The industrial town where The Pencil takes place has a pencil factory and a big prison facility nearby. The skies are dark; the small roadside ‘lakes’ are actually large, slate-grey water puddles of uncertain innocuousness; and in the distance, thick, white clouds billow from factory smoke stacks. Grim-faced arrivals disembark from a boat and trod along a road that runs between imposing walls of variously-sized wooden logs piled tight and high.
