Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction

B.J. Hollars

1 B.J. Hollars Introduction Let the Blurring Begin This is a story I’ve been told for most of my life. In the spring of 1964 my grandfather drove his wife and three children to the top of the Alps until they could drive no farther. Without warning, the road suddenly narrowed, steepened; finding himself trapped in a particularly unforgiving slice of terrain, my grandfather was forced to make a choice. “The choice” (as it is now affectionately known to my family) was whether the thirty-eight-year-old husband and father of three would get them out of the jam by easing the car’s wheels forward along the edge of the mountainside or take the safer bet—reversing out from the direction he’d just come. This is where the stories begin to diverge. According to my aunt—thirteen at the time, and the oldest of the children confined to the backseat—my grandfather pressed the automobile forward, though not before taking a few precautionary measures. The way she tells it, he handed over his wallet and insurance card to his wife, then waved her and the kids out of the car. The four watched as my grandfather’s hands manned the wheel, creeping the white Corvair across the narrow roadway, bypassing the drop-off by inches. My mother, the youngest of the children, remembers it far differently. While she, too, recalls her father handing over the wallet and insurance card prior to shooing them all away, in her version my grandfather does not drive forward but rather begins the slow business of turning the car around. 2 b.j. hollars “He was attempting a ten-point turn,” my mother remembers. “He’d drive it forward a few inches and then reverse it. And after enough of this, he eventually got the thing turned around and drove us back down to safety.” Yet most surprising of all is my uncle’s version. He is the middle child chronologically and, quite appropriately, the one situated snugly between his sisters. When asked of his recollections from that day, he offered not only a different version, but a far different tone as well. To his memory, nobody ever left the car. His mother remained on the passenger’s side while the children in back peered over the edge of the cliff. “But we were never in any real danger,” my uncle joked, downplaying the crisis. “That is, as long as our parachutes opened.” For years, I have tried to write about this near-missed mountaintop disaster that occurred over half a century ago. Yet I’ve struggled to do justice to the story, mostly due to the many conflicting reports. To date, my most successful attempt was to write of it in the form of a Venn diagram, in which the outer regions of the circles recounted the varied versions of the tale while the intersection of the circles remained utterly blank. While my Venn diagram approach, too, proved ultimately unsuccessful , its unique form seemed to explain why: a story as death defying as this demands a bit more overlap. After all, how is it that my aunt, uncle, and mother could offer three wildly different interpretations of an event at which they were all present? While I expected a few minor discrepancies (perhaps a disagreement on the make and model of the car), quite surprisingly, the make and model of the car seemed to be the only details on which they could all agree. My grandparents—whose adult impressions could have easily offered a ruling on the most accurate interpretation—passed away nearly introduction 3 two decades back, leading me to believe that the truth had died with them. However, in my most recent attempt at writing of this event, I stumbled on some new information that I believed might finally put the matter to rest. My grandparents, both writers themselves, took turns documenting their European adventure in a humorous though unpublished book titled “Five Is an Odd Number.” I came across several drafts of their collaboration a few weeks back, though surprisingly, not a single version directly addressed “the choice” on the mountainside. Thankfully, their work did clear up at least one issue. While my aunt and mother have long disagreed even on what section of the Alps they were in (French or Swiss), my grandfather’s written account sets the record straight; they...