Lost & Found in Fog, Part 1
In this blog series, I trace how a lost wedding ring, an innkeeper’s tale, and the story of Thomas Cole’s Oxbow helped me find my way through a creative fog—revealing that inspiration, though often hidden, still waits along the timeline from lost to found.
Part 1
Buried in Fog, Expecting to Be Found
Elation welled up in me as I spotted, glinting in the bright midday sun, nestled in a sandy rut, the shimmering, threadlike golden crescent of metal, nearly the color of the sand that cradled it. That sandy rut was one of a pair that, together, carved a road of sorts. That road bisected the swath of land that lay under a length of a high-voltage power lines. A strip of spongy undergrowth stretched below the powerlines that slashed through the Cape Cod National Seashore. The power lines lay adjacent to a tangled and stunted forest of oak and pine that sat between my nearby motel and Marconi Beach. I had been stood there the evening before, suspended it seemed, on the springy undergrowth, my tripod up to its ankles in vegetation. I was photographing those pylons and power lines as fog shrouded the scene. The fog providing an element essential for finding my composition—while, lost in my own ‘fog’ of concentration and creation, I unknowingly dropped my wedding band.
That elation—pure jubilation—at discerning the shining curve of gold snugged in sand immediately filled the pool of despair that eddied and deepened during the sixteen or so hours since I grasped that I had lost my wedding band—a ring of gold engraved with an intertwining dog motif said to symbolize longevity. It had been several hours after returning from the power lines that I finally realized my ring was gone, my finger bare. I had spent those hours oblivious to the fact it was missing from my finger, not entirely surprising as I often took it off to cook or wash up, setting it down for stretches of time. It was not uncommon for panic to take hold before I recalled where I had placed it. That day, without it, I had ambled around Wellfleet, Truro and Eastham, scouting image making locations. Without it, I ate fried clams at a rustic clam shack. Without it, I smoked a cigar in the open air at the edge of the forest by my motel, John Coltrane for company. Without it I packed my gear for an early morning start, my finger ignorantly bereft of its life partner. It wasn’t until later, a baseball game murmuring in the background, as I was readying to turn in for an early start the next morning, that I thumbed my finger only to find it missing. Panic was staved off as I searched, mollified by my habit of removing the ring only to find it placed nearby. Despair settled in as my search became frantic. Bags were disemboweled, pockets and pouches filleted by fraught fingers, blankets and pillows upturned and shaken like pickpockets in fables. No wedding band turned up. It was then that I started trudging along a timeline of loss and grief, gloom coming in like the tide. At some point along that timeline of despair, as place after place I searched turned up nothing, I conceded grimly that it was truly lost. I had recognized that I would live my days out, forever worrying the spot where the ring had been, thumbing the empty space like a wound that would never heal. I comprehended longevity as I never had.
During that time without my wedding band, in those ensuing hours after I discovered the loss, I was on a journey with an end I could not fathom. I was traversing an arc of time—a timeline from lost to found. It was an arc of emotion from grief and sadness and remorse, to glints of optimism and a shimmer of hope offered by an innkeeper’s own story of lost to found that led, ultimately, to complete euphoria. That timeline from lost to found could not reveal itself while I was on that joyless ride. On that ride along the timeline from lost to found, a fog of sorts encroached, eclipsing hope, shielding me from inspiration. From complete ignorance I slid helplessly into entrenched despair. That entrenched despair sublimated into a vapor of rapturous elation when I came across that shimmering crescent in the sandy rut.
Looking back at my life, I understood that I had been on that timeline before—from lost to found—when I left behind creativity for career, art for law. And like my wedding band, while ultimately I recognized what was lost, I was evermore ignorant that I was on a timeline back to found. This is so because, well, found was never an option when I left my ramshackle but ardent dedication to writing—to creativity—as the focus of my day-to-day life, for a career in law. And who could have surmised that my finding once again that ‘ramshackle but ardent dedication’ to creativity—to writing, in particular—would be through the glass of a 16-35mm Zeiss lens and a passion for image making rediscovered at the age of fifty.
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The parallels between “losing” my creative impulse, or more aptly, my ability—and inspiration—to pursue it, and “losing” my wedding band speak to a compelling dynamic. A dynamic that, I offer, afflicts all artists. From those dedicated to their pursuits at all costs, as I once was. To those who succumb to the needs of stability, family, what have you, and who shelve those impulses, to one extent or another, in service of meeting those needs, as I had. In short, inspiration, like my wedding band, is never really lost for most of us who shelve creative impulses—for whatever reason—to one degree or another. We may feel that inspiration and creativity are lost, just out of reach, perhaps, as they tug at us during odd, inopportune moments. But much like my wedding band, those impulses to create were always there for me, somewhere, as I believe they are for all “creative types” no matter how far away they may feel. Even if we cannot see or feel them, they surely lay wedged in a sandy rut, shrouded in fog, mere steps from ourselves and our dedication to the banalities and joys of family, friends, careers and the stability that comes from conformity. I’d like to think that my creativity—my drive to make things from nothing, things that pertain to splendor and the novelty of the discovery of form from formlessness—was merely misplaced, just out of reach and out of sight in a fog. And that there it lay, like my wedding band, waiting for happenstance to provide a key to unlocking a route back, to finding again that which, in retrospect, was never truly lost, fog notwithstanding.
In Part 2 I talk about how, in my twenties, I chose a life of creative freedom over comfort, working just enough to support my writing. I recount how I traveled across the country with a backpack, a sleeping bag and a little money, chasing experience and inspiration where it led me. I explain how that path began with a childhood photograph of an elm tree—an image that still anchors my lifelong pursuit of art.