Wednesday, July 25, 2012

The True Confessions of Buttercup Harding


Yesterday, Turner Classic Movies had an “adventure on the high seas” movie marathon—aka, pirate movies. Thank goodness the boring business of working with spreadsheets can be done while watching television! These adventures gave me a thirst to read a nautical tale. One packed with suspense and adventure. One that I could immerse myself in, become part of the story.

Enter The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. This Newberry winner, written by Avi, was required reading when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. I can’t remember which. But I can remember my overwhelming desire to hie off and join a ship’s crew. My parents should be thanking God that Oklahoma is landlocked.

Around the same time I first read that book, my family took a month-long road trip to hit all of the national parks west of the Mississippi. At the end of our journey, we visited Alcatraz, the United State’s most high security prison. Since its heyday during the Prohibition era, it has been transformed into a museum that tourists like my family can visit. My mother, being the dedicated lifelong learner that she is, insisted we all listen to the audio tour, not just wander through.

From the moment I placed those headphones over my ear holes, I was enthralled. The narrator had a History Channel-worthy voice. But even if the inflection and tone had been lacking, the ambiance noise in the background would have been enough to submerge me in that world. It changed from the clanking and cries of seagulls on the dock to the whispers of men in their cells to the shouts of violence in the mess hall.

As I walked the halls of Alcatraz, peering into the men’s cells that still had their effects on display, I imagined myself there, cutting hair in the barber shop, shanking any who dared threaten me in the cafeteria, attempting escapes with the inmates. I was thirteen years old. I wanted to be a forty-year-old mob boss. Felony is exciting!

While these youthful aspirations are—well I find them endearing. Others have told me that they’re weird. Apparently girls shouldn’t want to be Al Capone when they grow up with the sole goal of being thrown into prison. While I find them endearing, they’re more farfetched than the average ballerina or fireman dreams. The truth is that I would never be able to climb rigging without a) hanging myself, b) falling to my death, or c) vomiting myself to death from motion sickness. And as for being a felon…I’m a good girl! I just don’t have what it takes to be convicted. But oh, once I was there, in prison, I could be an awesome inmate. The best inmate. Which would basically mean I would get out on good behavior before I ever had the chance to attempt an escape.

But still the thirst for adventure chases me. Usually I’m fully content to live in Oklahoma. I love, love, love, love Oklahoma. I have seen the world. I have been to big cities and small all over our country and ten others. I have been on four of the seven continents. So anyone who considers themselves learn-ed and wants to correct my backward love of my state, they can stuff it. I don’t scorn your love of NYC or London or Tokyo (or wherever it is that you want to make your real home). So don’t scorn mine.

There are problems with Oklahoma, though. I will grant you that. For instance, adventure. What am I to do for adventure? Noodling just doesn’t do it for me. Nor does cow tipping, paintballing, or camping in the Ouachitas or the Ozarks. When I want adventure, a change in routine isn’t enough. It’s more than a need for adrenaline, too. I want danger. Not senseless danger, like sky diving. I want logical danger like mobsters or being on the wrong side of the law or sailing on the open sea.

So I have to ask myself, since my daydreams are so totally improbable, what is at the root of this thirst for big adventure? After staying up till four a.m. reading The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, I have a theory. What I yearn for isn’t just adventure. It’s that big life-changing event: mutiny on my ship, falling into crime, battling gross injustices, surviving a near-fatality. It’s experiencing something bigger than life, bigger than myself, and being changed because of it. That’s why simple adventures: travel, starting a business, going to a peach festival, noodling, etc., don’t satisfy that thirst.

The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle ends with thirteen-year-old Charlotte unable or unwilling to be reabsorbed into her well-bred family after her two-month adventure on the sea. She’s changed too much. The last sentence of the book reads,

Something Zachariah told me filled my mind and excited my heart: “A sailor,” he said, “chooses the wind that takes the ship from safe port…but winds have a mind of their own.”

According to my theory, I want to choose that wind, and then fly before it, whether I head toward storm or fair skies. As long as I’m pointed toward the open horizon, it doesn’t matter to me. The adventure is in the not knowing. It’s in the bigness, grandness, and uncertainty of the journey, and especially the unknown destination.

If you know me very well or have been reading this blog, you’ll understand how paradoxical that is. I sometimes throw little temper tantrums (luckily my dogs are usually the only witnesses) when writing a business plan becomes overwhelming. Or when I don’t know who to call to get a particular answer. Or when I begin feeling the pinch of my shrinking savings account. Or something as tiny as the brand of dog food I buy being moved somewhere else in the store. Clearly, I don’t like the unknown. In fact, not knowing is my least favorite thing. It makes me feel vulnerable and stupid. I deplore feeling stupid. It gives me heart palpitations when I feel out of my element. The kind of adventure I want to chase is entirely about being out of my element!

So what? Am I crazy? My opinion might lack objectivity, but no, I don’t think I’m crazy. Or at least not for this. There are several basic human aspirations at play here. 1) The desire to do something bigger than yourself. Leave a mark on others, or, if you’re the right person at the right time and place, leave a mark on history. 2) The need to escape the responsibilities of your current life. I think psychologists would back me up on this. At one time or another, every person has dreamed, what if? 3) The even more basic, deep-seeded craving to give up control.

There’s this simultaneous need in human beings to be in control and the wish to give up all control. It’s tiring, isn’t it, trying to control every aspect of your life? We’re all a bit OCD on the inside. We believe if we can just choose our friends and choose our profession and choose our partner that we will have a good life. If we could see into the future, we would pick the right path when we came to a fork in the road.

But that’s a lot of responsibility! And it also is disproved day after day. Your partner cheats on you, a parent dies, you get fired, or you end up hating what you chose to do for a living. When things like this go awry, our need for control is aggravated. We go on overdrive, attempting to control everything and every one. All we want, deep down, is to give up control. It’s too much to do to control every little thing. And we keep messing stuff up. It gets worse, and we just want Mom or Dad to come pick us up and clean up our mess. Our grip on our lives is so tight, though, that it is painful, so, so, so painful, to pry our fingers loose. That pain reinforces the belief that we not only want to be in control but we need to be in control in order to avoid pain and failure.

And then I have a day like yesterday, when all I want to do is stand up and walk out, driven by a wind of my choosing with an unknown path and destination. I want to experience big things I have no control over. I feel I can be the right person at the right time and place—if I just let go. If I stop trying to control my life, narrowing it down and boxing it in to something manageable (because really, how much can any one person control? I can’t even control myself!), then my life could be epic! And that’s what I want for myself. Epicness.

Do you ever feel this way? What is your what if daydream? 

3 comments:

  1. I read The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle a few months ago, and I hated it. It was, however, my first time reading it, and I have recently come to the conclusion that, unless the author is truly superb (like J.K. Rowling), then adolescent fiction that is read NOT in adolescence is bound to be torture. And Avi is just not superb. He's okay. He's decent. He's passable, for adolescent fiction. But not superb. So I was relieved to find that your entire post was not one of adulation for this particular book but merely of the "inspired by" variety.

    Your family really goes all out with road trips, huh? Wish I'd grown up a McAlister. :)

    I found your paradox interesting: wanting adventure yet being afraid of new experiences. And I think you're right; I think we're all like that. We are all paradoxical characters (of the "round" variety, as my 10th-grade English teacher would've said). We don't all operate with the same paradoxes, which is why we often butt heads with one another over specifics, but we all understand the general burden of conflicting desires, especially when it comes to fun & carefree vs. work & responsibility.

    I disagree with you, though. I don't think starting a business is a "simple" adventure. I think you've embarked on a grand endeavor, one that will forever change who you are and how you see the world, solely because of the things this particular experience will teach you. Don't discount it as a simple adventure just because it happens on Oklahoma soil. You never know who you'll meet or what turns your life will take because of this venture. So embrace it, with all its struggles and responsibilities and with those things, in time, will come your adventures.

    In my opinion, adventure is as simple to find as varying your routine and intentionally allowing new things into your life (which you've already begun to do). It's as simple as walking somewhere instead of driving. As simple as starting up a conversation with a stranger who smiles and says hello instead of smiling politely and moving on. It's as difficult as letting your schedule be flexible so that you don't get caught in the tedious and rigid tide of normal and routine.

    It's really a lifestyle, I think, rather than something that comes around only once every 20 years or so.

    -A

    PS I have what if daydreams, but this comment is long enough, so maybe another time.

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    Replies
    1. Dear Audra,

      I love your comments! Hooray for discussion! I sort of feel the same way about young adult fic that is truly juvy. I can read John Green and J K Rowling (though even the first two HPs were a bit painful to get through). I think that's because it's for a high school audience. Anything younger, and yeah, it becomes painful. I recently read the Wrinkle in Time series and hated it. Made it all the way to the end through perseverance because so many people love it. But I hated it.

      We do love the road trips. Or at least my parents do. I think maybe that's why me and my brothers get along so well. Forced time together. We were each other's only entertainment, and we had to be nice or my parents would blow a gasket.

      I like your take on paradoxes! Sometimes I feel as if I'm made entirely of contradictions. A body of dichotomies. Perhaps I need to do a post on just that and see what everyone considers their personal paradoxes.

      That's true about starting a business. I don't feel as if I'm changing. Yet. Maybe I am. But I do think that I'm going to be one of those people who has done a million different things by the time I'm eighty. Or at least I hope so.

      I agree that adventure can be those things. But I disagree that it's what we long for or day dream about. However! It's all a matter of perspective. So maybe the cure to our thirst for adventure is to appreciate it when it does happen in our lives. Learn to recognize it rather than gloss over it.

      Good observations, Audra, as always. Thanks for commenting!

      -B.C.

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  2. I love this. I definitely have what if dreams. During the Olympics they're mostly of the variety, what if I were an amazing tennis player? What if I were four foot nine and could actually do a cartwheel? And I agree with Audra. You think starting your own business doesn't count as an adventure? There's no way.

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