Making memories
In the midst of a cycling adventure, or a canoe voyage, or a backpacking trip (or a legislative session or an election cycle) there is a reliable arc sweeping from raw experience to constructed framework to refined narrative.
These stages are distinct.
It’s the way we make sense of the world, how we build the narrative of our lives.
While in the raw experience everything is in the moment. If a detailed itinerary is prepared in deference to the limits and narrow margins for error of self-propelled travel, there is no appetite for reflection, no luxury of anticipation, and no room for anything other than the now and the next. It is exhilarating and natural and satisfying to look no further than the next waypoint, the next meal, the hill in front of you, the evening’s destination.
That’s the easy part.
In the immediate aftermath of a complex undertaking, all seems confusion to me. I struggle to distinguish one day from the next, to remember routes and features in the right order, to connect the end of one event to the beginning of another step. It’s a frustrating middle ground between doing and understanding.
Then, in the instance of these stage-crafted, imposed-theme tandem rides, the grand unified version of The Trip takes embryonic form as my son and I tell each other stories of our experience, squaring up our version of events and fact-checking each other’s memories and perceptions.
“I tell you, we ate at Paddy’s Corn Beefery on Tuesday, the day we got to Kosciusko, between Stockholm and De Soto. I swear that’s the way it went. I had unsweetened tea.”
“I am just going to say you are completely wrong. Also, you had Mr. Pibb.”
Checking against one of a handful of primary-source references is often humbling. Looking it up, I am chagrined to own up to my own failure to chronicle things as they were. Then, in memory assisted by conversation, I connect meaningful segments one to the other and establish an outline of a chronology. We remind each other of telling details, of in-retrospect revelations. It becomes more than the ordering of events, it transforms into experience, memory, a life.
In this way, a common story emerges. I’ve learned, while writing up trip stories these last three years, how maps, and photos, and cue sheets, and elevation maps, come alive under my gaze as I connect one to the other in front of me and bring my flexible memory to bear on what is understood to be an agreed past, a shared experience to revel in. I can follow this string of information, of ideas, of references, maps, internet searches, and conversations – not to mention back to planning and setting down a schedule and a common memory and a life.
It’s familiar by now, this story I am forming and embellishing like tatted lace curtains in a kitchen window providing a comfortable frame to an ever-changing and beautiful view.