James Gaitis is the author of The View from Stansberry Lookout, a political eco-dystopian satire forthcoming from Guernica World Editions this September. In this essay, Gaitis draws on forty years of life along both the US-Mexico and US-Canada borders to reflect on what inspired his novel, and on the long tradition of cautionary tales that turn out to be more prediction than fiction.
Over the past forty years, I have lived multiple times along both the southern and the northern borders of the United States. I have lived near enough to the US/Mexican border to see the northernmost mountains of Mexico from the elevations surrounding my home and at times to have migrants walking through my orchard. I have taken my Jeep on travels in Mexico through the Sierra Madres, watched a lion on the prowl in the Copper Canyon. And I have lived off-the-grid on the west flank of Glacier National Park where, every day, I was able to look at and into the first of the southern Canadian Rockies and have wolves and grizzlies and elk and moose carousing on my property in the afternoon, only to spend their evening in British Columbia. I have slept alone in an icy snow tent in the wintery mountain backcountry of Banff and Jasper National Parks with only the voices of wolves to keep me company. And I have been taken into the homes of the peoples of those places even though they did not know me, nor I them. From those vantages, and being so close to my international Canadian and Mexican neighbors, I have seen and experienced how rich the cultures of Canada and Mexico were and are.
The View from Stansberry Lookout is a cautionary tale, written in satire and yet deadly serious in the telling. It is a warning of things that must be safeguarded, lest they be lost. It is a tale about the fragility of relationships—the relationship between neighboring nations and their citizens; the relationship between leaders and their people; the relationship between humans and their environment; the relationship between parent and child; the relationship between lovers; the relationship between the law and law enforcement. And, it is a warning, a reminder that there are foreseeable consequences to acts and omissions, whether committed by individuals or by errant nations led by errant leaders. A reminder that an ever-shrinking world requires compassion and friendships, not divisiveness and imperialistic behavior.
Some would say the writing of an essay or blog on cautionary tales is the errand of a fool. The concept of a cautionary tale, after all, is as commonplace as the fiction-based warnings parents offer to their children in a dinner-table effort to redirect the potential misadventures of youthful indiscretion. Do this too often, and you risk fantastical repercussion. Fail to do that, and a surrealistic consequence will surely result. And so on. Why bother to convey through literary artifice that which should be obvious? Why not say directly what an author otherwise might say through the ambiguity of allegory or the tangentiality of metaphor and simile?
The answer to these questions is the same as to the broader question of “Why Art?” And the answer to that question is that artistic expression helps to evoke deeper and more careful consideration of that which needs to be considered, or at least is worth considering.
The fact is that cautionary tales sometimes do come true, whether in whole or in part. And when they do, the long-unforeseen realities of what was predicted can seem to be so regrettably and obviously predictable that one wonders how they could have been allowed to occur in the first place. A poignant example is the novella Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, a tale authored by the American writer Morgan Robertson in 1898, which with uncanny precision essentially prophesized, in shocking detail, the subsequent sinking of the Titanic after that “Unsinkable Ship” struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic fourteen years after the novella was written. And, not surprisingly, there are plenty of other such examples of cautionary tales come true; and their outcomes are just as tragic, on one scale or another.
The writing of The View from Stansberry Lookout occurred following a brief, two-sentence dialogue that was catalyzed by some very un-American behavior by some rather second-rate Americans, and which went something like this. Observation: “The time will come when it will be Mexico closing its border to Americans.” Response: “Or Canada closing its border to Americans.” And that is how the foundation of a cautionary tale is established. It is established first with an arguable premise based on an observation of something extant or in its pendency—a premise regarding an existing state or potential circumstance that is problematic and fraught with danger. And upon that foundation is then set the unsure edifice of a prediction, a warning, a caution. A prediction or caution or warning of what will or might happen if those extant circumstances do not change or are not mitigated.
The concept is so simple that one would think that is how we see things every day. We see a danger and we are self-forewarned. But in everyday life we often fail to see, or to act upon, those dangers, perhaps because we are too busy, too self-absorbed. Too xenophobic. Too nationalistic. Too unfocused. Too swollen with hubris and unmitigated pride. Too ignorant. Too unconcerned. Too pliable.
Cautionary tales serve not only as warnings but also as reminders of things that are worth being reminded of, and which desperately need reminding on a constant basis. When Farley Mowat gave the title of Never Cry Wolf to his ecological masterpiece (a book I read while driving the mostly unpaved Alaska-Canadian Highway in the winter of 1980), he was not merely admonishing us to avoid making presumptions regarding the behavioral characteristics of those beautiful canine beings he had studied on the then-still-fully-frozen tundra of the Kivalliq Region of Nunavut. He also was cautioning us to “never” make uneducated and biased assumptions based on stale and primitive ideas lodged in the present but originating from the distant past. His was a cautionary tale, dressed as fiction and yet objectively based on plain observable fact. Never Cry Wolf was not merely a cautionary tale for his generation but rather for all generations to come.
Like many cautionary tales, The View from Stansberry Lookout was not viewed as timely when it was first written. Not timely because what it forecast through allegory and metaphor and simile and satire had not yet occurred. But what it forecasted has now occurred or is occurring, at least to one degree or another, not only between Canada and America but across the globe. And that is why the iconic multi-genre, multi-award-winning Canadian author, Will Ferguson, has characterized The View from Stansberry Lookout as “timely” and as “a tale for our times.” Because The View from Stansberry Lookout is a cautionary tale, now come true.
About the author
James Gaitis obtained a BA in English Lit from the University of Notre Dame and a JD from the University of Iowa College of Law. The author of two previously published novels—A Stout Cord and a Good Drop and the award-winning The Nation’s Highest Honor—he is a lover of all things wild.