As a writer born and raised where two rivers join, three states touch and several American centuries commingle, I was fated to a creative life of complex metaphors. The Shenandoah and Potomac rivers that converge at Harpers Ferry, I viewed early on as an unlucky wishbone. My mother was like the Shenandoah River — splashy, cheerful and pleasantly green — and my father was the murky, swollen, steep-sided Potomac. When they argued, I couldn’t very well pull the rivers apart like a fragile chicken bone and make my wish come true. Thus began a moral in the making.
As a fearless lad grabbing breathtaking views of town from the high cliffs, I soon discovered that the forked river at Harpers Ferry — when I included the highway, roads, bridges, canal and hiking trails — actually resembled a lot of things: question mark, peace sign, necklace, airplane, candleholder, dog’s profile and balloon on a string.
My father, hearing of my imagination, introduced me to his antique walnut artist’s easel and collection of camel-hair paintbrushes. A self-taught artist, he rendered excellent, but somber oils of the Harpers Ferry water gap, draped in long shadows of late afternoon.
Mom was a painter, too — but of a different sort. She didn’t use an easel, but instead sat cross-legged with a floppy pad of watercolor paper across her lap. She preferred the quick and free expressions of the watery medium and sometimes spirited off with a wonderfully symbolic imagination.
In one such example, she risked kingdom come itself by daring to desecrate the hallowed landscape of Harpers Ferry. Where the two rivers come together and, historically, have caused devastating floods, Mom blithely painted a calm, palliative-blue lake ringed with wild pink geraniums. On the matter of her creative license, Dad had bitten off his critic’s tongue long ago.
Now was my turn at art. I was the third of three sons, and landscape painting, of all possibilities, was my last hope to earn my father’s pride. I had already struck out in mechanical aptitude. I had no stomach for hunting, either. Worse still, I was the shortest, plus thin-boned like my mother, so forget sports, too.
Sneaking out of the house at dawn, I made my painting debut in secret, understandably, quietly erecting my father’s fancy easel in a postcard vantage point over the historic town. There, I poised myself importantly with my Thomas Cole paint palette and brush, the latter held at arm’s length like a ship’s captain aiming a spyglass at the high seas. In response, the grand water gap at Harpers Ferry yawned at me in the chilly sunrise, indifferent to my creative rite of passage.
I set to work, sketching the town on canvas, only to lift my pencil a moment later, step back from the easel and cock my head. Did anyone, in the millions of tourists who came to Harpers Ferry, see what I did?
Harpers Ferry was an open-air geometry class, starting with the huge black cylinder of the train tunnel that punched through a mountain of Paleozoic rock with a steampunk fist. There to meet it, the iron trestle bridge unfolded across the wide confluence in a patterned ironwork of trapezoidal piers and cantilevered isosceles triangles. Next, a thousand dominos in rectangular crossties marched into town along opposite riverbanks, in mile-long columns like the armies of the Civil War.
All I had was a dumb yellow pencil when I needed a T-square; drawing compass; couple of straight edges and curves; and a pink parallelogram for an eraser.
After making a rough sketch, I dabbed green and brown paint onto the canvas. As my brush followed the wandering riverbanks, I finessed the bristles to make rough textures, uneven shapes and muddy colors, as my father had shown me.
But when I prepared to paint the frothy rapids and swirling eddies where the rivers joined, my fingers stiffened around the wooden brush handle, while the thumb on my other hand fidgeted through the hole in my paint palette. The slow-drying, smelly paint brooded on my brush in long moments of unwillingness.
Again I stepped back from the easel, and this time both my arms fell by my sides. I was 12, and the chaotic currents and moody undertows at the confluence were like the turmoil inside me — the weird, upsetting feelings and awkward, self-conscious moments trending through adolescence.
How could I ever paint them in yellow ochre or titanium white?
My father survived his grave disappointment in my unfinished painting of Harpers Ferry, and life went on. By my 20s, I had traded my paints and brush for the medium of words, and not long after, my first novel ran copiously like the hydrogen and oxygen atoms of the whitewater I could not paint.
