Over this past weekend, I left the Washington Riviera in order to make further progress towards the ultimate trek across country. This began with full-Seattle-House-lockdown, and involved an interim stop in Olympia.
Once in Portland, I found myself somewhat distracted by the world (read: friends, food, and waterfalls), but also managed to sort through a considerable amount of stuff. You might call it junk. I would call it my Portland life.
I tend to live my life in a series of boxes. I don't mean this in an existential, world-weary sense ("oh, woe this compartmentalization of my identity, woe this codified homelife, woe this series of labels!"). I mean this rather literally: in my home(s), over the years, I have filled shoeboxes with life. Artifacts. The detritus of my me-ness. These boxes are, more often than not, organized by year, and the items in them are, more often than not, totally worthless to everyone but me.
A sampling of a few things found in my Portland Sentimental Miscellany:
- A stick with the words "Pirate Cove" written on it.
- A mints-tin filled with sand poured out from a shoe.
- A message in a bottle.
- A mini-potato gun.
- A build-your-own Kaleidescope kit.
- Several scraps of fabric.
- A pair of unwearable yellow safety goggles.
- An empty pack of chiclets.
These examples span 3 of my 4 years in Portland, and each of these things has a full narrative attached. Take the first, for example.
It was July 7, 2006, and the Best Friend and I were bored. We had already driven around town aimlessly, dropped in on several people, and established that there was no party-o'clock that night. It was about 9pm. We decided to call another friend, JF, who had long been amenable to spontaneous adventuring. JF did not answer, so we decided to intrude instead.
JF was embroiled in a fierce poker game when we burst through the front door and announced that he was coming with us. Initially, we were rebuffed, but few people can withstand our charms for very long--we were piled into my car soon thereafter, headed for the coast. We stopped at a place suggested by JF that required us to hike through the woods, cross a rope bridge, and navigate the wilderness without flashlights. Our reward was the Pirate Cove at Short Sands beach, where legend holds that a Pirate Ship once came ashore. Legend also holds that the booty from that ship remains somewhere nearby.
We did not go looking for it, in part because we didn't know the legend yet (I in fact did not learn that we had gone to Short Sands until months later), and in part because it is a known fact that Pirate booty is cursed. In lieu of damning our very souls to the depths of Davy Jones' locker, we built a bonfire and went swimming.
Then, we watched the moon set.
This is one of those things few people can claim to have watched. We did not watch the sun rise--we actually left the beach at around 5 am--but we did watch the moon go down over the horizon, and we walked back to the car in the pitch black of pre-dawn.
Now. That is, of course, only a short version of that story. I thought out the whole version of the story,* and therein lies my trouble. Thinking through the long-form of every narrative of every knick-knack takes time, energy, and emotional fortitude. At the end of each shoebox I wanted to look through the shoebox again. Instead, I was forced to put each shoebox into a slightly larger Banker's Box for indefinite storage.
Thus is the process of leaving a town, I suppose. I wouldn't be able to leave it if I took it with me,¹ so I find myself compartmentalizing memories in order to make room for new ones. Also, I find myself compartmentalizing so that I don't have to lug sticks and tins full of sand across the country to collect dust.
This process was repeated, to a lesser extent, in Olympia this week as well. I have thus nearly completed the sequential order of my life for the last dozen years, and successfully taken enough strolls down memory lane to wear irrevocable ruts and potholes into the road.
Next task: start packing the stuff that does get taken.
Notes:
* It may be said that there is no whole narrative, since each individual is by necessity offering only part of said narrative and probably stuff gets lost in the shuffle. But it may also be said that Bröt and Bread lack perfect conceptual equivalencies and are therefore always never perfect translations of one another. We'll leave those tensions to the continental philosophers, and return to the blog post.
¹ Oh, ho-ho! Tautology for the win!
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