Linguists remind us that storytelling is as old as our ability to produce successive sounds to convey meaning — as if our hominid brains could remember a time when our ancestors first sat around a fire describing how they had gotten that mastodon to run into a cleverly disguised pit just prior to dinner. Actually I am making this up; I don’t know anything about the history of linguists, but that’s not the point of this story.
Most of us spent whatever time we had in school learning how “write,” not learning how to tell a story. I know I never had any teacher or professor teach me how to write a story. I was taught how to write a research paper, how to write an essay, how to construct paragraphs with lead-in theme sentences, and other useful bits and pieces. But not how to tell a story. I suppose if you are in a creative writing program or journalism school, you learn something about how to tell a good story, but not the rest of us.
As I reflect on the cultural DNA of the Island Institute, I am reminded of how important storytelling has always been to us. Highly improbably, we launched the organization three decades ago with a storytelling publication, Island Journal, which we risked almost two-thirds of the first year’s budget to produce. Kind of an all or nothing strategy that I would not recommend to any other start-up nonprofit.
When we started the organization, we recognized that island communities were different than mainland communities; that islanders were intimately familiar with the notion of cycles — seasonal, sidereal, and tidal; that islanders instinctively appreciated the interrelated nature of island life; and that isolation reinforces both creativity and idiosyncrasy. We also knew these were pretty abstract ideas that were difficult to describe except through stories of real people whose lives allowed others to see important truths in their lives.
I had come to appreciate storytelling out of sheer desperation. Four years out of college with nothing to show for myself except several seasonal rounds of pulpwood-cutting, blueberry-raking and clam-digging, I had gone back to get a forestry degree to be able to work in the north Maine woods —actually the North Maine Woods — which I imagined to be peopled by the descendants of characters that Henry David Thoreau had described the previous century.
As a district forester for a timber company in Greenville, Maine, however, the primary instruction that the district manager provided each Monday at 6:00 a.m. when we met in the small office trailer was that I should be headed north out of town by 7:00, and if I were back before noon on Friday, there’d better be a damn good reason for it. Otherwise, I was to chase French Canadian skidder crews through the woods to give them thoughtful tree-cutting prescriptions, which they would pretend they did not understand. Then Friday morning, after the French Canadians had hightailed themselves back across the woods roads into Quebec, I headed back into town over a hundred miles of rutted dirt roads.
One of the first expressions I heard back in town described someone with “a face like ten miles of bad road.” After just a few weeks on the job, I had a deep appreciation of what this meant: it meant you wanted to punch his lights out. I was a little bit out of my league in that department, since boxing had faded in the schools I had attended around the time of Teddy Roosevelt. Instead, I began to long for the salty tongue of the Maine coast where the language was sometimes violent, but the culture was usually benign, rather than the other way around.
So after a year in the woods north of Greenville, I knew I was a goner. Sixty thousand dollars of a graduate school education down the two-holer out back. I had no job; no prospects; no plan. Hard realities to convey to earnest folks back at home who just wanted a story for their eldest son—any story, so long as it was a narrative they could tell themselves and their friends. To the extent that I had any thought at all about my future, I thought that after six years of post secondary schooling, I ought to be able to write some kind of story in the English language and be able to sell it somewhere.
Right around the time I was planning my graceless decampment, the town of Greenville had just completed the construction of a new sewage treatment plant. In order to clean up the polluted waters of Moosehead Lake from the many straight pipes that flowed into the lake, the town’s engineering consultants had sold folks on building an expensive, technologically sophisticated plant they promised would be the “Cadillac of all sewage treatment plants.” You can imagine what happened. The sophisticated technology failed to work properly and instead of diffused pollution all around the southern end of Moosehead Lake, it now all collected at the end of pipe right off the town landing. Houston, we have a problem.
The hubris of the engineers seemed like something out of a Greek tragedy to me, so I thought I had the makings of a fig leaf to cover my failed forestry career if I could just peddle this story to a magazine. But I knew I needed a catchy title. I explained the idea to a hard-bitten old newspaper reporter friend and in less than two seconds, he had the title: “When the Cadillac Hit the Fan.” I hardly needed anything else to sell it.
And the rest is (his)story, as they say.