Idyllwyld. Here and now.

What is Idyllwyld? If you're from the Los Angeles area, you may be familiar with the small, hidden village of Idyllwild, tucked 150 miles away in the San Jacinto Mountains. I hear it's a lovely place to visit.; I've never been there. My fictional town of Idyllwyld shares only the evocative name.

Idyll: an episode of such pastoral or romantic charm as to qualify as the subject of a poetic idyll. A romanticized rural setting. Idylls of the King by Tennyson, a retelling of the King Arthur legend, is just one example.

Creating a fictional, but seemingly real, place has far too many precedents to list here, but the concept crosses many genres. Being from the Midwest, Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon is perhaps most similar to Idyllwyld, and yet not, for Idyllwyld itself is sort of opposite of Lake Wobegon. Idyllwyld recalls a distant past when things were less certain, when magic suffused the land; the name itself today is divorced from its origin. It is a town that is loosing itself in banality as the frenetic, mechanistic city encroaches and consumes it.

Though I do enjoy city life for its diversity, its opportunities, its eclectic life, there is something profoundly sad in the loss of the idyllic. At least for me. To me there are hidden secrets yet to learn, a clear, crisp spring yet to drink from, and wild creatures both fierce and friendly to behold.

When I was younger, my brother and I, and a neighbor boy, journeyed deep into a forest on our family's farm. It was a 20 acre wood which as an adult feels rather small, but when you're ten, it might as well be the Black Forest. If you've read Robert Holdstock's "Mythago Wood," you know exactly the mystical feeling that a forest can produce. Our little band of adventures traipsed through the wood, each imagining our own perils, our own vistas ahead. Little did we know we'd be in for some honest to God magic.

After what seemed like hours (and was actually more like twenty minutes), we came to an old oak tree, cracked and decaying. Shadowy holes riddled it. We approached this tree, drawn to it as surely as a young Arthur might have been drawn to an odd sword driven into a rock. And then quite suddenly, small reddish-orange balls of fur began leaping and flying from the old tree. They looked like squirrels! Flying squirrels?! They landed on nearby trees and chattered to each other, climbed higher, and flew around again. For ten-somethings, it was a sight to behold, a sight beyond anything we knew to be real.

We ran home, hyperventilating with excitement. We found my dad and screamed to him about flying squirrels! Down in the woods! Probably six of them, soaring all over the place. Dad chided us, perhaps he even laughed a bit. Flying squirrels? Impossible. No such thing. You kids are imagining things. To this day, I don't know if Dad really believed us or whether he was feigning doubt. I suspect he was joking. Only as an adult did I investigate the existence of the Sciuridae Pteromyini, the flying squirrel, and discover its range included Western Wisconsin.

Yet this captures the essence of Idyllwyld. Magic, seen and unseen. The mind of the possible vs the mind that has closed. The irrational vs. the rational. Yeats believed in fairies. In my novel, Dusty explains the very real existence in Iceland of an inspector whose job it is to investigate potential development sites for the existence of fairies. Do they exist? In Idyllwyld they do, only, like my father and flying squirrels, many have become oblivious to them.