Is Life a Trick or Trip?

By Audrey Stallsmith

If life were a movie, would it be a road trip or a mystery? I’d have to conclude that life is more like an odyssey—a long wandering journey—than like a mystery novel. The latter, after all, centers on a limited cast of characters and comes to a solution after a certain number of chapters. It also depends on the author tricking the reader until the last minute. 

For the book to be a good one, that final solution has to fall into place with an almost audible click, eliciting a response such as, “Oh, that’s so obvious. I should have seen that.” I’ve been reading a biography of Agatha Christie, who was the master of that type of ending. 

Real life, however, doesn’t come equipped with such ready-made solutions. Even true crimes aren’t wound up nearly so neatly. There still are threads left dangling, clues which never are fully explained.

Christie’s own mystery proves that. Her husband Archie-- who had fallen in love with somebody else--asked her for a divorce shortly after her mother died, taking the author completely by surprise. She then disappeared for a period of ten days, which later would lead some people to believe that she had tried to frame her (obviously highly inconsiderate if not downright caddish) spouse for murder.  

Considering that she’d truthfully told her brother-in-law that she was going to a spa in a certain area, however, it seems more likely that she’d hoped Archie would worry about her and come after her—thus sparking a reconciliation. We can guess that the brother-in-law may have put off sharing his information because he didn’t want to get involved in his sibling’s marital troubles. In that case, he probably assumed that Agatha would come forward when she knew that the police were looking for her. Oddly enough, she didn’t.  

I would guess that two such severe blows coming almost on top of each other had caused a nervous breakdown of sorts. Severely wounded in spirit, Agatha needed to be left alone to lick her wounds where nobody knew her. But the newspapers and public couldn’t resist a story about a mystery author disappearing. All of this may have been a bit hard on the chief suspect in the case, but I think most females would agree it was no more than what Archie deserved!

But, of course, that wasn’t the end of Agatha’s life—though it might have seemed so at the time. She would go on to marry another man who was much younger but apparently more considerate than her first spouse. And she would achieve a level of fame that may never have happened without that odd disappearance. (In fact, some people still believe the whole thing was a publicity stunt.)

This is what I mean about life being more like an odyssey, because there is no winding up of everything at a set point with explanations. Rather, things just keep chugging along, often in a new direction. The original mythological wandering, of course, was Ulysses’ long journey home after the fall of Troy. That trip took him ten years—which was more than a bit excessive, even considering the slower travel of those times!

An odd western we watched recently reminded me of that more ancient, much-interrupted trip. A young man named Jimmie, whose father had just been murdered, signed up as a pony express rider. He planned to use the fast horses to take him further west, in search of the father of the man who had shot his father. Meanwhile that killer was making every effort to head him off.

Due to all that movement, the movie didn’t stick with the same cast of characters. Rather, Jimmie kept meeting peculiar new ones along the way, whom he had to get past to reach his goal. Fortunately, that goal involved more tattling than vendetta. The boy trusted the killer’s father to do the right thing, and he wasn’t disappointed in that trust.   

And, of course, the other main character—the villain—had his own journey. The viewer could identify with him in a way, since he so obviously wanted to please his father, but lacked the older man’s morals and strength of character. The unsatisfactory son killed because he couldn’t face up to his own weakness and bluffed his way though most of the movie by bullying those with whom he came in contact. But he ultimately broke under his father’s disappointment in him.

Everybody has choices on these journeys, many of which are excruciating. The killer’s father, for example, had gone west to accept the governorship of a new territory. Once there, however, he discovered that the appointment wasn’t based on his merits but on the mistaken assumption of certain men that they could control him.

When he found out what his son had done, it must have been tempting for him to deny that his boy could be capable of such conduct. But, deep down, the father knew better. With his life already crumbling, he turned his son over to the law. Now that I think about it, perhaps that father was the true hero of the movie.      

So, although the whole of life may be more like a journey, the people we meet along the way definitely are mysteries to us, just as we often are to them. At times, there seems no adequate explanation for what we humans do or don’t do. That is what makes this odyssey so interesting as well as infuriating. Speaking of infuriating, some of us recently learned that a well-known Christian writer has been a sexual predator for years. How could anybody live that contradictory a life?    

There are some people we can’t explain, but we can’t allow them to trip us up either. For instance, at one point in the movie, Jimmie came across an abandoned little girl and took her on with him to his next stop. When he asked her what had happened to her parents, she succinctly replied, “Dead.” Jimmie and she didn’t discuss that further, as if—in such a rough land—there was no point in belaboring what couldn’t be helped.

His mount having gone lame, Jimmie stopped to borrow another when they came upon a large building and corral of horses in the middle of nowhere. He left the girl to pick out and saddle one while he went inside to inform someone that he was taking it. Because the orphan was so tiny, there seemed no way she could accomplish her task. But she continued to struggle with a saddle almost as big as she was the whole time Jimmie was arguing with the horses’ owner, who turned out to be more than a bit batty.

As someone who is prone to self pity myself, I’ll have to remember that little girl’s single-minded determination the next time I start feeling sorry for myself. In the meantime, Jimmie only managed to escape by figuring out what the madman’s psychoses were and getting around them. The girl, now with a horse at the ready, took her new friend’s sudden eruption from the house with bullets flying after him matter-of-factly. 

They both had goals after all, hers to locate an uncle she’d never met, and his to find justice for his father. And they couldn’t allow the insanities of other people to distract them. Just as Jimmie was convinced of the integrity of the man he was going to find, we need to be convinced that the God who is our goal is good—even when the world he made seems anything but.