Umbilical attachment, Haley poem, ball of string, clew

[Jeff]

Fenn:

I am almost umbilically attached to the spot (Mysterious Writings Six Questions 2019)

The ball of string has always stuck out to me as significant.  What do you make of it?

(1) Forrest collected string, multicolored (Gold and More). Tied it end to end and wound it into a ball. Mysteriously disappeared but couldn’t fit through his bedroom door. Unrealistically large, magical. His mother kept eyeing the window. Was she just looking for the postman? An unsolved crime!

(2) It’s implied that the ball of string disappeared through his bedroom window. What else jumps out windows? Forrest. Spanish class (Jump-Starting the Learning Curve). Bedroom, first time (Surviving Myself). Bedroom, second time (Gypsy Magic). How about when he’s shot down in Laos? Through his jet’s canopy, in detail (My War for Me).

(3) These windows lead from the comfortable and safe into the potentially dangerous world. What? Flying through a war zone, are you kidding? Not according to Forrest: he felt “totally invincible” and his “F-100D was so solid and strong that being afraid wasn’t easy.” The window is the edge or the boundary. The actual windows discussed above: 1) child play, 2) child play, 3) child play, 4) real danger. There are other more imaginative windows throughout the book. It’s crossing the street or crossing the river, as imagined by a young Forrest. What’s the harm of climbing out a window? Well, falling is one very real possibility. Does a fall happen? See being shot down in Laos.

(4) Woven clothes = connection to home. Evetts Haley poem (My War for Me). Forrest imagines addressing these words to his wife. Grand clothes are worn by seekers and adventurers, woven by “gray-gowned patience” while she (gender only implied) “sits at home.” Glamorous adventures are only made possible by the mundane work of supporting players. Woven threads tie the adventurers to home and put their supposed greatness in perspective. Note that Forrest’s wife always allowed him the luxury of doing the things he thought were important (Flywater). Woven clothes = connection to home. Woven clothes = a ball of string?

(5) Cable and wires = connection to home. Rescue from Laotian jungle (My War for Me). The 240-foot cable ride up on a heavy, iron jungle penetrator enables Forrest’s extraction from the Laotian jungle by his Air Rescue Service team. More imaginatively, Forrest calls his wife after his cable rescue with patches through Saigon, Guam, and Barry Goldwater in Scottsdale, to Lubbock, Texas. Woven clothes, cable extraction, line patching = connection to home. His ball of string? Yes.

(6) Woven hair, finds the exact spot. Bookseller tossed her thick braids back and forth as Forrest remarked that she “knew where every book was in that whole store” and that she took him to “the exact spot” (Important Literature). A hunt for the exact spot. In a treasure hunt book? Interesting. And a braid / ball of string to lead us there? Forrest’s home for eternity, the memorial to him. Call this ball of string an umbilical connection to the spot? Not a far leap to suspect this is what Forrest is getting at.

(7) Ball of string, clew. A clew is a ball of thread or yarn. Origin of the word clue. Clew originally meant a ball formed by rolling pieces together, as in a ball of yarn or twine. It’s a ball of thread, employed to guide any one in ‘threading’ his way into or out of a labyrinth or maze. It came to more generally mean “a fact, circumstance, or principle which, being taken hold of and followed up, leads through a maze, perplexity, difficulty, intricate investigation, etc.” And today, typically spelled as clue, it means “that which points the way, indicates a solution, or puts one on the track of a discovery; a key” and “especially a piece of evidence useful in the detection of a crime” (OED). Cue Forrest’s missing ball of string unsolved crime, a stand-in for the treasure hunt. All this in a treasure hunt book? Really?

(8) As Forrest’s ball of string clew is found in a book with a treasure hunt and, further, that it is in the very chapter in which the treasure hunt is revealed, its inclusion invokes the notion of the “guide” sense of the word. This contention is bolstered by the advice on the end paper fold-out map in TFTW: “study the clues in the book and thread a tract through the wiles of nature and circumstance” (emphasis added). This unambiguously recalls the sense of the word relating to the ancient Greek myth in which Theseus used a provided clew to thread his way through the intricacies of the Cretan Labyrinth.

(9) The ball of string clew is a clue, the connection and guide. Multicolored ball of string could invoke rainbow, at the end of which we find Forrest / the treasure chest. Forrest’s ball of string is tied end to end: could invoke omega-omega above the colophon if we take omega = end. Forrest’s ball of string is a ball, a circle. Circles are also end to end.

(10) Parallel to rescue from Laos near death experience, his wife Peggy rescues his from cancer near death experience. Cancer exacted “tolls on [his] spirit and body” and that “he was disappearing into the black abyss” before his wife lead his “team” that “saved [his] life.” Ode to Peggy Jean: “saw that he shall never die” because Peggy takes care of him. Letter O is typographically a circle, ball. Ode to Peggy Jean: O’ed—or circled, connected, united—to Peggy Jean. Fenn wordplay, characteristic of his writing.

(11) Tackle box at conclusion of Flywater = overt stand in for treasure chest. His memorial and would-be grave. “Special things that brought me to that final place, one of which was knowing Peggy was there.” Route to that place--possibly meaning the poem to the treasure chest--and at least one guide to that place is Peggy. Connection, O’ed, clew. Fishing: (1) lines and flies tied and (2) connection between fisher and fish.

If this is the line of thinking that Forrest intended, does it have any relation to the treasure hunt and how can it be applied? I don't know. Discussion of his father in the Epilogue is related? Googled him = searched the web.

[Jenny]

This is all great thinking and awesome connections made, Jeff. If Forrest had been into traditional 'armchair treasure hunts', I'd be all for these type of things you are suggesting. But I'm skeptical of anything other than the intended solution being nothing more than the following of the poem, by marrying those 9 location clues, to a map...

It could be, for myself, is that with the treasure chest found, and with Jack saying he found it by basically a few slip ups confirming his initial thoughts of where it would be...... it's all so blah... it was incredible fun, awesome journey, and lovely chase, but yet, simple in hindsight.

I ask myself, had Forrest created all those intricate and elegant links, like you might find in the traditional styles of armchair treasure hunts and you lay out?

Maybe....

But I can't get past the feeling it was just a 'map' of words, given in the poem... beautiful words, but only those words (with a few sprinkled hints)....and not a tapestry, or books of words, which interconnected every which way............

[Jeff]

Hi Jenny.  "It's all so blah."  Couldn't agree more that this is a fear of mine too.

I’ve swung from a K.I.S.S. approach to a complicated one with hidden info in the poem and now back to most likely K.I.S.S. based on Jack’s comments and things pointing to a probable Yellowstone hiding spot.

Since Jack’s comments on simplicity, straightforwardness, and oeuvre, I’ve largely tried to set Forrest’s other writings aside and focus on how he develops (what I think are possible) symbols and motifs in TTOTC. My assumption is that these will help interpret the poem. They provide the context to get to the correct interpretation. They do not solve it like a riddle or cipher but provide evidence that a certain interpretation is correct. They provide the confidence that Forrest advised us to have before poking around the woods.

My approach when I first started led me to Yellowstone because that’s K.I.S.S. and my first solutions around the Midway area of Firehole (around Midway Bluff) and around some fishing holes of the YS portion of the Madison. They were such tenuous arguments that I didn’t even bother poking around these sites when I was passing through pre-pandemic. It felt too much like a hunch. Hiking + sightseeing were a better use of my time than poking around (almost) aimlessly.

Then because of Forrest’s other writings (especially the scrapbooks) and recognizing that this hunch exercise could continue ad nauseam, I was drawn into the hole of looking for a stenographic solution that would add specificity. A lot of this was done in concert with Nkown. He had many non-TTOTC pointers to the area around the USAFA in Colorado, but our seperate focus was trying to systematically extract hidden information from the poem. We didn’t get anywhere.

Now I’m approaching it with the notion that TTOTC is his least corrupted writing, and therefore the best place to get information in the correct context. He never let on that TTOTC wouldn’t be enough...that other writings or statements are absolutely required. It’s fair to assume that he initially intended TTOTC to be the only information ever released and that he didn’t explicitly plan for this to be an interactive hunt (he said he originally planned to die there by suicide!). All the interaction creates complications by needing to know their timing, context, i.e. his reaction to what’s happening in the search community or to individuals therein (hence my description of TTOTC as the least corrupted writing).

[As an aside, I question the creator’s choice to have an interactive Q&A portion of The Golden Treasure of the Entente Cordiale. Interaction undoubtedly drummed up interest in Fenn’s hunt but it also seems to have created its share of problems (including slip-ups). I’m now of the opinion that letting a hunt stand on its own is the best way to go.]

Whether TTOTC is “enough” or not remains to be seen. At this point I’m more curious about how the non-poem part of TTOTC fits into the solution more than the solution itself and certainly more than the particular hiding spot.

If the poem is, as both you and I suspect, just a set of intentionally vague directions, then I wonder how it might be saved from being trite--"blah," as you said. Was it all about the hunt's epiphenomena and not the poem itself? When asked if the solution is elegant, Jack told me that the solution is elegant in its simplicity. Not sure that definitively answers the question of whether it is at the end of the day a very pedestrian treasure hunt (from the perspective of the poem itself), but it certainly suggests that that is the case.