The April Creative Challenge: Camp NaNoWriMo, The Cataract

Making the decision to rework The Cataract was a good one. It was a good one only because I knew with the little I had, I could do with it what I wanted to do with it all those years ago. I opened it up, a file that I hadn't really looked at in almost 22 years. It was a time capsule of sorts. It was like reading an old journal. I had put myself back into August 2001. I was a bartender living in Denver, Colorado. I was fantasizing about returning to Oregon, living in a small town somewhere out of the way and writing a novel.

When then girlfriend Deborah and I bought our tickets to Mexico, I knew I wanted to spend a good portion of the mornings writing. Thankfully, she was supportive of that. I asked my friend Kat if she would write the first sentence for me. I do not have that first sentence to share, but these opening paragraphs are what I did with it in that first 2001 draft:

It's raining here again today because it rains here everyday. Between the puddles and the clouds the drops fall steadily and I'm a sandwich. I watch the clouds reflected perfectly like mirrors in the puddles obscured by ripples of individual drops crowded now in puddles of fallen friends and brothers now part of the whole. Puddles.

I'm wearing my orange galoshes, and what a funny word... Galoshes. Although I know it would be easier to just use a dictionary, I'd read a whole book to find one word, a word like galoshes, or unctuous, or saffron, or love. Just to see it on a page somewhere in context, perhaps with an adverb describing an adjective right after it, wow. That's something to make me cheer: My galoshes can find the treasures at the bottom of an insidiously blue body of water, galoshes.

As I'm walking between puddles and clouds in the rain I spy an orange construction sign so vivid through the cataract that reminds me orange is my favorite color. So, I guess my story starts with just one line: I'm walking through the rain in my orange galoshes.

I don't have a very clear recollection of the years after I wrote this in the fall of 2001. I have a tremendous gap in detail from early 2002 until the fall of 2006. I did not write anything of much consequence during that time, although I was always writing. I do remember loving what I had written on The Cataract.

I printed what I had written. Once I took it out of Courier New and made the double spacing into single, and took the margins from 1'' to .7'' the 37 page manuscript went down to 12 pages. I printed it at the copy center the same day I did my March Zine project. I folded the manuscript and I packed it for our trip to Astoria.

On the plane to Oregon, I read it.

How could I be so disappointed in something I had once been so proud of? I decided to make a great many changes. The first change was that I changed it from first to third person narration. I changed the names of the characters. And I decided not to stay with the same plot.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the 2023 revision:

It was a premeditated act. It had to have been. It was a decision reached after weeks and weeks of thought. And even those weeks came after an even longer period of thought. When young, time got measured differently. It's easy to measure things in terms of weeks. Weeks can be a long time. But age has a way of changing time, the perspective of time. Time becomes measured in months or in terms of years, or even in terms of decades. Whatever the measurement of time, Jacob had made the decision weeks ago to shave his beard, and he had thought about shaving it, although casually, for years.

It was not an unruly beard, Jacob had trimmed it, often, but it was thick. It had been a fixture on his face for nearly twenty-five years. And it was the very thought of twenty-five years that had sparked the idea of shaving it. Twenty-five years is a long time not to see one's face.

In the bathroom, early morning, Jacob stood and looked at his reflection in the mirror. He stood for an exaggerated period of time, measured now in seconds, but reeled back in years. Many years. He took out the clippers, the comb and then the razor and shaving cream. Should it prove to be the wrong decision, he could always grow it back. It grew fast enough. Back at his reflection, he marveled at the thick gray hair on his face, so out of balance with the hair on his head. He was always grateful to have kept all the hair on his head especially when he knew so many men his age who were thinning or bald. It was just a bonus that his hair had stayed its youthful brown color.