Thomas Sullivan

It was the wrong thing to do and the wrong time to do it on the wrong day.  The direction I took couldn’t have been more wrong, and my clothes were all wrong for the woods and the snow.  Whether because of wrong decisions I made, a bunch of other things went wrong along the way.  Even my basic quest in pursuit of confirmations was wrong because the odds of success were as wrong as slim and none. 

So, what could be more right for a story?

Quest?  Check. … Conflict?  Check. … Supporting cast (underlying characters)?  Check. … Dynamic setting?  Check. … Tension?  Check. … Obstacles and minor characters along the way?  Check. … Meaningful resolution?  Check.

To those hundreds of people who have asked over the years, this is where stories come from.  So call this column one of my Cannibal Essays.  I believe the last Cannibal Essay I did was Empty Boxes I Have Worn  http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/01/16/thomas-sullivan-empty-boxes-i-have-worn/, the idea being that a meaningful life shapes meaningful stories every day and that a writer must learn not just to live them but to put frames around them and communicate them.  I’ve deliberately chosen passive events here just to illustrate that it can be done without inherently dramatic material.  In fact, if a writer is to reach the professional level it is critical that these underlying techniques of story creation are able to stand convincingly on their own apart from sensational plot twists i.e., a nuclear device ticking down to doom in an orphanage in which the future Dalai Lama is mastering the secret that will save the world from ebola if only his insanely jealous hermaphrodite brother/sister will find love on death row and allow a bone marrow transplant that will supply the missing gene for spiritual enlightenment.  So I invite you to come along and see how an arbitrary circumstance morphed into a quest with conflicts and resolutions and, above all, greater meanings.

It began with defeat.  A perfect winter of adventures ended with a fall on skinny skis one night.  A rotator cuff that was already torn tore some more and surgery was deemed necessary as quickly as it could be scheduled.  Out of refusal to accept my fate I got back on skis sans poles twice before the sawbones cut a week later, but of course this was merely symbolic.  Just a tantrum I had to throw.  Anger, frustration, bitterness…done.

Are you getting this?  Negative emotions with which anyone can identify are a good beginning for a story because they map conflict.

… negative emotions, but not mourning, not denial.  Those two just aren’t me and their exclusion will be part of this story.  Not mourning, because its premise is an acceptance I can’t…accept.  Not denial, because there is very little that I don’t believe is possible, miracles inclusive.  This is because I am a romantic idealist and for me romantic idealism is the only thing worth living.  If I keep faith with myself, the romance stays alive.  Everything external is negotiable.  In the vast resources of the mind, there is a work-around for any obstacle to ideals.

Again, important because it establishes the character of the POV, and it travels well for most readers.  Okay, the romantic idealism happens to be my personal front row approach to the world.  But it’s a POV that exists in virtually everyone, even if their romantic idealism is a bunch of crushed flat hopes in the back of their closet.

And it’s funny, but when you sincerely live romantic idealism, things happen.  Where there’s a will there’s a way.  So now, standing in the ruins of a winter in the aftermath of a ski accident, I begin to pull myself together.  I won’t give up.  Instead, I go into analytical mode.  What is it about the skiing that is so essential to me?  Flight, motion, rhythm, flow…  And then the underlying reasons for those physical sensations — the fact that all of me gets used…I come alive!…I connect, I feel, I think, I sort things out, I GET IDEAS!  Idea: who needs skis for all those things?

In case you missed it, that was the catalyst…

If I can’t ski for a while, I will hike.  Nothing will steal my winter, my crystal ether, my fields of inspiration.  Blind adventure will follow.  Trust me.  I’ve done this before, and you CAN try this at home.  Or out in nature.  When you walk the walk and talk the talk day after day it all starts to link up — the symbols, the meanings, the wild cards of chance — with the adventures.  Finding a quest is easy in this my token universe of 5400 acres.  A couple of quests actually.  A white feather and a pink flamingo.  Like I said, I’ve done this before.

The white feather is from 10 months earlier.  In a place I call the Golden Meadow, next to a lone tree, I stuck it nib first into the ground, like a writer signing his name.  The place and the plume have special meaning to me, and so I took note of how the feather survived spring floods, summer storms, and autumn winds.  It got to be a thing in my life and for my readers.  There were pictures of it in my April  http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/04162008.htm , August http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/08162008.htm , and November http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/11162008.htm newsletters, and I wrote about it in my October column on StorytellersUnplugged Inspiration Is A Duet http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2008/10/15/thomas-sullivan-inspiration-is-a-duet/.  The end, I thought.  With winter coming that was the epilogue.  But the amazing feather hung on, and so did I until I was sure it couldn’t be there any longer.  Ice, snow — it couldn’t survive the cycle of seasons.  I didn’t want to know.  Only now I am off the ski trails, because I didn’t survive either.  There is something here for me to accept.  So I will make one last pilgrimage to the site, just to keep faith with myself and the symbol I placed there.  Thus, knee-deep in snow, wearing only YakTrax Pros on my hiking boots, trying to protect a severely torn rotator cuff, I set off from a distant parking lot at Elm Creek’s beach to reach the Golden Meadow from the furthest approach, as if to delay by an hour or so the inevitability that this day I will confirm.

…The Quest!

So, let’s see where we are in this framing of simple events.  We have begun with a frustrated protagonist who, in desperation, sets off walking in an effort to reclaim a season of life and of nature denied him.  The symbol of his futile defiance is a white feather, now surely gone with the elements, but that he must quest for one last time as a kind of closure.  Q.E.D.  The meanings are multiple, but there are levels which will remain beyond the story –

…this is how you anchor and preserve romantic idealism, but the quest could serve any passion or tangible goal in a larger story.

The route I have chosen is very long and destined to become longer this day because I do not want to mess up the groomed trails with my boots.  I switch to snowmobile trails, but the first close call roaring up from behind gives me pause, and soon I am playing a dangerous game of Dodg’em.  It culminates when a bouncing ballistic behemoth of gleaming green metal careens off a curve head-on, driving me to my knees and nearly onto the injured shoulder.  I am in the wrong place.  My bad.  Traversing a strip of woods ends the danger and brings me to a snowshoe trail.

First challenges met.  Please note that I am not adding anything to this from my imagination.  It would be easy to intensify it with elements of almost any genre from supernatural to thriller, but the point here is that real-life has real stories every day no matter how innocuous.  The thing of it is that they never happen for you if you don’t invite them or recognize them or communicate them.

The adrenaline rush is followed by an encounter with two novice snowshoers on their maiden journey.  The exchange of stories is interesting, informative.  One of them has a brother who makes snowshoes.  Note to self: maybe I should get into snowshoeing while I’m rehabbing the shoulder.

This is a Canterbury Tales element — a character sidebar paced after an event.  Again, it could be invested with dramatic material — confrontation, rescue, emotional connection, tragedy, comedy — suitable to any category.

When the snowshoe trail veers away from my destination, I abandon it.  But cutting through fields and forests soon envelops me in waste high drifts, while marshes wrap themselves around me like wheat paste and black pools block me.  Ominous cracks appear in thin ice I must cross.  I have been skiing all winter mostly without poles in order to allow healing, but now I have an injury that must be protected against falls.  [Photos are in this month’s newsletter] I use an old trick I learned the hard way in Michigan’s state parks, i.e., that deer tracks will lead you out of dense areas.  Deer follow the path of least resistance. 

Another wave of challenges met.

I discover that deer don’t have to duck under low branches, and — just to get one more animal into this sentence — I am sweating like a stuck pig (do stuck pigs sweat or just bleed).  The next couple of hours are pure struggle against the elements.  Exhaustion and below zero cold are taking their toll.  A bass drum is beating in my chest as I surge and plunge through the snow, and I am soaked through all layers.  I cannot stop to rest, because the dampness will freeze if I stop putting out heat.  But at last I come upon the meadow, still gold though thinned and clumped by drifts, and am briefly heartened.  This is going to end my quest, I remember.  The meadow rises above me and there is the lone tree halfway up where I planted the white feather 10 months ago.  Its slender snowbound trunk informs me of what I must accept, and there is even a pulse of self-disdain in me for having come here to be defeated.  I feel foolish.  But what’s the alternative?  I climb the final hundred yards.

Do you see the possibilities for an ending?  It can be whatever you want it to be.  But this is what it was…

Cold tomb, pale shroud.  No white plume à la Cyrano de Bergerac.  The white feather could not survive an endless winter, of course, though this one nearly made it through the full cycle of seasons.  But that’s okay, I tell myself.  There is nothing safer than a memory.  The memory will always be there waiting for yet another spring.  Still, I stare grimly at the undefiled sweep of snow.  And then, like a latent flame leaping down a column of smoke to re-light a candle, I am taken by a faint hope.  I pull off my glove, and as carefully as an archaeologist at an ancient altar I caress away the white dust of winter.  At first I think it is a scraggly leaf — the skeleton of one — somehow upright, but then I see what to me is still miraculous.  [Photos in my newsletter this month -- mn333mn@earthlink.net ]

And that’s the point.  It doesn’t matter whether the reader feels they foresaw this particular outcome, because it’s not a story about things & events.  It’s an internal story about feelings, insights and revelations.  What matters is the journey, whether the reader empathizes with the POV of the story.  If it works, it works because the reader went somewhere.  And that’s the job of the writer.  To take the reader on a journey. 

Most stories that happen to most people on most days are like this one.  They do not hit you between the eyes with tangible events.  For impact they depend on your world view and the poetry in your soul or the passion with which you regard things.  But when you do this every day, potent adrenaline adventures will also happen.  You are never bored.  In any case, the fully interpreted happenings of your life are the underlayment, the launch point for the writer’s imagination.  And the writer’s imagination is the visa to cross all borders and explore all possibilities. 

Did I mention that there were two quests that day?  The second arose because something in me was confirmed by the results of the first.  I’ll use the final quest for next month’s column. 

Also thanks for all the inquiries about the shoulder.  Rotator cuff had to be Fed-exed from the scene of the ski accident, but the sawbones said I had excellent tissue and in two hours of surgery with twice the usual number of pins and sutures he got me on the road to full recovery.  Also had a ruptured bicep, same arm, which wasn’t fixed.  Other bicep has been ruptured for a long time, though, and I never fixed that one.  In the words of the inimitable orthopod, “…you probably won’t notice any difference.”  Yeah, that’s what I want to hear and why I pay my med bills promptly. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.   My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to add you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .    Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included. 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

Ah. You’re back for Part 2. Please be seated. The guards are now sealing the exits.

Last month I wrote about optimism. I don’t think I ever actually used the word optimism, because I was talking mostly about pessimism and cynicism. Does that make me a pessimist? Hmmm. An optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds; a pessimist fears that’s true. Pick a color on the spectrum between the two, and color me anything but black, even though I drive a black car, like to wear black, and love Noir 86% dark chocolate bars. The thing of it is, as I tried to say in Part 1, there’s a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy in the attitudes one takes, particularly for people who want any kind of perfection or dare to risk failure, as writers must do. Hope makes you vulnerable and takes a little courage. You may deflect some disappointment or temper some shock by setting the bar of expectations low, but then why bother getting out of bed? If you’re going to do that, my advice is to postpone life and age as little as possible until you’re ready to get in the game. “A life without living, still is lost,” as the song goes. If you’re going to live at all, live large and sweat not the obstacles.

Humdrum scripted lives should be reserved for 24-hour insects: hatch, mate, find a blood meal, lay some eggs (if you’re of that persuasion), then die. Take your time dying if you want. Nothing much between laying the eggs and dying, so don’t suffer from useless things like hope. Just avoid getting swatted – pain – and veg out passively. Life sucks and then you die. Starting at 25 hours, though, we are into a whole new sunrise. Once you get that far, might as well die from a lethal dose of happiness, which means dust off the dreams you had before the world taught you to say “ouch!” Forget just minimizing unhappiness. Dare to be happy big-time and reach for whatever your perfect life is. This includes such reprehensible endeavors as becoming a writer. One needs only paper and pencil to become a writer, actually. In fact, a Taco Bell bathroom wall and a crayon will do. Be read by the next bad chimichanga customer, and you become a writer with a readership. Sell something to a publisher, and you can claim legitimacy in the marketplace. But first – as esteemed writer Richard Steinberg says – you must “Believe!” Miracles seldom happen to cynics.

I was a cynic once. Still am when it comes to humor. But down deep I’m always looking to max out the best of life. You can want to be happy, but if you don’t clear the red lights and the fear of driving, you can’t possibly reach your destination or even enjoy the journey. I dunno when it was I decided all this, or even if I ever did. Maybe it just came naturally, like a feeling. But I remember things like a coach telling me after I went what was probably my fastest 200-yard breastroke, “The watch didn’t start,” and I said, “Let’s not discount the possibility that I swam it in nothing flat.” Optimism. It starts the car and makes the lights turn green. Then all you have to do is push your foot on the accelerator. Or maybe it was gambling that taught me to hope. I think I faced a lot of fear early, and I know now what is worth losing – if it comes to that – and what isn’t. It never does come to that. But if it did, you still have everything if you have yourself and your ideals and – if you really hit the jackpot – someone to share them with. In fact, the only way to not have happiness is to live a life of compromise with yourself.

Writers especially have to face down that paper tiger of giving in to compromise, because they so often go against sterile lifestyles and stereotypical thinking. Being true to yourself is an island, and not for everybody, especially if you need a lot of social approval. Hope, fear and superstition float ashore with the tide each day, and you have to pick what stays with you and what you throw back in the ocean. That was another thing I tried to say in Part 1 [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/07/16/thomas-sullivan-3-legged-stallions-hopping-toward-hope-between-the-garden-and-the-vacuum/] of this post. Your island should be self-sufficient, a reward onto itself. Make it that, and you are guaranteed happiness and satisfaction in life. As a writer, though, you are exporting notes in bottles. If and when you succeed in communicating your beauty and your wisdom, or maybe just your entertainment, society may put your island on their maps and give it a name and send tourists to worship you. But if you learned what there is to learn in the process of succeeding, you hate tourists. You even hate being worshipped. Not that I would have any personal experience with that, but it’s evident in the lives of truly fulfilled people who do.

As last month’s column tried to suggest before it reached an ungodly length and split like a cell, the reward is in being who you are, the same inside as you appear to be outside. You prove your point when you reach for perfection and are happy with the peace and honesty it brings. That’s the real success and all you need, really. For sure, fame and fortune are nothing without it. And there’s something else. Something that comes with intimate familiarity with the ups and down of fortune and coincidence. Last month I called it a game played by the gods of irony. I was not being all that metaphorical. In fact, as the person closest to me pointed out, cues and omens abounded in the wake of that article. Sometimes it’s impossible to deny that higher presences are testing you, teasing you, looking to see what you’re made of and whether or not you are worthy of your dreams. But the gods are not without compassion. They never seem to create fates where there are not choices and solutions. And it is usually demanding in the short-term. There are elements of our lives that are so important that they redefine us, change us forever, according to what we do. Emerson called it “compensation.” For me, these big swings of cosmic destiny offset the little inconsequential acts of fate and make all the difference in life. If you fail to recognize or answer one of these, you have truly lost something. I mentioned love and the saving of my son’s life as two such keystones for me. Let me end this column with a letter I wrote my lad after the latter event. Writer’s reflex, I guess. It doesn’t matter now, because years later the letter was published in The Detroit News, and subsequently picked up in a TV pilot by Tony Orlando of Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree fame, so it’s no longer just personal.

The guards have unsealed the exits, but here is the letter…

Dear son,
It may be some years before you read and understand this, but it must be written now. Since coming so close to losing you, I seem to have a need to go over and over what happened, to acknowledge how miraculous it is that you’re still here, and to draw closer to you in every way.

Even though you are only three, I think you feel a little of this, too. Especially the drawing closer part. A bump on the head, a scraped shin, small cuts send you looking for me now as much as for your mother; and there are moments – just brief moments – when I’m carrying you straddled on my hip with your arms around my neck, or holding you on my lap, that I see something much too old in your blue eyes. It may be a fixation on an undefined event in your memory, or a troubled glimpse into life’s grimmer possibilities, but it comes across your face like a trance, passing when you sigh and blink and drop your head on my shoulder. Afterward those delicate fingers of yours go to work on a button of my shirt, or a piece of fuzz from a blanket, and you are uncharacteristically quiet.

So we’re closer. Thank God we still have the opportunity.

The whole thing started when we went on vacation. Maybe it even started before that. Your mother and I took you to register for pre-sc
hool just before we left, and the secretary there said we would have to send for your birth certificate. I don’t know whether it was a premonition or what, but I didn’t want to wait. Somehow I felt you had to be registered before we went on vacation – a kind of insurance policy, I guess, that you would have to come back for pre-school in the fall. It even occurred to me fleetingly that if I lost you, I would register you anyway when I got back. But I quickly banished the whole fear from my thoughts.

Then we were on our way, and the heat and the traffic and the scenery took over. We stopped in the town I grew up in, and after that you and your sister were tired of traveling, so it was: “Sean, stop hitting your sister!” and “Colleen, quit teasing your brother!” from the front seat the rest of the afternoon.

We reached our friends house on Lake Michigan above Traverse City and there spent two wonderful days. There was the kayak, and your sister’s growing shell collection, a bonfire, a tour of a coastguard cutter, and the water slide. You chased the grown-ups through the sand waving noxious, dead “alewives” that had washed up on the beach; and the stony shallows kept you from venturing out too far.

Then it was back in the car and straight through the Upper Peninsula into Canada. The country got more wildly beautiful, more awesomely serene, but I wanted to go where no one was.

The locals directed us to a place where there was nothing on the map and as usual made a fuss over you – the blue-eyed, blond-haired wonder child, precocious, forthright, with the slightly husky voice and engaging mannerisms. Your sister, though only six, was remarkably good about all this attention, as usual, and even showed you off.

Your old man’s penuriousness was as much a factor as solemnity in our final choice of a camp. Snowshoe it was called. Five miles down a nearly impassable lane. It was under reconstruction, having deteriorated to the point of collapse. There were outhouses and primitive facilities, but we were the only guests, and the lake – the lake was a huge donut, as much as 240 feet deep, with an island maybe two miles square. And the whole thing – lake and island and woods – was devoid of humanity. We settled in.

Your mother and I reveled in watching you and your sister prance barefoot down a shaded path to a sunlit beach where you built your castles and found exotic fauna. We explored the lake, and you thrummed on the bottom of the boat scaring the fish away. When the wind whipped up waves off the head of the island your mother insisted I turn back. We had a bouncy return trip, and I could see your white faces looking very small above the orange life jackets.

But the next day you didn’t have a life jacket . . .

There was a waterfall that skimmed warm water off a higher lake, making a swimming lagoon near the camp. A jetty divided it, and I had just gone off the open channel side to cool off, while your sister played on the shore. In the meantime you were telling your mother in the cabin: “It’s about time I learned to swim, I’m going down with daddy and struggle with it!”

Whatever possessed your truculent soul to march down that path toward such a hideous misjudgment, we’ll never know, but down you came to the other side of the jetty. Nor did I know just exactly when you entered the water, nor when the steeply sloped sand gave way under your feet. What I do know is that for some reason I felt compelled to swim around the end of that jetty, and that, even after my eyes were drawn to the cat that sat on the log there, I felt compelled to turn further. And that was when the riveting tragedy finally reached me.

You were just a pair of wrists and spread fingers above the water, and the merest glance of a nearly horizontal face, eyes wide in surprise, mouth gaping and twisted. Even now, I have to stop as I write this . . .

So.

I sprinted to you, maybe twenty yards, head up, and the most I could see was your blond hair massed just below the surface. There was no doubt in my mind you were swallowing water, and I knew it only take seconds sometimes. I remember thinking I’d have to give you mouth-to-mouth, and then my last stroke went down and under you, and my palm on your bottom shot you up and above the water. That critical split second of looking at you, as if on a pedestal, supplied indelible relief, because even though you were purple, your eyes were open and you coughed and gasped.

I have never felt such an intense rush of emotion, or so mixed. You clung to me, and I reassured you, and the first thing you said when you could breathe again was a very stoic and sincere: “You’re gonna hafta teach me to swim, Dad . . .”

Quailing inside, I stood you on the shore and went back in to show-off for you, so you wouldn’t be afraid of the water.

For the next two days that scene kept repeating with increasing vividness in my mind. I marvel at the timing. Had I looked a second or so late, I might never have seen you again in that black water.

What a blessing it is to fret over a mosquito bite on your downy forearm. The moments with you and your sister and your mother seem incredibly precious to me now. As the years pass, and you children grow into your own families, we’ll forget these things. That’s why I want to write this now. So you’ll remember a time and an event and how it made us aware of each other. So you’ll know – I love you, son.
Dad
p.s. I will teach you to swim!

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. My web site is below. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out the free sample chapter from my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF. And if you’d like to receive the monthly newsletter, ask to be added to the list at: mn333mn@earthlink.net

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/