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Subcribe to comment rss feedEbb and Flow on Inspiration’s Timeline
Douglas Butler
Doug is a legal aid attorney living with his wife, Jen, in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts where he enjoys exploring the region, making images and writing.
How a lost wedding ring, an innkeeper and perseverance cut through the fog of loss & reminded me that when creative inspiration leaves, a journey along the timeline from lost to found remains though likely veiled and unseen.
Elation welled up in me as I spotted, glinting in the bright midday sun, nestled in a sandy rut, the shimmering, threadlike golden crescent of metal, nearly the colour of the sand that cradled it. That sandy rut was one of a pair that, together, carved a road of sorts. That road bisected the swath of land that lay under a length of a high-voltage power lines. A strip of spongy undergrowth stretched below the powerlines that slashed through the Cape Cod National Seashore.
The power lines lay adjacent to a tangled and stunted forest of oak and pine that sat between my nearby motel and Marconi Beach. I had been stood there the evening before, suspended it seemed, on the springy undergrowth, my tripod up to its ankles in vegetation. I was photographing those pylons and power lines as fog shrouded the scene. The fog providing an element essential for finding my composition—while, lost in my own ‘fog’ of concentration and creation, I unknowingly dropped my wedding band.
That elation—pure jubilation—at discerning the shining curve of gold snugged in the sand immediately filled the pool of despair that eddied and deepened during the sixteen or so hours since I grasped that I had lost my wedding band—a ring of gold engraved with an intertwining dog motif said to symbolize longevity. It had been several hours after returning from the power lines that I finally realized my ring was gone, my finger bare. I had spent those hours oblivious to the fact it was missing from my finger, not entirely surprising as I often took it off to cook or wash up, setting it down for stretches of time. It was not uncommon for panic to take hold before I recalled where I had placed it.
That day, without it, I had ambled around Wellfleet, Truro and Eastham, scouting image making locations. Without it, I ate fried clams at a rustic clam shack. Without it, I smoked a cigar in the open air at the edge of the forest by my motel, John Coltrane, for company. Without it, I packed my gear for an early morning start, my finger ignorantly bereft of its life partner.
It wasn’t until later, a baseball game murmuring in the background, as I was readying to turn in for an early start the next morning, that I thumbed my finger only to find it missing. Panic was staved off as I searched, mollified by my habit of removing the ring only to find it placed nearby. Despair settled in as my search became frantic. Bags were disembowelled, pockets and pouches filleted by fraught fingers, blankets and pillows upturned and shaken like pickpockets in fables. No wedding band turned up.
It was then that I started trudging along a timeline of loss and grief, gloom coming in like the tide. At some point along that timeline of despair, as place after place I searched turned up nothing, I conceded grimly that it was truly lost. I had recognized that I would live my days out, forever worrying about the spot where the ring had been, thumbing the empty space like a wound that would never heal. I comprehended longevity as I never had.
During that time without my wedding band, in those ensuing hours after I discovered the loss, I was on a journey with an end I could not fathom. I was traversing an arc of time—a timeline from lost to found. It was an arc of emotion from grief and sadness and remorse to glints of optimism and a shimmer of hope offered by an innkeeper’s own story of lost to found that led, ultimately, to complete euphoria.