Road Fever

So here's some things I've learned today:

1). Most of Texas is actually in the central time zone.
2). When sitting in a car for long periods of time, you can acquire something I like to call "car fever."

And, perhaps most importantly,
3). Everyone on the interstate tailgates. Everyone.

Today we attempted the longest stretch of driving in one day for us so far: from Show Low, Arizona to Austin, Texas. Despite leaving at 7:30am and not even stopping to eat (I ate in the car while Katelyn drove, then she ate while I did), the two-hour time change is finally what did us in. We realized that we wouldn't make it to Austin until 11:30pm our time, which would really be 1:30am for our gracious host, the sister of a good friend of ours from Webster. Needless to say, we didn't feel comfortable arriving that late at anyone's home, even if we did think we could manage to drive that far without sleeping, which we didn't.

Which is why I'm sitting in the laundry room of a KOA campground (or kampground, as they infuriatingly choose to spell it - I guess because it's "cute") which just happens to have free wireless internet in Fort Stockton, Texas. I wish we could stay and see some of the Lone Star State, but we have to get on to New Orleans, where a good friend of mine from high school is waiting for us, and where we'll hopefully have about a week to interview some of Tulane University's faculty in the anthropology, history and psychology departments about their take on the importance of stories, myths, and folktales.

This next phase of our research and filming I'm getting more and more excited about, because we'll be exploring a more "scholarly" approach to the uses of story. The storytellers we talked to were wonderful about clueing us in to the idea that stories can entrance and transport their listeners; now I hope to really tackle the question of why the human mind is made that way.

A few books have been helping us out in this search so far: "The Power of Myth," by Bill Moyers and renowned myth scholar Joseph Campbell, "The Uses of Enchantment" by Bruno Bettelheim, and of course, the book that started it all (for us anyway) "The Seven Basic Plots" by Christopher Booker.

"Plots" is a nearly 800-page tome that apparently took Booker more than 30 years of his adult life to put together. In it, he makes the case that there are only seven basic stories that keep getting re-told in some fashion or another, in every story ever told, in any medium, in any culture, throughout all of time. They are: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Rebirth.

Many of the storytellers we have talked to have already had many interesting opinions on this idea (although only one has actually heard of and began to read this particular book). The motif that they all seem to come back to is that of Cinderella; how there are literally thousands of versions of the Cinderella rags-to-riches story in every culture in the world. This obviously begs the question: what is it that we see in the Cinderella story that makes us re-tell it over and over, in all sorts of different forms and mediums throughout history? There is something very elementally human in that story, of the underdog finally coming out on top, that makes us root for these poor characters time and time again. Interesting concept, but we'll have to see how well Booker's theory holds up all the way to the end.

"The Power of Myth" is a fascinating read. It's a television interview between Moyers and Campbell transcribed into book form, and I'm constantly highlighting things on every page that Campbell has to say. He is the man who pretty much "wrote the book" on the idea that certain stories are re-told in different forms across many cultures in his "Hero of a Thousand Faces" which I unfortunately have not been able to track down. Campbell was apparently cited as a major inspiration for the character of Luke Skywalker. No wonder Star Wars works so well: it's a myth many of us have already heard, just told in a highly original, exciting new way.

Since it's getting late and we have to be up early to finish our jaunt into NOLA tomorrow, I'll have to leave it there for now. But don't worry, there'll be more of my excited ramblings on what I'm learning as we go along...after all, when it consumes pretty much 75% of your life, what else is there to write about?

Good night!