Relax and Enjoy the Ride
Backstory collects decades of adventure in the traveling life of a literary couple
In Backstory: A Literary Life on the Run, Dean Faulkner Wells recalls the advice of her friend Peets Buffett, mother of singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett: “It was Peets who taught me how to live in the shadow of a famous relative. ‘It’s not my fault that Jimmy’s a star,’ she told me. ‘Nor is it your fault that your uncle won the Nobel Prize. You can’t change who you are; so relax and enjoy the ride.’” Backstory offers readers an enjoyable ride of their own in a collaborative collection of short pieces written by Dean Faulkner Wells and her husband Lawrence “Larry” Wells between 1978 and Dean’s death in 2011.
Most of the 25 articles are penned by Larry, with colorful commentary provided for each by Dean, who shares highlights of their travels together — often with their dogs along for the ride. Thirteen of the pieces were originally published by the official magazine of Southwest Airlines, Southwest Spirit. Other publications include Parade, American Way, and American Bookseller.
Covering points of interest in 20 states across the U.S., England, and France, the couple tackle topics as diverse as the 50th anniversary of D-Day, a wild tour of Mammoth Cave, reenactments of the Battle of Little Bighorn and the Battle of North Bridge (site of “the shot heard round the world”), rodeo and ice hockey competitions, and journeys along the Santa Fe Trail and into the wetlands of Louisiana. Dean and Larry investigate the lives and work of William Shakespeare, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain. They pay a visit to the literary inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, including Lousia May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fans of Dean’s uncle, the aforementioned Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner, are treated to some family lore, too.
A particularly entertaining entry is “Yoknapatawpha High” (American Way, 1978), which juxtaposes the story of Dean and Larry’s hot-air balloon ride in Oxford, Mississippi, during the U.S. bicentennial celebration with the hilarious story of the town’s first balloon ride in the same location more than 70 years prior. That ascension was witnessed by three of the four Faulkner brothers — William, 8; Jack, 6; and John, 4 — and involved very poor judgment and a vast quantity of alcohol, with predictable consequences but, thankfully, no loss of life. Dean and Larry’s ride is less eventful but no less memorable. “Dean reluctantly exits the gondola,” Larry writes. “Like a Mississippi astronaut she has just gotten a bird’s eye view of her uncle’s ‘Yoknapatawpha County.’ Indeed, this balloon ride is not unlike reading one of his short stories where one comes away with the sensation of having been released from the ordinary.”
During a visit to Petrified Forest National Park in “Arizona’s Triassic Park” (Southwest Spirit, 2002), the couple view 62 dinosaur nests and talk with geologist Steve Hasiotis, who discovered them in 1996. Dug by crocodile-like creatures and more than 200 million years old, they are the oldest known reptilian nests. “‘It’s important to understand our earth history,’ Hasiotis points out. ‘The average person might think the past is past, that the present is what is important. But the fact is, we’re very fortunate to have the history of the earth preserved in layers of rock, to help us look to the future. … If we want to predict where we’re going, we have to know where the earth has been.’” It’s a sentiment that also informs the other 24 glimpses into the much more recent past compiled here, as well as calling to mind William Faulkner’s famous declaration in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Dean and Larry come across as pleasant, knowledgeable guides, always game for adventure, whose quiet confidence and ease with people bring their stories to life. With the passage of time, each article has become a snapshot from the album of their lives. As Larry says in the afterword, “Compiling Backstory was an odyssey for us both, but what abides — I see now — are the memories.”
Tina Chambers has worked as a technical editor at an engineering firm and as an editorial assistant at Peachtree Publishers, where she worked on books by Erskine Caldwell, Will Campbell, and Ferrol Sams, to name a few. She lives in Chattanooga.
