The Story Must Change

Every summer my family and I take a vacation to our cabin in Michigan. It’s a tiny cabin that sits between two small lakes. I haven’t gone a single summer of my life without visiting this special spot.

Most of my strongest childhood memories come from these cabin trips. It’s a child’s dream come true; fishing, daydreaming, and exploring the thick woods and wild apple trees that surround the lakes.

A trip to the cabin would not be complete without my father’s retelling of his scary stories before bed each night. His most well known story is called, “The Great White Ape”.

The story is given differently each time, but the plot always remains: The weather is dark and stormy. We find a castle and enter to find a giant white ape in a cage with a sign that reads, “Do NOT touch the Great White Ape.” Well someone always ends up touching the Ape and chaos ensues. The Great White Ape breaks from the cage and chases us around the house until he catches us. Tension mounts and the end seems near— it’s in that moment that the Ape reaches out and taps us with one finger, saying, “Tag! You’re it.”

There are many reasons why this oral literary tradition has made such a profound impact upon me, but what always stunned me is the fact that the story always changed! When new brothers were born, new characters were added. Details about how we found the castle or how the Ape was first touched were also apt to change. And this is what made our tradition so special. I learned an important concept: art and literature adapt. It’s this aspect of change that makes life and storytelling so mystifying. There is always a new story to be told.

Safe Among the Indians

When I was a boy my father read to me at night from a curious history called Among the Shoshones. Elijah Wilson was a Mormon settler who, as a young boy, found himself adopted into an Indian tribe for many years. I don't even remember how. Not only did he survive, but he thrived. How cool was that! They didn't scalp him; they taught him and trained him up and adventure ensued. In one episode, he rode himself raw on a horse, and the Shoshones had him soak himself in the briny waters of the Great Salt Lake to heal him up. I'd tasted the water of the Great Salt Lake. I bet that stung.

You can "go native" as a reader, inhabiting the life of someone else. I've done it many times. Reading is an act of sympathy that takes you to the alien world that is someone else's experience. It doesn't have to be Indians or a wilderness frontier -- any imagined world makes you a foreigner, and a book gives you a travel visa. That can be dangerous. I still shake when thinking about that criminal autobiography I took off the shelf at Whitmore Library in Salt Lake City in which a murder was described. I wished I never read that.

Overall, I feel pretty safe about traveling the literary wilderness -- not because I'm an adult or any other reason. My safe travel through imagined worlds I credit to my father. I can still see his fingers smoothing the pages, inserting a bookmark after tucking me in, pulling up the green quilt my mother had tied in wooden frames set up in our living room. It's okay to go among the Indians when your father takes you on the journey.