Storytellersunplugged

Art imitates life. Sometimes life imitates art, too, and the lines between who you are and what you do get blurry.

 
So it’s ten PM on a Saturday night and I’m up on top of a mountain. Mount Pisgah, to be exact – a slithering hunk of rock that stretches across western North Carolina, bridled with a slice of the Blue Ridge Parkway and capped with a lone hotel named The Pisgah Inn. That’s where I am, tucked into room 217 with a glass of scotch (Glengoyne 21, if you must know – there are some things I just don’t fool around with) in my hand and various and sundry male types seated around me. In nine hours, I’m due to get married out back of the Inn, looking down on a wooded valley toward Waynesville. In the meantime, I’m drinking scotch with my best man, a couple of relatives from either side, and the nice young man who’s going to marry my fiancee’s niece.

And as we’re sitting there, sipping the single malt and engaging in various acts of manly bullshitting, my now-nephew Michael sticks his head out the door onto the room’s porch and says, “Hey, look at this! There’s a cloud rolling up the mountain.” Before any of us can get up, he’s a liar – the cloud has finished tumbling all the way up the slope and has poked a tendril into the room through the still open door. Someone opens the front door and the stream of fog pours through, a ghost train running non-stop from one side of the inn to the other.

From the next room, I can hear one of my sisters say, very loudly, “You know, this looks like something out of one of your books.” There’s a pause. “It’s kind of creepy.”

 
Sunday morning rolls around faster than sleep does. At 3 AM, I stick my head out the back door to see if there’s been any clearing in the weather. No dice: we’re still socked in with fog. I turn on the outside light and make shadow puppets into the cloud in hopes of embarrassing it sufficiently to dissipate. But there’s no such luck, so I kill the light and throw myself back into bed. An hour later, I check again, and the weather’s the same. In bed, I hear the howling of the wind coming from every which way, while the foglight seeps in around the door and through the shades. Something out there is feeling energetic, but every time I check the conditions, it’s the same.

The wedding, needless to say, is supposed to take place outdoors, in the bright sunshine that the weatherman had promised. Around 5 in the morning, I start getting nervous, as the fog hasn’t moved, and the wind has picked up. We’re doing a Humanist Jewish ceremony (most of the tradition, but no God to offend anyone’s sensibilities), which means that four of the male guests will be standing out there hanging onto the ceremonial canopy, or chuppah. A chuppah, for those of you who don’t know, is a tent held up by four poles. It represents the home that the bride and groom will make together. It also tends to catch an awful lot of air, and the drop behind the spot where we’re having the ceremony is pretty much a thousand feet straight down. I write a note to myself to warn the chuppah-bearers that if they start to get lift.

At quarter after five, the alarm goes off. My best man wakes up with a noise like a donkey in a blast furnace – sunrise weddings take a certain kind of dedication, after all, as well as a great deal of restraint when there’s a bottle of Glengoyne 21 about – and asks what the weather’s like.

“Miserable,” I tell him. “We’re still wrapped in fog.”

“How can you tell?” he asks me. “It’s freaking dark.”

I open the door, and once again the cloud sticks its nose in. “That’s how,” I say.

He sits up and starts mucking about with his suit. “Maybe the sun will burn it off.”

“I hope so.” I don’t sound very confident.

He turns to look at me. “You know, this is actually kind of appropriate for you, all things considered.”

 
Seven AM. We’re supposed to be getting ready for the pictures, which simply isn’t happening. Shapes loom up out of the mist and resolve themselves into siblings, in-laws, even my deeply worried two-year old nephew. I bounce back and forth between the site and my room, trying to convince the musicians that it will be all right to play outside and keep everything else on the rails. The best man is an absolute machine, organizing people and running messages back and forth.

People walk past me in the fog. Every so often, one stops and says, “You know, this would be great stuff for one of your books.”  Then they disappear into the mist again.

 
Quarter after eight, and we’re going to give it a go. The musicians have been strategically positioned out of the wind, a hotel staffer standing beside them with an umbrella to ward off any stray moisture off the trees. The rabbi is there, waiting under the wind-whipped chuppah as the four pole-bearers hang on for dear life. The mountain is wrapped in cloud, with visibility of maybe twenty feet. Beyond the hitching post that marks the edge of the area where we’ve set up, there’s nothing but soft grey and occasional silhouettes of trees. The guests are in place, and I’m under the chuppah with the best man, waiting. The maid of honor is there as well, looking back toward where the bride is waiting. Slowly, she emerges from the fog, the wind whipping her wrap around her so that she looks like she’s part of the mist, no way to tell where it leaves off and she begins.

I’m transfixed. She looks absolutely beautiful. My heart is in my throat.

And one of the guys holding up the chuppah leans forward and says, “You know, you ought to write a book about this."
 

I don’t know. Maybe I should write a book about it, or featuring it, or distilling it into something else. We all take our daily lives, the high points and the low ones and the stuff that drives us absolutely batty, and transform it into the stuff we put on the page. But the stuff on the page can pop up and inform what we do beyond the words, can have day-to-day life viewed through the prism of what we’ve written. It’s inevitable, and it’s appropriate. We are what we write just as much as we write what we are.

Maybe the wedding was like something out of one of my stories. Maybe it was like something I should write a book about. And if I do that, the lines get blurred once and for all between what’s inspiration and what’s observation, what’s art and what’s life and which imitates which. Not that it matters, though. In the end, they just might be one and the same.

——–
Richard E. Dansky
Writer, Game Designer, and Cad
(Not necessarily in that order)