Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

Time is definitely not of the essence in Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.

Narrative games are often in danger of being hard-to-read novels, books that one ‘plays’ the reading of to the detriment of both the actual reading and the book. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a prime example of that particular danger. There’s truth and beauty to find within its choppy transcontinental trek, but only at the expense of a pair of sore eyes.

The 19th and 20th century microstories that make up the bulk of WTWTLW (there are over 200 of them) are encountered by plodding across a garish map of the entire United States by foot, and sometimes by train or car, and activating ugly little icons. There’s light personal upkeep to be done, managing rest, money, and health, but dying just resets you somewhere in America.

The stories are illustrated vignettes with narrated text, though many of them are not so much ‘stories’ as scenes. A thunderstorm. A dead kid. A couple in a lighthouse. A man burying his dog. There are passages of beautiful, tragic, sometimes supernatural prose tucked away in Florida and Idaho and California and Oklahoma, but only a dozen or so—such as a talking baby buffalo I carried to safety—stuck with me. The others I collected for the sake of collecting, to pad my library so I could hear WTWTLW’s best stories.

CAMPFIRE TALES

Those more substantial stories come from travelers you meet and make camp with. They’ll ask for certain types of tale (tragic, scary, exciting, hopeful, funny) that you can pull from your collection of encounters, and after you do so they’ll tell you something about themselves related to its themes.

Tell them the kinds of stories they want to hear and their ‘eye’ will open. Fully open it (which soon becomes rote once you have enough stories and know roughly how they’re taken), and the next time you run into them, they’ll have new responses, eventually spilling their life story over the course of several encounters.

These characters, each written by a different author, often feel general rather than specific at first. A Dust Bowl refugee camping outside of LA, for instance, tells me that, “The first thing the big owners did was shove the tenant farmers off their land with tractors.” Simple accounts of historical details like this along with repeated aphorisms can suppress characterization. Stick with them, though, and their personalities begin to shine—especially The Beat Poet (Matthew S. Burns), The Sharecropper (Gita Jackson), and The One Who Went Upward (Demian DinéYazhi´).

What emerges is an overview of experiences, in which representatives of the Reconstruction, World War 1, Jim Crow, indigenous struggles, labor struggles, and the Summer of Love appear in one-person plays to explain how they fit in, drawing from, among many others, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Dee Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Lucy Parsons, and Allen Ginsberg.

SLOW BURN

They tell important stories, but it takes far too much work to hear them, and WTWTLW’s non-written world isn’t special enough to hold ten or more hours of attention. When the map’s fields and clouds align just so, it has a mean strikingness, but it also ran terribly for me, stuttering often, with visible, jagged seams wearing on my eyes. And once a swath of map has been cleared of encounters, all that’s left to do is chase down the campers. It’s a rare game that slows down the more of it you complete.

WTWTLW’s stories are reminders of the stories we should seek out to understand history, to answer Bertolt Brecht’s questions: “Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors? Every ten years a great man. Who paid the bill?” It’s a graphic novel I’d wish to own. As it is, though, I’ve never had a short story anthology work so hard to keep me from reading its stories.

The stories are illustrated vignettes with narrated text