When Words Failed - Havard Gould

When Words Failed

As someone who writes for a living, I have never liked the phrase "words failed me". I used to say words don't fail, it's people who fail words; either a failure to select or a failure to find.
But then my words failed. For many months.
I was attacked on a Thursday afternoon, knocked to the ground and out cold before my glasses bounced off the sidewalk. I woke up surrounded by caring passersby, at least two of whom probably saved my life by interrupting my attacker who had decided what an unconscious reporter really needed was repeated kicks to the head.
At the hospital, tests were negative (they scanned my brain and found nothing, I joked with a complete lack of originality). I was sent home and told to take it easy, not a particularly tough set of instructions to follow. I didn't feel too badly that Thursday night and Friday wasn't too rough either. I hurt some. I slept a lot.
Saturday I got up before everyone else and discovered I couldn't read a newspaper.
I could glance at a headline and understand it. But I couldn't read a news story, let alone write anything. I was overwhelmed.
That was October. In December, I was still too badly injured to sign a stack of greeting cards. It took me more months to realize how badly I had been injured and many more after that to detect signs that a recovery was taking hold.
For a long time, I couldn't watch tv or ride in a car. Motion was intolerable; I even had to ask people not to talk with their hands. My brain didn't like light, complex matters, being around people or doing much of anything.
Eventually, in boredom, I picked up a camera. I could take still pictures. Not easily and not quickly. But over time, that slowly got better and gave me a sense that I was hanging on to at least one skill.
That's what this page is about. Images from a time when I didn't last long and I couldn't go far, but behind the camera, I felt I was at least preserving a spark of creativity.

I

This is where I started. This is a feather from a healthy male Cardinal, lost in a frenzy the day his three chicks left the home prematurely. A predator had approached the nest and three mostly-flightless young birds fluttered to earth. Each managed to find hiding spots in various bushes, all a foot or so off the ground, where they perched in terror. Mother and father defended their scattered brood as best they could, harassing any creature that came close. In the frantic battle that first day, the father lost this feather but none of the chicks. The ties that bind ...

Harvest time. An apple on the stump of a very old oak tree.