Professional storytellers like Bobby Norfolk understand a person's instinctual desire to be actively engaged with tales, and on Thursday, he worked his craft for an audience of local high school students and staff.
"The human brain is hard-wired for stories" that encompass all the five senses and intuition, Norfolk said.
He performed Thursday afternoon at Calvary Lutheran High School as part of the Missouri River Regional Library's second annual, revived Storytelling Festival.
The festival hosted eight storytellers, including Norfolk, who performed at 31 schools in Cole and Osage counties Wednesday and Thursday. There was also an evening performance Thursday night at MRRL in Jefferson City, featuring four of the performers.
The goal of the festival is to introduce young audiences to the oral tradition of storytelling.
"To bring reading alive and make it such a joy, and entertainment" adds to students' learning, Calvary Lutheran Principal Erich Ahlers said.
Norfolk told the journey of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and the rest of the Corps of Discovery Expedition group in 1804 as they worked their way west across the Louisiana Purchase toward the Pacific Ocean. "Told" undersells the performance, though; he began with the instruction "buckle your seat belts."
"I'm a very physical performer. I use a lot of movement and sound effects," Norfolk said.
Over the course of the 30-minute performance, he acted through motion, gesture, sound and expression many of the details of the Corps of Discovery's trek: rowing up a river; the different feeding methods of male and female mosquitoes; how to load an old-fashioned rifle; being chased by a grizzly bear when those rifles proved ineffective; explaining one-quarter of Native Americans' many uses of a buffalo - all that time allowed.
The story of Lewis and Clark, Clark's slave York, Sacagawea, and the other expeditioners has a personal connection for Norfolk; he used to be a park ranger at the museum at the base of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
"I didn't seek storytelling. It sought me," he said. Though he made his first appearance as a storyteller at the St. Louis Storytelling Festival in 1979, a critical experience that pushed him to explore the art form further was when a group of storytellers performed at the museum in 1981. He had been a ranger there since 1975.
He was so moved by the performance that he asked the chief ranger if he could take a couple days off each week to perform on his own.
Every October from 1981-86, he traveled to Jonesborough, Tennessee, to attend the National Storytelling Festival, which will have its 45th anniversary this year. At that festival, where he said thousands of people come to watch professional storytellers perform, "I would watch these people work their craft, and I took copious notes."
In 1986, he tendered his resignation from the National Park Service to perform as a professional storyteller full time.
He admitted it was terrifying to walk away from a full-time job with a pension and benefits, but he had an established stage presence from doing stand-up comedy and theater work concurrently with his park ranger career.
He hired an agent to help him with marketing, and "within a year, I was traveling the world performing."
For five years, Norfolk also had his own Emmy award-winning television show called "Gator Tales" on the CBS affiliate in St. Louis, from 1988-93.
His advice for anyone inspired to get into storytelling nowadays is to attend a National Storytelling Network conference - "that's step one." He was on the NSN's board of directors for six years.
Learning is as much a part of his own performances as entertainment.
"I hope I was instructive as well as funny," he said after his performance at Calvary Lutheran.