liked this country and felt unpressed, stopping now and then to make notes about interesting possibilities for future expeditions or to shoot what she called "memory snapshots." The purpose of these cursory photographs was to remind her of places she might want to visit again and approach more seriously. In late afternoon she turned north at Spokane, picking up U .S. Route 2, which would take him halfway across the northern United States to Duluth, Minnesota.
She wished for the thousandth time in her life that she had a dog, a golden retriever, maybe, for travels like this and to keep her company at home. But she was frequently away, overseas much of the time, and it would not be fair to the animal. Still, she thought about it anyway. In a few years she would be getting too old for the hard fieldwork. "I might get a dog then," she said to the coniferous green rolling by his truck window.
Drives like this always put her into a taking-stock mood. The dog was part of it. Quinn Fabray was as alone as it's possible to be- an only child, parents both dead, distant relatives who had lost track of her and she of them, no close friends.
She knew the names of the man who owned the corner market in Bellingham and the proprietor of the photographic store where she bought her supplies. She also had formal, professional relationships with several magazine editors. Other than that, she knew scarcely anyone well, nor they her. Gypsies make difficult friends for ordinary people, and she was something of a gypsy.
She thought about Puck. He had left her nine years ago after five years of marriage. She was fifty-two now; that would make her just under forty. Puck had dreams of becoming a musician, a folksinger. He knew all of the Weavers' songs and sang them pretty well in the coffeehouses of Seattle. When she was home in the old days, she drove to his gigs and sat in the audience while he sang.
Her long absences- two or three months sometimes- were hard on the marriage. She knew that. He was aware of what she did when they decided to get married, and each of them had a vague sense that it could all be handled somehow. It couldn't. When she came home from photographing a story in Iceland, he was gone. The note read: "Quinn, it didn't work out. I left you the Harmony guitar. Stay in touch."
She didn't stay in touch. Neither did he. She signed the divorce papers when they arrived a year later and caught a plane for Australia the next day. He had asked for nothing except her freedom.
At Kalispell, Montana, she stopped for the night, late. The Cozy Inn looked inexpensive, and was. She carried her gear into a room containing two table lamps, one of which had a burned-out bulb. Lying in bed, reading The Green Hills of Africa and drinking a beer, she could smell the paper mills of Kalispell. In the morning she jogged for forty minutes, did fifty push-ups, and used her cameras as small hand weights to complete the routine.
Across the top of Montana she drove, into North Dakota and the spare, flat country she found as fascinating as the mountains or the sea. There was a kind of austere beauty to this place, and she stopped several times, set up a tripod, and shot some black-and- whites of old farm buildings. This landscape appealed to her minimalist leanings. The Indian reservations were depressing, for all of the reasons everybody knows and ignores. Those kinds of settlements were no better in northwestern Washington, though, or anywhere else she had seen them.
On the morning of August 14, two hours out of Duluth, she sliced northeast and took a back road up to Hibbing and the iron mines. Red dust floated in the air, and there were big machines and trains specially designed to haul the ore to freighters at Two Harbors on Lake Superior. She spent an afternoon looking around Hibbing and found it not to her liking, even if Bob Zimmerman-Dylan was from there originally.
The only song of Dylan's she had ever really cared for was "Girl from the North Country." She could play and sing that one, and she hummed the words to herself as she left behind the place with giant red holes in the earth. Puck had shown her some chords and how to handle basic arpeggios to accompany herself. "He left me with more than I left him," she said once to a boozy riverboat pilot in a place called McElroy's Bar, somewhere in the Amazon basin. And it was true.
The Superior National Forest was nice, real nice. Voyageur country. When she was young, she'd wished the old voyageur days were not over so she could become one. She drove by meadows, saw three moose, a red fox, and lots of deer. At a pond she stopped and shot some reflections on the water made by an odd-shaped tree branch. When she finished she sat on the running board of her truck, drinking coffee, smoking a Camel, and listening to the wind in the birch trees.
He had been to most of the places posted on his boyhood walls and marveled she actually was there when she visited them, sitting in the Raffles Bar, riding up the Amazon on a chugging riverboat, and rocking on a camel through the Rajasthani desert.
The Lake Superior shore was as nice as she'd heard it was. She marked down several locations for future reference, took some shots to jog his memory later on, and headed south along the Mississippi River toward Iowa. She'd never been to Iowa but was taken with the hills of the northeast part along the big river. Stopping in the little town of Clayton, she stayed at a fisherman's motel and spent two mornings shooting the towboats and an afternoon on a tug at the invitation of a pilot she met in a local bar.
Cutting over to U .S. Route 65, she went through Des Moines early on a Monday morning, August 16, 1965, swung west at Iowa 92, and headed for Madison County and the covered bridges that were supposed to be there, according to National Geographic. They were there all right, the man in the Texaco station said so and gave her directions, just fairish directions, to all seven.
The first six were easy to find as she mapped out her strategy for photographing them. The seventh, a place called Roseman Bridge, eluded her. It was hot, she was hot, Harry- her truck- was hot, and she was wandering around on gravel roads that seemed to lead nowhere except to the next gravel road.
In foreign countries, her rule of thumb was, "Ask three times." She had discovered that three responses, even if they all were wrong, gradually vectored you in to where you wanted to go. Maybe twice would be enough here.
A mailbox was coming up, sitting at the end of a lane about one hundred yards long. The name on the box read "Finn Hudson, RR 2 ." She slowed down and turned up the lane, looking for guidance.
When she pulled into the yard, a woman was sitting on the front porch. It looked cool there, and she was drinking something that looked even cooler. She came off the porch toward her.
She stepped from the truck and looked at her, looked closer, and then closer still. She was lovely, or had been at one time, or could be again. And immediately she began to feel the old clumsiness she always suffered around women to whom she was even faintly attracted.
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