Rose Baker -- Yellowstone: "Are you telling this story or am I?"

 In class, Dr. Redick discussed the founding of Yellowstone National Park, and the campfire version of the story that the tour guides won’t share. Dr. Redick’s take was that regardless of the accuracy of the story, it reflected the deeper, poetic truth of the man’s experience of the event, and was as valuable, and perhaps more so, than a prosaically accurate version.

I’m conflicted, because it’s true that there is no substitute to a story so evocative. It draws you into the passion of the event, conveying not only the facts but the purpose and the beauty behind the endeavor. Doesn’t enslavement to the arbitrary details of an event hinder their communication of the actual heart of the story? At the same time, I generally feel more comfortable with fiction doing the creative inspiring and historical accounts sticking to plain reality. I find reality very inspiring in its plain, unattractive scattered state. What happens in reality is simple, quiet, and oftentimes good things happen without a perceived beautiful moment behind the grand plan or purpose. Maybe the concept of Yellowstone didn’t come about in a single idyllic night around the fire. Maybe the inspiration took shape through formal letters, in ledgers, in harsh disagreements between surveyors with muddy boots and grubby compasses, or in droning proceedings back in DC.

To me, the ability to know the gritty, prosaic truth of a momentous moment gives me hope when life doesn’t look significant. It proves that the poetic can come from the tedious, the imperfect. Perhaps there was no great, humanitarian vision of a group around a campfire, no collective wonder, but nevertheless, collective action that led to preserving a Wonder. I guess the difference is who is doing the processing of prosaic into poetic. I tend to want to reinterpret the events into the poetic myself, rather than opening myself the retelling of another.

I think that the best of both worlds is the ability to know the event-accurate truth of something, and then later, to intimately reflect on the poetic version. In my class essay I wrote about the Broadway musical Big Fish, which tells the story of a skeptic son and his relationship with his storyteller father. Every time I engage with Big Fish, I feel an immense appreciation for the beauty of the father’s perspective. He described his history the way it impacted him, narrating his encounters with giants, trials, and fate, and we are brought alongside his internal journey in a uniquely personal way. Side-by-side, we see his son investigating the real stories behind those experiences but eventually learning to engage with his father from a poetic perspective. Though the son could likely have learned to appreciate his father without knowing his true background, learning the real events his father had encountered facilitated the process by bridging the gap between their two natural methods of understanding. Within the context he uncovered, he could draw his own conclusions and reflections on his father, while appreciating how the narrative his father told harmonized with and was influenced by it.