story

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us ...

-Rebecca Solnit

I was asked, this past week, were we here on vacation?  To which I immediately answered no -- well before I had a chance to realize how strange it sounded.  But I don’t see these expeditions as recreation in the conventional sense.  Maybe that’s a problem ...  but to me vacation is a week in the sand with a stack of books, empty agenda, little ventured, simple gain of relaxation, rest, renewal.  Other trips hold more than that.  Adventure, adversity, opportunity -- a quest for ...  for what?  The MacGuffin could be anything really, because it loses its significance as the story begins to unfold.  It’s the action, the characters, that make the meaning.  The place and play between the place and person, and person and person.  The story.

And so it’s interesting really, that in literary terms the denouement of a story is the final resolution, the moment when all of the details fall into place, order emerges.  And yet denouement, in French, means the untying, unravelling.  Which feels to me like unpacking from the trip -- first the physical things we carry, clothes, gear and then the intangible things that also return with us in the form of thoughts and memories, emotions, all tumbling into the pile to be sorted.  This process is complicated by the fact that the unpacking of the intangibles is, by nature, indeliberate and it is unclear as to just what and how much of it there is, and when it will reveal itself.  These fragments of memory, anecdote, happiness, regret ... steep cliffs, unfathomable colors, sore muscles, short tempers, long talks, sunsets, northern lights, shooting stars, the brief interval between the dying light of one day and the first flicker of the next, constellations of mosquito bites, deep water, cold water, falling water, drifting sands that won’t hold footprints, cold beers and campfires, marshmallows, al fresco dining, dust, heat, lake breezes, thrills and tears, baptisms, epiphanies, mysteries...  unravelled into a tangle that I want badly to take and weave into a single frame that might tell a tidy story but it doesn’t seem to want to work itself out that way.  I have to be content then to simply pour it all out ... and to let the story continue to tell itself.