‘Tambourine Man’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Tambourine Man

            An icy cloud blankets the barren trees of central Kentucky. Mounds of brown decay become covered in a blinding sheet that will glisten and shimmer off the sun’s glorious beams when it eventually rises and pokes through that gray fog like a filled water balloon. Both complete and broken icicles tender the roof of a covered bridge, the tin creaking against the wood as a tundral breeze winds through the forest like a forlorn spirit.

            Although it is still dark, and the moon provides more light than the sun does at this current moment, two boys push through the cold. Their meager jackets, the pockets furnished by minor holes and an invasive chill, do poorly to protect against the morning zephyr. Despite the porous weather, perhaps even in rejection of it, one of the boys pulls a small, handheld camera from his pocket. He records the snow falling. The limbs transitioning from brown to white. The hills developing a delicate, translucent armor. He pans between gaps in the wood, capturing tall shadows and distorted shapes, as if searching for something within them. The two boys walk in silence for some time before returning to an RV on the outskirts of the great unknown. There, they will hold onto the past and examine figures in the treeline.

            It was 2013 then. They were filming “The Tambourine Man.” A short found-footage horror film about a fabricated local legend permeating the labyrinthian trees of Danville, Kentucky. Inspired heavily by online mythology of the time period and popular mediums of communication, “The Tambourine Man” was a nauseating collection of innocuous footage collected over a two-and-a-half year span. Intoxicating perspectives conveying abstract portrayals of rural property and urban exploration. The lore behind the being was just as muddled and confused as the adolescent shot composition: contradictory and immature. Six years later, this footage would be lost forever, and, by association, so too would the memories.

            In 2019, a home on the outskirts of Burgin, Kentucky burnt down overnight. The family lost everything. From two dogs and clothing, to easy breathing and childhood. Their lungs heavied beneath black soot and ash, those embers staining their pupils and marking their flesh like cattle. At first, nobody thought much about those lost times, or the lost tapes that preserved them. But as days turned into months, and the years passed by, those are what they miss most about that house. Being able to go back and inhabit who they used to be. Living within those moments like vagrant time travelers in search of some abandoned purpose.

I was a different person then. A complete stranger to who I am now. The memories that link myself and that child feel like fleeting visions from another life, transmitted through dream and packaged by some terrible fog. Really, all I can remember is how cold it was out in those woods. The exact narrative of “The Tambourine Man” is missing, and the footage those boys captured on that frigid morning has become inconsequential. I’ve become separated from the time spent pillaging those beaten trails and mangling intricate cobwebs.

On the rare occasion that we’re all together again, we reminisce on these times. Our tongues act as devices of transportation, muddying our sneakers and polluting our jeans with grass stains and pollen in an instant. Specific moments do come to mind on occasion — trivial fights or comedic bloopers — but the details are half buried beneath plateaus of dirt and bone. Each story contradicts the next and we argue about the truth, distorting the past like expired film spiraling from a dusty reel. Nothing is how it’s supposed to be.

This is why we miss these tapes so dearly. Not because we believe “The Tambourine Man” to be a cinematic masterwork lost before it could be found, but because these tapes were the truth. These tapes were our lives. In lieu of something extraordinary, they became scrapbooks in motion. Moving images depicting our growth. The changing of pitch and the sprouting of facial hair, prepubescent discussions of life and the paltry challenges that came with it. Immature humor and teenage angst. Although the film was about a fictional local legend, it was a complete and earnest documentation of childhood. Our childhood. Images, and memories, that we will never get back. No matter how hard we focus or how deeply we sleep, these moments are lost. Forever. These years exist within a vacuum. A bottomless pit, blacker than night and entirely void.

In 2024, with a new camera, I attempt to fabricate time. I craft my own souvenirs through a fuzzy lens, echoing an accidental entrapment of reality. I fixate on shot composition and lighting. The framing of faces in conversation and staging of missed opportunities. Instead, however, these recordings feel cheap and hollow. They are false rememberings of plastic mannequins and scripted dialogue, no more true than those drunken discussions of nostalgia through toothy, dejected lips. In a few years time, all I will have are these videos. Disconnected from memory, entirely null of context and history.

I return to those central Kentucky woods on another cold winter day. They are different than I remember them being, and their current state forever alters their past form. The paths that we walked all those years ago have since faded into overgrown clusters of serpentine shrubbery and that bridge boasts an illness only contracted through bouts with human touch and time. I can never be certain that this was the road traveled, or that we saw anything of importance within these very trees. I like to think that those videos would help. But, in actuality, they would reveal nothing but our own shrill, impotent voices ricocheting through an abyss of jagged limbs, fearful beasts, and a stark, domineering cold. No matter how often we return, or how firmly we squint into the darkness, those kids are gone. There is nothing out there. Nothing for us in these woods.

Daniel Ungs is a twenty-three year old writer from Danville, Kentucky. He recently earned his bachelor's degree from Western Kentucky University where he studied English and Film. While attending WKU, Daniel published several works in undergraduate literary and academic journals, such as Zephyrus and The Ashen Egg. He was also the recipient of several creative writing awards at the university, including the Wanda Gatlin Essay Award in 2022, the Dale Rigby Essay Award in 2023, and he took home first place in the Mary Ellen and Jim Wayne Miller Celebration of Writing Fiction Writing Contest in 2023. Instagram: @danielungs Writing Blog: onbusterpike.wordpress.com