The Marsh Pond

We lived in a country house on several acres of land, and there was a marsh pond towards the back of the property.  A couple came to visit us from the city, and I took them back to show them the pond.  It was late September and cool.  It was early in the evening, but it was already dark.  There were tall cattails and weeds on either side of the path that led down to the shore of the pond.  The ground was soft and wet there and my shoes made deep prints in the mud.  We could hear the bugs in the tall weeds and the frogs out on the pond.  It was a clear night and the golden moon was just above the water with a bright star beside it, its light flickering off the pond.

As I reached the edge of the water, I turned back to say something to the couple that had followed me, but I found now that there was a whole crowd behind me, families with tents and RVs setting up barbecues, their kids lingering about or running along the shore or hiding from each other in the cattails.  They all worked through the night, establishing their camps.  There was the soft ting of hammers driving tent stakes into the ground.  People shivered in light jackets and flashight beams played about in the sharp morning air.  Someone set up a covered pavilion with picnic tables beneath it and we all gathered there for breakfast as the sun rose over the tall weeds.  Some of the kids went out to swim in the pond first thing in the morning and someone put a tin pot over a campfire to make coffee.

More and more people arrived as the day wore on.  They came in trucks and campers, setting up tents on the outskirts of the growing camp.  The day was warm for being so late in the season.  By the late afternoon, the kids had gotten drowsy and there were only a few of them floating lazily out in the pond.  Their parents called them up for dinner under the pavilion as the setting sun glared low over the water.  After dinner, someone made one last pot of coffee as the sun dipped below the horizon and the evening grew cooler.  It got harder to see each other's faces as it grew dark and people started turning in for the night, climbing into their tents and campers to sleep.  Some of the smaller kids cried, because they were tired or they didn't want the day to end or both.  Their parents hushed them and the hush fell over the whole camp and the bugs and the frogs took up their song again.  I took a folding lawn chair down to the edge of the water and planted it's legs there in the mud, and I sat down to finish my coffee and stare out at the crescent moon over the pond.

Roadside Assistance

I was driving along a desolate stretch of freeway in the dim, early morning mist.  My car started to buckle and hiss and clunk and shake.  The word "emergency" started flashing in red on the display in the middle of the dashboard.  I pulled off onto the shoulder and looked to the display for more information about what went wrong.  The display showed the graphic of an engine with a spinning fan on the front of it, and the fan seized up, the blades going all twisted and crooked, and smoke rose from the graphic of the engine.  After a few puffs of smoke, cobwebs appeared all around the engine along with a few curvy tendrils that represented tall grass.  As the graphic of the engine began to shake and sputter and sink into the ground, sharply outlined birds flew from it in all directions.

Once the birds had flown from the screen and the engine had sank completely out of sight, only the lines representing the grass remained.  They seemed to waver in the wind.  And then, from the right of the display, a graphic of four horses came galloping, drawing a covered wagon behind them.  A skeleton sat at the head of the wagon, whipping the horses and driving them on.  It turned its head to look at me, the skull grinning, the teeth gnashing.  Then it drove the horses and wagon off the left side of the screen, and there was just a graphic of a puff of dust left in their wake.  This puff of dust stayed on the screen, pulsating and flashing red.  I wasn't sure what any of this meant, but it definitely didn't seem good.  It was pretty clear that I needed to call a tow truck.

Cover Art

I was hired to participate in a photography session.  They were taking pictures for a book cover.  A bunch of us showed up for the session, and they put us all in a large hotel suite.  They told us to just act natural, have conversations with each other, sit at a table eating a bowl of cereal, whatever, while a cameraman buzzed around the room filming everyone.  They were taking a cinema verite' type of approach.  The idea was that the cameraman would record hours and hours of footage, and then they would look back through it all and find the single frame that struck the photographer as the most "real" and the one that best captured the essence of what the book cover was supposed to express.

I didn't like this way of doing things at all.  I argued that the image quality wouldn't be as good as it would be with a single, properly lit, high gloss photograph.  I argued that they wouldn't get the stylized look needed for a book cover by just sifting through frames of random footage.  I argued that their pretensions of things being "natural" and "real" were pointless because the setting itself was already staged.  We had all just been put into this room and paid to act "normal." The more they strove for some ideal of truth, the more the whole thing became a lie.

I suggested doing things differently.  I suggested that we should all gather for a normal group portrait, or maybe we could all be arranged in a tableaux of some sort.  I imagined us all dressed in period clothes, arranged in a cluster at the center of the photograph, with our backs to one another, fascinated by the decorative iconography that would frame the photograph once it was placed on the cover.  We would be peering up though monocles at sketched cherubs and harps; some of us would be tentatively reaching for quills and stars.  These sketches would be gilded and laced with flourishes and streaming Latin banners, while we would be rendered in the middle in black and white, as though our images had been cut from the newspaper and framed in gold.

The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that this was the right cover for the book, that this, in fact, was the only possible cover for the book.  I even became convinced that there was no question that this was how the book's author and publisher wanted it.  It had to be this.  Once I saw it so clearly, so vividly, in my mind, there was no other way.  I yelled at the cameraman.  I protested and stamped my foot, almost to the point of tears.  But none of them would listen.  The cameraman just kept circling me, filming my outburst from every angle,  still looking for that single moment, that one frame of undeniable truth.