Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek

Walter Van Tillburg Clark

A quick word search of the name above would turn up references to an author whose most famous novel was The Ox-bow Incident. This impromptu chronicle is not about Clark, the author, but about that random incident a few hours ago in which the Footloose Forester suddenly remembered the name; but most importantly a puzzlement about why that thought appeared in his mind.  He acknowledges that he writes, mostly, in a stream of consciousness mode, and he also knows that he depends on timely inspiration to trigger any session of writing.  Thus, it was a name-Walter Van Tillburg Clark.  This chronicle is thusly commenced.

Walter Van Tillburg Clark

It was in Virginia City, Nevada where Footloose Forester sat down for breakfast next to the son of Walter Van Tillburg Clark.  The younger Clark was on a week-end camping trip with his friend from Stanford University where both of them were undergraduates.  It didn’t take much small talk to discover that his father was presently a Professor of English at Stanford.  And it didn’t take much more gentle probing to learn that The Ox-bow Incident was his ticket to ride on the train of collegial recognition and a teaching job at Stanford.

As they say, one thing leads to another; hence the Footloose Forester subsequently went looking for a copy of The Ox-bow Incident, a western saga about the injustice to an innocent man being hanged as a horse thief without any direct evidence at all, and very little patience among those who lynched him.  As he now recalls, the Footloose Forester obtained a copy at a very iconic bookstore in Placerville, California, sometimes known as Hangtown because Placerville has its own history of hanging horse thieves.  You just can’t make this stuff up.  In town, the Hangtown Café still served breakfast where Footloose Forester sometimes ate, and it was in that folksy eatery where they had a spectacular display of six-guns, a few of which Footloose Forester coveted.  

Bumping into western-lore artifacts in Hangtown and bumping into the son of a famous author in Virginia City, Nevada went beyond mere coincidence, Footloose Forester was at the time living in a boarding house in Placerville and was eager to drink in the mystique of the Old West.  

The sad moral of the story in The Oxbow Incident was the impatience and stunning ignorance in approaches many people use to judge others and factual events.  Those implied lessons in moral certitude carried on throughout the life of the Footloose Forester and he wanted, henceforth, always to restrain himself from being too hasty in making important decisions.  Writing in a steam of consciousness mode does not violate that principle; on the contrary, the impetus of a remembered person or event stimulates the desire to record things in print, lest he forget.

Sometime a few years later, Footloose Forester also recalled that Son of Walter Van Tillburg Clark had told him that his father struggled for nine or more years before he finished his second novel, The City of Trembling Leaves.