While visiting the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone recently, we saw a young tyke wearing a Batman costume. Most people give little thought to children dressing up as superheroes. It is common for young ones to pretend to be their favorite characters from books and movies or people who seem larger than life like firefighters and astronauts, yet I would suggest this is not province of children alone. Adults, too, enjoy entering into larger stories.
I am a huge fan of the Longmire novels by Craig Johnson, so when we prepared for our trip to the West, I packed one of them. As a side note, serious readers spend more time deciding which books to pack for a vacation than they do clothes. I have been re-reading the Longmire series in order and was in the middle of Any Other Name, so that went into my bag along with a few other books. Craig Johnson is an award-winning author who is featured in the The Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. For another side note, this is an amazing site that is home to five separate museums: The Buffalo Bill Museum, The Plains Indians Museum, The Cody Firearms Museum, The Draper Natural History Museum, and The Whitney Western Art Museum.
Craig crafts stories that invite readers into another world and make them long to return once the last page has been turned. His characters are carefully and exquisitely crafted, and the settings he describes rightfully hold a place as participants every bit as vivid as the human players. How, then, does one whose inner child has not been lost enter into such tales?
For starters, I wanted to read one of these novels while in the places near where they are set. I read while we stayed at Airbnbs in Driggs and Island Park, Idaho, and in the Wyoming cities of Cheyenne and Cody. In the liner notes to John Cougar Mellencamp's 1985 album
Scarecrow, we find this. "The highway between John's house and the studio where these songs were recorded cuts through a stretch of Indiana where the land is fertile and full of growth. It is from this land and its people that these songs are born, and though it is not necessary to know this to enjoy and appreciate them, it does lend a certain understanding for those who care to think about such things." Serious readers care to think about such things, and it was one way for me to enter into the stories that Craig has created by reading them in the West. But wait, as the informercials say. There's more.
The Busy Bee Café often provides nourishment for main protagonist Sheriff Walt Longmire, and though in the books it sits in the fictitious town of Durant, Wyoming, in reality it exists in Buffalo, where we made a stop just to get this picture. Actually, we would have eaten there, but the Bee is closed on Sundays. Had it been open, I would have ordered Walt's usual, but to find out what that is you will need to read the books.
Yet the picture I was most excited to take was with the road sign for Ucross, Wyoming, population 25. That is the home of author Craig Johnson, a fact of which he is so proud that he made it his Twitter handle,
@ucrosspop25.
Now, before you start thinking this is all a bit much, I will have you know that thousands (no exaggeration) of people liked these pictures in the various Longmire fan groups on Facebook. I would also point out that you probably own some apparel dedicated to your favorite sports figures or musicians, and this leads us back to the point of this post. We like to enter into other stories. It is part of the human nature. Why do you think Homer's Iliad has been so popular for nearly three thousand years? We thrill to the adventures of Achilles and Hector and if only for a short time are transported to places we can only imagine, gaining new perspectives on life as we go.
Thus ends the literary portion of this post, and thus begins the educational. Teachers have an opportunity as no one else does to help young people enter into other stories. In fact, although it may not be written in their job description, it is one of the most important things they do. From Kindergarten through twelfth grade, a child's understanding is quite limited. Children simply have not lived much life, yet they can grow far beyond the constraints of time and space through entering into the grand stories of history, science, literature, and the arts. Their teachers, however, must be guides who have not lost their own love of entering into stories. A dry, crabbed person is not a fit companion for adventure.
And as the educational section of this comes to a close, I invite those who are interested to consider a theological one as well. God entered created the most dynamic, breathtaking, and adventurous of stories when He spoke reality into existence and formed us in His image. He then entered that story in the person of Jesus Christ so that we could in turn enter more fully into His story, which is the story of life. The story of God and His people is not one solely or even primarily of rules and regulations and spectacular punishments. It is a story of shared life made possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus, Who entered the story of each and every person, whether someone accepts it or not.
What are the stories that have shaped you? Which stories have you tried to enter and how? I would love to hear from you in the comments!
