Lost & Found in Fog, Part 2
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 2
Poetry Was the Plan
I spent my twenties in pursuit of art, or some such manifestation of eschewing conformity to craft a lifestyle were the opportunity to write was foundational to my existence. Like photographer/author Guy Tal, as he put it in his essay My Audience, “my primary . . . goal [was] simply to sustain the life I already” had. He called it his “mission statement.” Like Tal, I valued “stability” so as to maintain “my freedom to pursue meaningful and rewarding experiences.” Looking back, we were on the same mission. I willingly, deliberately lived in relative poverty for a long stretch, following the caprice of a muse I scarcely understood at the time, making me thirsty for experience outside the confines of the mundane birth, school, work, death. Once, with a one-way ticket, an army surplus backpack and little over $400, I hopped a train for the desert southwest, thousands of miles from my hometown, having never passed west of the Mississippi. I was going to live in a town that was little more than spot on a map, where I knew not a soul—long before a smartphone and a search engine could have introduced me to the area. I repeated that venture just a few years later, this time to the inland Pacific Northwest, after that muse had returned me to the east coast from the desert. I had worked in group homes and mental hospitals, was a dishwasher, a failed line cook, a mason’s tender, drove a forklift, among several other vocations, and generally tried to work only as much as I needed to keep a roof over my head, books on my shelf and writing supplies in hand—literally paper and pens. I lived in rented rooms, didn’t own a car for long stretches, riding my bike, at times 20 plus miles to work. I possessed little, my meager belongings—mostly vinyl records with no way to play them, books and journals and a pile of clothes—barely filled the back of the car I did not own. For several years, I did not even own the mattress upon which I slept. In other words, I was a poet and short story writer.
“Success” then was merely having the daily time, opportunity and mentality—the bandwidth, as we say now—to dedicate to writing, to creation. I did publish some, though not often—small press, burgeoning zines and the like. I read my work publicly quite often early on, the thrill of performance informing my writing in ways with which I was not always comfortable. I belonged to writing groups but grew dismayed at the notion of my work channeling itself into a middling path, becoming generic through groupthink. Late in my twenties I had the opportunity to add some formality to my pursuit of writing by enrolling in a distance learning program whose bedrock was writing. Founded by Peace Corp veterans back from Africa in the late 60s, there I studied all manner of writing. I tore through as much as I could. From indigenous artists worldwide to the likes of Amos Tutuola and Chester Himes, a forgotten African American protest writer of the mid 20th century, to some of the true greats of the short story—William Trevor to Bernard Malamud to Raymond Carver—and on into the creative nonfiction mastered by John McPhee. I wrote and wrote at Vermont College, bound to produce, among other obligations, 40 pages of “finished” writing per semester project—I regularly submitted twice and again that amount. While there, reading James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with Walker Evans’ exquisite images, I was reminded that photography, along with writing, had deep roots in my creative (well) being.
It was in elementary school that I was first introduced to the art of image making. Vague in my memory, glossed by time, I still recall the first image I ever made. It was under the tutelage of my second-grade teacher and her aging 4 x 5 field camera—nothing less than a magic box to me then. My black and white image, to the casual observer, was of a grand Victorian home perched in a small hill. The home, rising behind the bulwark of a rounded cement retaining wall, rose from the bottom of the frame, leading one’s eye to the peaks of a slate roof adorned with a large weathervane of an eagle in flight. The house, grand, somewhat forlorn, filled much of the frame, but, for me, the image was all about the tree, an American Elm, the Massachusetts state tree. It was under the shade of an American Elm in Cambridge, a few miles south of where my elm stood, that George Washington took command of America’s first army on July 3, 1775. My elm, a regal verdant firework, splayed its crown, up and over the gable peak, in an explosion of leaves spreading out and up, flirting with the rooftop eagle, frozen in flight. Though that image was made nearly 50 years ago, its imprint has never left my mind, though I admit, it probably looks much better there than if it were in my hand—one of the gifts of memory, seeing things from the timeline of the past as we’d like them to be rather than they likely were. Even so, that tree is firmly stood at the beginning of the timeline of my pursuit of creative image making. A timeline that, in fits and starts, decades later, led me to that swath cut through the Cape Cod National Seashore, fog enshrouding the scene, much like the fog that would set upon me—on my creative drive—on my timeline from lost to found.
In Part 3, enter the innkeeper with a story I didn’t know I needed to hear in that moment. A story that changed my day and has lingered with me as a reminder—that which is lost may be found or, just maybe, never truly lost, only unseen, hidden.