“Every boat possesses an imaginary black box, a sort of bank account in which points are kept. In times of emergency, when there is nothing more to be done in the way of sensible seamanship, the points in the black box can buy your way out of trouble.”
This odd but useful bit of advice comes about midway through Philip Gerard’s “The Patron Saint of Dreams,” a collection of essays about choices, rescue, survival, identity and those often arbitrary decisions that end up determining how -- or if -- we survive in the world.
We’re more likely to weather a crisis, Gerard says, if we’re prepared and ready. “Which means, of course, filling up that black box every chance you get. Not just on your boat, either.” But what about moments when the box is empty?
Each of these 15 investigations circles a shift in the atmosphere when the game changes and fate steps in unchallenged, when a split-second decision or nature’s sudden storms cut us off from where we were headed -- safe harbor, our hoped-for future, the person we always knew ourselves to be.
Beginning with looming hurricane weather on the south coast of North Carolina, the roller coaster of preparation in “What They Don’t Tell You About Hurricanes” sets the tone of the book: No matter how much you think you know about what’s coming, there will be “freaky contradictions of weather” and unanticipated developments: heat, a plague of bees, miracles.
In “The Thirteenth Hour,” Gerard sifts through a 1997 investigation in which a father and his two sons and nephew were drowned after a weekend sailboat trip turned deadly. Several casual missteps -- the missing elements in the father’s “black box” -- combined with a stormy night caused the tragedy. But the Coast Guard’s failure to act on the boys’ SOS echoes a theme that repeats in other essays here: “That thin desperate voice through the midnight static” that alerts us to a chance to rescue someone -- or ourselves.
These faint signals reappear in the powerful “Bear Country,” easily the centerpiece of the book. It revisits the author’s near-fatal heart attack juxtaposed with a reckless camping trip to Yellowstone Park at age 19, when his refusal to listen to any safety alerts lands him in a battle for his life strangely related to the one 30 years later.
“The nature of doom,” Gerard writes, is that “it hardly ever starts out as doom but masquerades as a lark.”
The least successful pieces are those that explore messages from beyond -- a Ouija board message, an unexplained cellar light, a phantasmagorical boat, a scratchy SOS from thousands of miles away. Efforts to tie these phenomena together never quite progress beyond tall tales -- though the author delivers them with the spooky panache of a master storyteller.
Originally published in small press magazines in the ’90s and early 2000s and collected here for the first time, many of these articles reveal a secondary focus: the nature of identity, beginning with the title essay, where the author struggles to write about his mother, whose average life -- “In most ways that would matter to a biographer, my mother was not special” -- was anything but average to her son.
She was his patron saint, Gerard writes, “who blessed me on my adventures from the time I was a boy, who encouraged me to find a larger world than the one in our neighborhood, our small town, our featureless state.” He speculates on who his mother -- stricken with Parkinson’s disease -- might have been in different circumstances, with an education and better opportunities. But words are notoriously unwieldy; he can find none large enough to describe the woman he lost, one piece at a time. His failure to write about her becomes his story.
Another life, other chances, the disappointments or dark secrets that affect the trajectory of who we turn out to be -- Gerard returns to these over and over, in stories about baseball players who “almost made it,” an old soldier carrying a lifelong shame about his part in WWII, a humble schoolmaster buried in a rural North Carolina churchyard who is rumored to have been the legendary general of the French Revolution, Marshal Ney.
The worldly goods of a young chess player, abandoned in the crawlspace of an old house -- clothing, new textbooks, chess trophies, wallet and driver’s license -- inspire another investigation into the abandonment of a former life. Yet in his portrait of poet and writer James Dickey, Gerard suggests there’s no real escape from ourselves, regardless of our attempts to vanish or hide: our scars and our choices, good and bad, accidental and intentional, eventually coalesce into our true faces.
It’s only fitting that the man who has done so much to popularize the genre now shows us how it’s done. Gerard has been a kind of patron saint himself of narrative nonfiction, a literary form he has been defining, teaching and writing about since the 1990s. His books on the subject, “Writing Creative Nonfiction,” co-edited with poet Carolyn Forche and published in 2001, and “Creative Nonfiction” (2004) are still two of the most often cited and highly recommended references for those interested in the genre.
Philip Gerard chairs the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and co-edits the literary journal Chautauqua.
Nonfiction
"The Patron Saint of Dreams"
Philip Gerard
Hub City Press, $17.95, 200 pages
About the Author
