Alright, the votes are in, the discussion didn’t materialize like I hoped, and I’m here to blow the lid off my Seven Truths and One Lie. But first a few prefatory remarks.

First. Overall, I don’t think I accomplished exactly what I had hoped to. I sought to pull the wool over my own eyes and generate at least one micro-short story. Unfortunately, the problem that dogs my writing – and other parts of my life – came to the fore. I’m a profoundly passive person, who finds observation, description, and analysis more interesting than any kind of action.

In my anecdotes I found it interesting that there is exactly one active character, my father, who in two stories variously drags me fearlessly into the middle of the Mexican desert to La Cantina or perilously pulls an imperialist prank on a hapless East African. Although I wrote in first person, there is never any interaction, and in three of the stories my seeking solitude is the primary motivation of the observations that comprise the bulk of the tales.

Certain persons who know me well in real life – *cough* Eric and Ken – will probably find themselves bemused by this. Ken’s followed me into an active riot zone, clouds of tear gas brilliant white against the night sky, illuminated by banks of playfield lights as bright as day. This was at my initiative, following a boisterously contentious dinner among activists and residents of Seattle during the WTO events here. “Bang!” went the grenades in the distance, and I had to be physically restrained from charging off to the scene.

Eric’s not only heard my travel tales but my many misadventures as a callow yoot, some of which I should probably develop. There’s the time a certain person (a convicted murderer on the lam from Florida, the grapevine later insisted) held a kid out the second story apartment window by his feet in a dispute over drug monies said to be owed, for example (I was nether present nor involved, may I hasten to add).

I was surprised to see themes emerge with such clarity: imperialism and colonialism, war and military might, solitude, the desert, and flight are clearly the things I have been thinking about ever since I was a child.

My personal favorite – and the piece which is most fully developed – is The Wind and Rain. Still, the piece is just the setting for a short story, the armature and stage on which persons might sing their little songs of mating and death. And that’s the problem with all these pieces. There’s no actor, just a setting.

That said, you people elected The Tumor head of the class. This story is not the lie. Each observation in the piece is factually a part of my memories of Japan. I do have recollections of the outdoors in Japan – usually in the context of a visit to a tourist destination, such as the temple complex at Nara – but because the memory of that man’s face was so stark and uncomfortable, I deliberately chose to write about what I perceived then as the Great Indoors. To this day when the SF trope of the world-city passes under my eyes in reading, it is the endless layer-cake of under Japan I visualize.

Felicity, bless her book lovin’ soul, fingered the ringer, but was buffaloed by what she visualized as a Deltawinged dive-bomber screaming down at my family by their car. In fact, the bomber was simply flying as low to the ground as possible – possibly approaching us from below the crest of the hill on which we’d parked, at a potential altitude of as low as 25 feet. Which is why we heard it so long before we saw it. The plane had probably begun to pull up a bit when he saw us, before clawing his way back up to the sky just after.

The lie, dear hearts? Well, it’s two-fold. I was frankly disappointed that no-one noticed my giant sign, planted in the Ethiopian highlands on the road to Axum. The sign? My father, after all, told the collector of The Toll a sort of lie with his crazy, dominant jabbering. That lie, as all good lies, encapsulated the truth: white men who gesture angrily on dusty third world roads are best heeded, as history has shown. Unspeakable violence may ensue.

My own lie, however, is of a different order. My parents lived and worked in Addis Ababa in the early 1960s, before I was born. The story as I wrote it here is almost exactly as my father can still tell it, to great comedic effect, amazing, pseudo-linguistic jabbering included. The details of my mother’s distress, and the need to keep the car from bursting into a storm of questions are my own fabricated contributions.

So, thanks again to those of you who dropped by and registered a vote or a thought on these, and thanks also to those of you who were interested enough to link over. I will be conducting more exercises in fictioneering here; I’m far from ready to discuss the techniques and goals I want to pursue, however.

RECAP TIME!

I hope you enjoyed my travel stories.

To review: last Saturday I announced a weeklong special, Seven Truths and One Lie, in which I proposed a fiction-writing excersise for myself that you were invited to observe and comment on. Specifically, I was hoping to fool myself into crafting some fiction based on one of my many travel experiences.

Unfortunately, the name of the event led more than one person to expect that I would write eight essays, one crafted from whole cloth. I had never intended to do so, but by the time I realized I’d confused some readers, I was deep into the project and didn’t wish to explain here.

At any rate, now you know: there are only seven tales. So where’s the lie? It’s there; but to be sure, each of the seven tales is also a true and factual account. In a way, I’m disappointed in myself for not being able to get fictional enough, but as I noted at the beginning of the project, I freeze when I think I’m going to “write fiction,” absurdly enough for the man who chronicled the history of Kensapoppin’.

So here’s what I’d like you to do.

Look over the list, with my one-sentence summaries, and compare the stories in your mind. Was there one in particular that felt different or rang false in some way? Feel free to ask questions in the comments section, preferably in this entry so that everyone can benefit. I’ll answer in the comments section, truthfully, and with reasonable helpfulness.

At the same time, feel free to vote in the poll, just below. Currently I have not activated the poll’s lock-out, so those of you who’d like to indulge in the great American tradition of stuffing the ballot box may fire away. The poll also links to the entries. I just set it up; and while the code is straightforward enough it’s, uh, rather tersely documented, so if it blows up real good, I may disappear it.

(near the Outer Banks, North Carolina)

The day after Christmas we drove out to the coast, the countryside slouching to card-table flats, tin-roof tobacco barns dotting the plain. An angry-looking white man in a rust-specked Cutlass insistently refused to let a black family in a late-model Ford pass, changing lanes with vitriolic swerves. We came across the first of the many coastal inlets that add hours to any coastal drive in the Carolinas and I eagerly examined the maps to learn if it was this inlet that held Teach’s Hole, where Blackbeard met his end. We were far afield.

We drove on through the quiet, bare-limbed landscape, ancient cemeteries flashing in the slanting winter sun, to arrive at the colonial capital of North Carolina, a Georgian mansion dressed in holiday finery, wreaths of real fruit and evergreen atop the locked gates and fences. We strolled through the herb garden, cold, considering our options.

We determined to head north, passing by the site of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, near the location of Teach’s Hole, before seeking a hotel on one of the Outer Banks themselves. By late afternoon we’d reached the first of these destinations. Pulling into the park, we were taken by surprise to note that we were the only people about. It was a holiday, after all.

We wandered around the park, noting the signage and general lack of reconstructions and archeological digs common in such places, before coming to a surprising edifice partially cantilevered out beyond the rocky shore of the island itself. It was an elaborate stage set, constructed solidly of wood, designed to give the impression of a pioneer stockade and blockhouse. We clambered about it, peeking backstage, bemused by the irony of finding the Lost Colony abandoned, no mysterious “Croatan”, no “McDonald’s,” no “Wal-Mart” carved into the wood of the stage. The moment of my culture’s troubled birth enveloped me.

The park itself came into being as a result of a summer-stock drama reimagining the story of the vanished colony on the very spot where the 1500-odd colonists lived, and vanished. In respect of the heritage of the production, the park co-exists with the play.

As I trod the boards, musing on the theatrical fertility of Elizabethan England, I gazed north and west to see the low, sandy line of the Outer Banks wink in the unseasonably bright sunlight. As I looked, I saw a white tower blink as clouds scudded by the sun. I took it for a lighthouse, but then reconsidered: the object did not sport the iconic striping of the Banks’ lighthouses, familiar from menus, signs, rural mailboxes, windsocks, bumper-stickers, and so forth. It was a pale cream color, not quite the yellowish tone of sand.

With a start I realized I was looking at the 60-foot granite monument erected at Kill Devil Hills to commemorate the first flight of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, 96 years and nine days prior. As I stood on the empty stage of the Lost Colony, the very birthplace of the Twentieth Century was visible across a few miles and five hundred years.

The next day, the unseasonable weather was gone and the more usual spitty, wind-blown conditions prevailed. We parked in the lot and noted that the park was open, and filed into the interpretive center to observe the Wrights’ memorabilia, including a full-scale operational reconstruction of a 1902-season glider. A park docent demonstrated what the Wrights’ guidance technique of wing warping truly meant. The wings twisted organically as he slipped his hips from side to side, bowing like giant cupped hands with a great woody chunk.

The grounds about the center were empty due to the wind and rain, chilly and strong, pinking the greetings of the winter Atlantic into my face. I leaned into the wind, working my miserable way down from the 90-foot hill on which the monument stood, supposed by the builders to be the very place that the first flight took place. The information at the park, however, claimed the dune had migrated by the time the pylon was raised in the 1930’s and that the tiny canvas-and-wood shack visible to the seaward of the great dune was the most probable location of the Wright’s winter camp and first flight. From the height, I had been unable to spy the stage on which I’d stood the day before, my peerings defeated by the misty white lashings of the weather.

Gratefully, I stepped out of the wind and rain into the careful recreation of the 1903 cabin, each item neatly stocked and ranked with the appropriate precision of the engineer. Turning to look back into the blow, I noted a short, metal-topped wooden rail a few feet beyond the door of the cabin, about an inch wide along the top surface and about two-and-one half inches tall, running for fifteen feet or so in the sandy scrub. I took it for a path boundary from an earlier landscaping effort, overlooked by strapped groundskeepers.

For no particular reason I walked out to the rail. I began to teeter my way along it, balancing arms out, leaning into the wind.

The wind caught me and steadied me as I moved down the rail; I raised my head and the rain spattered my glasses and stung my face. Suddenly, I realized this rail was a recreation, as the cabin, of the rail the Wrights rode into the sky on December 17, 1903. The river of wind I faced and leaned on was the wind that launched us to the sky. Since earliest childhood, I’d ridden its’ tributaries around the world. The rushing sound of it ouside the portholed cabin remains a drowsy lullaby for me to this day.

I let the wind take my arms and raise them above my head.

(Along the border of France and Germany, on the way to Calais)

As we drove through the countryside, the green of high summer on the rolling hills, glistening like jewels in the sunlight, I noticed odd, rounded depressions in the verdant slopes. As we continued along, I began to realize they were everywhere.

The plantings on these hills appeared to be primarily grasses, and here and there farm equipment and picturesquely abandoned stone houses stood marooned in the fields. The frequency of the mysterious bowls increased as we moved further north and east, toward the Channel crossing between Calais and Dover.

Around a bend and off across a couple of fields stood not a single house, but a cluster of buildings, tumbled into ruin. With a start I realized that the tallest of the buildings was the remnant of a church, and the rest of the buildings about it had once formed a village center.

The meaning of the circular depressions surrounding us came into focus. These were shellholes, huge divots of earth from bombardments past. Romantically, I thought to associate them with the first World War. When one of the abandoned examples of farm gear proved to be a Sherman tank, slumping into rust amid the waving leaves of grass, I realized the unlikelihood of that.

It’s possible, however, that the battle whose traces I was seeing was indeed from the first war, and not the second, despite my recollection of the tank. There are memorial parks in France in which Great War shell holes remain visible, around the site of the great battle of the Somme.

I don’t recall any further discussion of this at the time. We drove on through the peaceful, prosperous landscape.

(I’ve violated my word count rule, apologies. The anecdote was thematically appropriate to follow yesterday’s; and after all, brevity is good, right?)