Imagination Crosses The Barriers of Time

I'm not necessarily sure from whence these characters come. They are just inside me.

This man's name, by some ethereal imagining, is Pinkerton. He lived more than a hundred years ago according to my empathic interpretation of him. He's another character in the novel-in-progress, Humbird.

I suppose you could say it's an historical novel, not hysterical mind you, but historical in that I'm drawing from an actual event that took place in I'm guessing roughly 1912 on the shores of Lake Pend d'Oreille in North Idaho where I currently live. The North Idaho pronunciation of the french phrase Pend d'Oreille is ponderay. Some people spell it the latter way nowadays, but I like the old french version. Quite a history here.

The event I refer to was a mill fire that burned down a relatively brand new all-wood (and quite sizeable) cutting barn for the Humbird Lumber Mill. The cutting barn was built out over the waters of the lake on pilings. A train track brought logs to the water on a long pier where they were dumped into Pend d'Oreille Bay for holding before being singled out and ramped up to the saw blades for lumber. Many water-logged timbers still reside in the clay bottom of the lake. And incidentally, these characters are all made from clay taken from the shoreline where the mill existed.

North Idaho had a major rail line passing through Sandpoint (google it on google maps), so the mill was worked partly by transients who travelled the line. This character, Pinkerton, is my imagination of the man who controlled the paychecks for the mill owner, a true Mr. Humbird. Jim Paton, posted earlier is the villain who started the fire, having been, in his mind, swindled from partnership in a Minnesota lumber mill.

Leave it to writers to imagine history. Remember it's a novel; i.e., fiction. So these guys didn't really exist. Or did they? Hummn. Your guess is as good as mine. All I know is that there's real mystery about that fire. There were human bones left behind and period-dated shoes found along the shoreline. Much more. Mystery?

Why do I post them here? Because they are also part of my journalling dialogue about creativity. Scultping and photographing them helps my imagination give them life.