The Elephant of Surprise

A novel with a heartfelt backwoods love story by David A. Woodbury, available in quality paperback, 468 pages, $16 at Amazon, Kindle edition $4 (free with Kindle Unlimited)

Ordinary people, those not harboring ambitions of wealth and grandeur, inhabit this narrative. (Some whom you will meet here are still living.) Even though most of us never do achieve a life of affluence and glory, the crossing of paths — just what happens again and again in The Elephant of Surprise — the crossing of paths is the story of the world: inauspicious people dealing with chance encounters either beneficial or detrimental to their circumstances.

It is well to understand that the encounters recounted here take place in the 1970s, at the very tail-end of the era when people kept handwritten diaries, licked stamps to mail letters composed in careful script then waited days for a reply, paid extra to make a long-distance telephone call from home and paid ten cents to place a local call from a pay phone, rode in cars without seatbelts, and paid cash when coins still held value. It wasn’t so very long ago.*

Read the opening chapters in Kindle preview.

Hamlin is a remote Maine college town just down the road from the Odessa paper mill, a company run by an eccentric egomaniac — or so everyone thinks. In the fall of 1973 Hamlin College welcomes a new student. Andy Vicandoro, in his initial visit to the area and fresh out of uniform from a plum assignment in Europe, is readily hired to pump fuel at a bustling local truck stop while starting a full load of classes.

He is shaken, though, by two recent fatalities, two friends who died one after the other in separate tragedies, both events occurring even as Andy stood not far away. As he settles in to resume civilian life he is tormented by the suspicion that if he had done one small thing — anything — differently for each of those friends before their final moments maybe neither would have died.

Cautious about getting too familiar with anyone new, fearing that to befriend someone will imperil another life, he tries to remain aloof. His purpose is to get on with his education, work hard at menial labor to pay for it, and ponder the jinx he seems to be in others’ lives.

People are drawn to the amiable loner though. He is kind, helpful, approachable, and acceptably good-looking, and the beguiling girls in the small college town weaken his resolve for detachment. Soon enough a classmate, Jack Dershem, challenges Andy’s reticence and goads him to ask a diligent, quick-witted waitress, Aimee Cassell, for a date. She finds him odd but intriguing and gives him a chance.

Taking a summer job as a spare laborer in the intrinsically dangerous paper mill, Andy buddies up to a fellow worker and family man whose head seems screwed on straight. Blindsided, however, by a duplicitous acquaintance, in the aftermath of a misunderstanding with Aimee he is swept up by a provocative budding artist, Jeanie Wisdom, who inadvertently leads him to a shocking connection with his past and another stunning connection with his future, but not before one more friend goes down in Andy’s presence.

While he contemplates the sobering side to everyone’s mortal existence and the many ways a promising romance can be derailed, and while his chronicle is interrupted now and then by irrelevant characters too interesting to exclude, more than anything else The Elephant of Surprise is a heartfelt backwoods love story.

*More of the same: It was a time when silver coins were still in circulation but disappearing rapidly, when a child would tape a quarter to the under side of a cereal box top, send it to a post office box in Iowa, and wait four to six weeks to receive a cheap toy.

Children in school passed handwritten notes to their friends. You might use an expensive camera to take a nice snapshot, but you would not see your photos until you spent weeks exposing all 24 frames on a roll of film and then more days waiting until the film was processed. The streets were safe because we had “state” hospitals where most of the crazy people were kept behind locked doors against their rights to roam and menace.

When a woman named Jane Fye, for example, married John Doe, she could be properly referred to as Jane (Fye) Doe or Mrs. John Doe, but not Mrs. Jane Doe. In the “society” section of a newspaper from as late as the 1970s you can find photographs with captions listing the women as Mrs. [Husband’s Name].

For more information about this book see: What It’s About.