by
Samuel Ben White
Sitting at the kitchen table in the house I
grew up in on Bickley Street
in Abilene, my
father and I were discussing time travel.
Having watched a rerun of “Star Trek” the night before, we were discussing
what we would do if we could travel through time. Where would we go? Is there something we would change?
What if, we conjectured, we could travel back
in time and take the place of someone in the past? (This was long before the show “Quantum Leap”,
mind you!) What if one of us were to
travel back in time and take the place of Patrick Henry in March of 1775? What if he had never made his famous, “Give
me liberty or give me death” speech and we were to take his place? Would we give it? From there, we began to wonder what the United States
might have been like if Henry had never given that speech. Would things have been different?
I had always wanted to be an author, since it
first dawned on me that those wonderful stories—both true and fictional—that my
parents read to me every day were written by someone. I started by drawing cartoon stories and
getting my sisters to letter them for me (one sister always wanted to edit, one
sister wrote just what I dictated, and the other sister tried not to help at
all—if they’re reading this, I’ll let them try to guess which one I am
remembering in each role). By first
grade, I was excited to learn my letters and words so I could start writing my
own stories and filling in the word balloons on my own cartoons. (I still do that, by the way, drawing a comic
strip for the local newspaper that’s read by upwards of a dozen people!)
Through junior high and high school, I sat up
to all hours at that old namebrand-less typewriter hacking away at story after
story. Fantasy stories about the end of
the world, detective stories that managed to rip off both James Bond and Magnum
P.I., a western mash-up of Louis L’Amour and James Michener. All of these flowed from my fingers and
through that type-writer. When one of my
sisters and her husband—while between jobs—had to move back in with us for a
while, I think it was the clickety-clack of my typing that drove them to take
jobs they didn’t really want just so they could get out of the house.
Time passed, as did college and the first
months of marriage, with a myriad of stories (and comic strips) being produced,
and always that long-ago conversation about changing the course of the
Revolution with time travel bounced through my mind but never quite made it to
paper (or, by then, the ethereal saving mechanism of a computer). In that first summer of marriage, as I got
off work before my wife, I had about an hour each day and I sat down at my old
Commodore 64 and began to type out the story I had been thinking of for more than
a decade.
Garison Fitch, an eccentric, middle-aged
bachelor of a lawyer living in Fairplay,
Colorado, begins to experiment
with … something scientific. No, not
Fairplay. Where? What if Garison were to live in La Plata Canyon?
I had been there, back in college when I had spent a summer as the youth
minister for the First Christian Church of Farmington, New Mexico.
Somewhere in that canyon was Louis L’Amour’s vacation home. Yes!
Perfect place to put Garison Fitch.
I even knew the meadow that would become his front yard.
And
then Garison got younger, because as a young man myself I thought he needed to
be younger to be active. And his
experiments: what would he experiment with?
What if, in an attempt to prove that there were more dimensions that
currently accepted, he were to travel through time? He travels to the past, and does what we’re
always told time travel couldn’t do: change history. But what if it did? Got it!
What if Garison grows up in a world that’s very different from ours, but
something he does in the past changes history and creates the world we
know? Suddenly, the story was flying as
Garison grew up in a Soviet-dominated American continent, a world where
everyone was worried that the two super-powers—Russia and Japan—were about
to start World War III. I began by creating the back story of how the
world could have gotten to that point.
Finally,
I had to ask myself, “What changed?
What’s the pivotal point and how can Garison be the one who changes it?” I tried to have Garison interact with Patrick
Henry but—as much as I admire Pat—I just couldn’t convince myself that he was the pivotal character in
history. At least, not the history I
wanted.
So,
where and how could Garison change history?
At the battle of Concord? At the Constitutional Convention? At the Delaware River? And then it occurred to me that some of the
most influential moments in history are the moments we know almost nothing
about and seem inconsequential at the time.
The private who changed the course of D-Day when he told Eisenhower that
June 6 was the birthday of Rommel’s wife and the German leader would be away
from the front. The farrier who, in
trying to save a nail for economy, loses the horse and—subsequently—the
battle. I knew Garison needed to do not
something big, but “small”. Some little
butterfly of an event that changes history by sending those insignificant
little colonies on a victorious trajectory against the mightiest empire of the
day.
A
little boy who would be a general one day playing at troop movements in the
dirt. A speeding dray wagon with an
angry driver. A fellow from the future
who shouldn’t have been on that road at all.
More than two decades after the original conversation with my father, it
all coalesced into a wonderful time travel fantasy about the power of one man
to change the world which I titled, “First Time: The Legend of Garison Fitch”.
Author Samuel Ben White
Samuel Ben White (“Sam” to his friends) is the author of the national
newspaper comic strip “Tuttle’s” (found at www.tuttles.net) and the
on-line comic book “Burt & the I.L.S.” (found at
www.destinyhelix.com). He is married and has two sons. He serves his
community as both a minister at a small church and a chaplain with
hospice. In addition to his time travel stories, Sam has also written
and published detective novels, a western, three fantasy novels and four
works of Christian fiction.
Links
Thanks for spreading the word about my words! Hope you enjoyed the novel and thanks for letting me guest blog with you.
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