Thomas Sullivan

Sorry for leaving you in the woods last month.  February’s Cannibal Essay was half a quest, and this is part 2.  The point of the two columns is to take the most mundane circumstances possible and try to make stories out of them, because you can always invent adrenaline rushes but unless you can find and express the underlying meanings in daily living you really can’t anchor make-believe dramas to believable characters.  Meaning is like DNA.  Just as the complete genetic code of an organism is present in each of its cells, so too a complete universal truth is present in each experience.  The universe in a grain of sand, as they say.  When we make up characters we are playing God, after all, usurping the power of creation, even if we only do it with words and imagination.  Fortunately we don’t have to worry about rivaling God.  Our failures will keep us humble if our ambitions do not.

 All the more reason, then, to practice exercises like last month’s http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2009/02/15/thomas-sullivan-do-stuck-pigs-sweat-negotiating-romance-and-the-path-of-least-resistance/ .  In a nutshell, what began as defeat (when a severely torn rotator cuff sidelined me) turned into a quest for an incredible white feather that has become a symbol of survival on both the physical and romantic planes of my life, if they are not one and the same.  Yes, I chose to do those things written about in February’s column, which considerably upped the likelihood of an adventure that day, but within that there were many more choices and recognitions that needed to occur in order to develop a story.  Here’s where I left off:

…so now I am standing there steaming in the snow, staring at a minor miracle that makes the exhaustion of the prior several hours fade away.  Because I’ve just found something that should not be there in the harsh elements of winter.  What is so eternal about a white feather?  If the symbol survives, can the thing it stands for do less?  I recall another relationship that will always survive and whose symbol hides in these woods.  This one is with a friend (Frank Wydra, author and columnist here at Storytellers) six months removed but not forgotten…

Flamingo Frank is a brother to me in every real sense of the word.  He died before his time and is buried 750 miles away, but a part of his spirit is here.  I brought it here two days after his funeral, a pink plastic flamingo that was a joke between us.  It was a joke because he would brook no mourning for him — he even had his body propped up at his wake with a glass of Jack Daniels in one hand and a silver dollar in the other.  In the heat of August I carried that pink flamingo into the most impenetrable part of a 5400 acre preserve and the joke is now a covenant.  The white feather has restored my spirit, restored my faith and hope, preserved my commitment to the people I believe in…today is a good day to visit Flamingo Frank.

Conflict and quest and character were all established in last month’s column, as were time and setting.  The main thing that needs to be added here as I segue from one quest to another is the connection between them — a catalyst, in effect — which is what the white feather instilled and renewed in me.  Additionally, if this unfocused event in the course of my day is to be turned into a story, I have to develop some back-story about Flamingo Frank.  That could be fed out through memory and association as I search for the covenant symbol.

For several hours I have struggled against deeply drifted snow and underbrush in freezing temperatures to reach this spot by the most indirect route, but now I head out from the lone tree in the Golden Meadow in another trackless direction.  The chill reality of beginning a second quest soaked to the skin in this weather soon comes home to me as I fight through waste-high dunes and lariats of reeds that snare me as tightly as Chinese finger traps.  So when I cross an actual park trail that poses no such obstacles, I opt to follow it even though it will take me a little out of my way.

This is the rising and falling action of the typical story — small hurdles and lesser challenges.  It can always be enhanced with imagination, and I’m leaving a few difficulties out that could be exploited, such as the fact that a cougar and a black bear have both been reported wintering in the area.

There are fresh tracks from three snowshoers with short strides — women or children — on the trail, and through the snow that has begun to fall I sight the veiled trio in the first mile.  By coincidence they turn out to be three nurses who work in the same hospital where my torn rotator cuff is scheduled to be surgically repaired.  They are lost and I have my own urgency, having overstayed my time in the woods.  In an odd quid pro quo of our chance meeting, I give them the right directions and they give me the lowdown on all the surgeons.

Minor characters can serve a great many purposes ranging from simple human interest to actual involvement in the unfolding of a plot.  The coincidence of the shoulder surgery could be developed through these characters as part of this story just as it happened or in a totally different way.  Think in terms of intensifying the character relationships — love, hate, gratitude, revenge — along the way.  Whatever takes place between us at Elm Creek could set the stage for even more drama or a meaningful twist if one or more of them turn out to be in the operating room for the surgery.  Coincidence is one of life’s great gifts to fiction writers…

I leave the trail and come to a creek, which I know will be no problem because it has recently been 25 below zero, and it just has to be frozen.  But there, nestled down in the woods, on a day when the temperature is twenty degrees higher, there is moving water.  With my shoulder like it is I cannot take a chance, I argue with myself.  A wet foot out here and I’ll be in real trouble this far from help and out of cell phone range.  But I look up and down the banks, because there are many logs across the creek, some in tumbled tandem where you can go from one to the other.  Plowing through the brush above the black water I find something at last that I think will work on both sides.  The fallen tree is a little slippery, and with my left arm unable to move except with my elbow leveraged against my side, I have to pretty much crawl and lean at the same time.  The main log has a few extended branches still stuck on it, but they are old and some snap off like breadsticks.  Still, I go slow enough to get to the middle, and now there is just three feet of smooth snow covering what I hope is solid ice right next to burbling water.  One lucky step is all I need, and if my momentum is fast enough and my step light enough, I should be able to hit the far bank which — though damn near vertical — is loaded with dried branches.  No “one-for-the-money,” I just do it.  (“I’m comin’, Frank…”)  And though I don’t like the disturbingly hollow sound of my foot thudding off what looks like snow over the ice, I fall forward onto the bank, clutching with my right arm at all the snapping underbrush.  I am soaked with sweat but the snow down my socks feels good somehow as I work up onto the bluff. 

Crossing the creek in winter is the riskiest part of this simple story, and again it could be made more dramatic in fiction, i.e. I fall in, I get pinned or trapped, etc. The point here being that those benign happenings of your daily life usually presents some “what ifs” which provide ample drama.  You simply have to think outside the box…

I do not know precisely where I placed the pink flamingo last August.  Heavily overgrown then, the landscape now is considerably different under winter’s pall.  But if I move in back and forth sweeps, I should be able to pick up the pink flash nestled against a tree…if it is still there.  For the next half mile I trudge futilely through the tract in ragged arcs.  No neon hint of red breaks the achromatic plane of woods and snow.  As with the white feather, I feel the drag of pending disappointment.  Someone has come upon this strange marker out here in the middle of nowhere and taken it as a souvenir.  That too was inevitable.  A symbol for a reality must become the memory of a symbol for a reality.  I make another pass close to the serpentine creek and well away from where I crossed, just to be sure, and then I see it.  I’m not sure at first, because the pink looks brighter than I imagined.  But then, Frank always was a beacon… 

This seesaw of emotions is not contrived, though perhaps predictable in these circumstances.  Until the moment of discovery, success would be in doubt.  What is important in those final moments is to bring out the poignancy of the relationship and what it means.  I think a lot of writers miss this in the denouement.  You really need to make the reader feel what the issues, conflicts and questions are right before they are resolved.  It not only hones emotional impact, it delays and teases out the climax.

Call it praying, call it a séance, call it a bridge between two planes of existence, call it what you will, standing next to that garish plastic symbol I had my commune with Flamingo Frank.  Wise-cracking, of course.  Hey, Frank, thought maybe you flew south for the winter on this here flamingo I left.  (Frank always went south in February, if he could get away).  He was as real to me in those minutes as ever, and he gave me a loan against eternity — the knowledge that there is some kind of continuance from this life, because I felt his presence so strongly that he just has to exist somewhere.  And I like to think that my being there preserves the fact that he once passed this way on planet Earth.  Wherever he is, perhaps that was a mutual assurance we both needed…

It seems almost sacrilegious to write about fictionalizing any of what actually happened that day at Elm Creek, but in keeping with this column, the content of those moments in the presence of eternal mystery could provide endless threads for storylines.  The spiritual aspect could go toward drama, mystery, thriller or any other shade of human experience.  At its most basic level, I simply took a walk in the woods that day.  But being a thinking animal (and only incidentally a writer), I have fashioned a life of symbols and meanings as I interact with my environment.  I cannot imagine living without that (the writing seems irrelevant) because I cannot sense or feel less than I do.  But if you are a person who does not optimize the world around you for its myriad connections to wit and beauty and wisdom and all truths, you must learn to do so if you expect to express it meaningfully to others, as a writer does.

“Seeing” Flamingo Frank again wasn’t closure or a simple paying of respects, it was, as always, stimulation.  We were always each other’s catalyst.  So the story continues… 

Leaving the woods I am tempted to take a shortcut and try another jumble of logs to cross the creek just for the adventure.  Don’t do it, Sully, the countering voice of prudence warns me.  Don’t do it.  But that is practically a dare to my nature.  Hey, another time…heal first, says Jiminy Cricket.  And you know what.  This time I listen.  Maybe that was Frank too.  I follow my tracks back to where I crossed the first time.  Sliding down the bank is a lot quicker than going up, and I decide to just take that step on the ice with my momentum and trust again.  I brake myself, pause, then take the leap and the one-armed reach.  But there is no luck with the thin ice this time.  The thud and the cracking are simultaneous.  I roll, sweeping the leg away from the point of contact and fall with my right arm against the log.  Sanctuary! 

Thank you, Flamingo. 

Long hike back.  I pass the stations of the cross I have walked before, and in the parking lot by the pool/pond I pick up the shuttle bus to the chalet.  The young chef at the concession stand makes my special turkey club most generously as I ply him with questions about his life and joke with the cashier.  I sit down and half a dozen high schoolers slide onto stools around me.  “Hey, Sully, when are you going to snowboard with us?”  Standard question to which I give my standard answer.  “When I retire,” I tell them.  “You guys are short-term risktakers.”  “So when are you going to retire?” one of them wants to know.  When I stop questing for white feathers and pink flamingos, I think, but what they see and get is my smile…

As with part one, this is still an internal story framed by physical events.  In my writer’s mind I cannot see it ending with the fulfillment of the quest.  Yes, there was satisfaction when that happened to me and my goal was achieved.  But Flamingo Frank and I had many adventures as varied as a week on a deserted beach in the Bahamas to big-city soirees.  It seemed fitting to me then that the return crossing of the creek should have a little kicker of adrenaline in it for me — for us — and maybe I kind of made it happen that way on that day out of the memory of those times.  Author discretion.  But it’s that kind of prerogative in writing the story — in seeing the story when it is happening to you — that makes for transcendent statement.  Whether or not what happened at Elm Creek that day became a story (or a column, as it did), or a fragment of fiction used in some later work, or just an exercise, the point is that a writer needs to become someone who finds all the living in all the life that surrounds them.

Photos in my free monthly newsletter for March include the pink flamingo from the day described in this column.  I’ll be happy to put you on my mailing list if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters are archived at the website below, photos included.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com