Tag: tension

That which is pleasant to live through doesn’t always make a good story. That which is terrible to live through often does. I think I’ve observed on this before, paraphrasing Tolkien’s narrator voice in The Lord of the Rings when he skims over a great deal of pleasant time and moves on to more dangerous adventures.

I was visiting my friend Bob at the New Mexico State Veterans Home. We went out to look at the flowers and the birds on the campus, and a nurse who used to work on his unit came up and hugged him on her way to her car.  Melinda, like Bob, is a raconteur, he enjoyed her turn to tell the tales. As a travel nurse, she’s had some misadventures moving from one job to another.

In one incident in Utah. there was no one else on the road when she hit black ice where she could have gone off the highway into a canyon. Her car spun, hit a guard rail, and all she got was a dent in the car and whiplash in her neck. After she got her car righted and started driving again, other cars suddenly appeared on the highway, and she realized that if she had hit the ice when they were there, all of them would have crashed with her. She said, “I have angels.”

Another time, a semitruck didn’t signal a turn, and she had to turn with it and go off the road into a ravine or get hit and dragged. She bumped around in the ravine, the car didn’t flip, and she drove back out. The trucker didn’t check to see if she was okay, maybe never realizing  what he had done. Horrible to live through. And Bob and I were in rapt attention.

His greatest narratives are war stories. The first time he was in combat. Guarding the DMZ during the early days of the armistice, a nineteen-year-old afraid to make a mistake that could restart the war.  He’s able to create tension and humor in the same moment. The U.S. troops had been instructed not to engage, not to start anything, but to shoot if someone came at them. A few North Korean solders had learned enough English to holler to the Americans, though. Hearing. “What the fuck you doing, Yankee?” followed by giggles made Bob see them as just young guys like him. People he hoped he wouldn’t have to shoot.

Good stories make you worry about the characters, even if you know they survived. Until the end, you don’t know how much damage or loss they endured, and they, of course, didn’t know they would live to tell the tales.