Traveling awakens memories. The fact that you may have woken up in a bed that is now hundreds of miles away makes voyages decades past more immediate, for yesterday you were Oakland and today you are on a windy two-lane highway three-stories above the Pacific Ocean, and the other day you were living in your house working your jobs in a context that is now historic, and that one time your uncles took you backpacking in the Shoshone National Forest. You are a rootless free agent traveling in your own past. You are convinced that if you scramble up one of the exterior ridges of what they refer to as The Bowl, a depression in what appears to have once been a peak, you will get 365-degree views of the Grand Tetons and the origins of what will become the Colorado River but is now the Green. You believe this to be true but are persuaded by your uncles that it is not worth it. Your brother, cousin and uncles rest on a rock, eating trail mix and drinking water, everything else was left at camp below, though you ascend a little before realizing it is steeper and higher than you originally perceived. You go back and find where you camped the night before, your uncles show you how to fold and pack the tent, that you have to pee on the fire to make sure it is extinguished. You don’t remember saying anything. For all you knew you never said anything. On the hike back it is downhill but it is still hot and you are sore from the day before when it was uphill and even hotter. It is July. You are miserable but proudly so because it is beautiful and you are accomplishing something to be proud of.
When you descend from one of the last ridges an expansive meadow with chest high thickets open up below you. Your uncles knew that you had to go straight, You don’t remember why they knew the destination was straight ahead, but you knew exactly where you were because you were there yesterday, but that you arrived by a trail that traced the base of the south ridge. You don’t know why you remember that direction as south or if it even was. You had no compass. What did you have? What did you wear? You hope these details are inconsequential because you don’t remember them. You don’t want to consider the possibility that you have lost who you were, that you don’t have conscious access to all you’ve experienced, learned and perceived. You remember saying, but who knows if you even did, that you came by the trail to the right and that we should go back that way, because you didn’t come by braving sharp bare branches, so why should you leave this way. But no one heard you so you let them go ahead and took the firm, wide dirt trail by which you ascended the day before and you lost eye contact with them as they quickly disappeared into the thick shrubs. The curve around the small ovular plane brought you to the other end in five minutes or so, and you waited at least ten watching the distant images of your family struggle and curse the figment of a trail that by now had entirely disappeared, though it is too late to go back, as it was the moment they didn’t listen to you. Finally they are directly beneath you and they scramble out of the brambles. Your uncle thinks you must be very pleased with yourself, and you are except you are pleased with how you are able so easily to refrain from gloating because this was all no big deal because you are right when everyone else is wrong as a matter of daily course. You are a teenager in a month.
When you travel it all seems like it happened yesterday, like when you went backpacking in Wyoming. Yesterday you went up, today you went down. As you go down you share with a companion, this one time I went up. And, another day, you go up and describe, what feels like yesterday, once upon time when you went down. It’s hard to remember the lesson when you approach it backwards. Every memory you have is only a memory of a memory, everything else is lost. The way you envisioned your childhood as a teenager is how you as an adult remember yourself. And you remember: you remember the lesson, what’s important is at a moment’s recall, everyone else passes through this world missing everything. You have a bright future.
This morning you awoke in what is now a distant bed—or, no, you slept on a mat on a floor in a converted attic apartment in Oakland—that yesterday you didn’t know existed, and tonight you will sleep in a tent in a campsite off of Highway 1 and tomorrow will be another floor and you sleep so well that where you awoke in your dreams doesn’t even register in your conscious mind. When you travel your dreams are just another surreal side trip in a weeks long journey into the mental unknown, whose images and narratives can only be comprehended by the reawakened self when it finds itself back at the beginning. Perhaps this is not the case when everyone travels. But when you travel you reshape your identity. You thought you were a field of grape, but you’re a vineyard, the fruit of your experience has ripened. You don’t want to spell this metaphor out. But the point is: recalling a memory is a kind of fermentation, aided by the natural yeast found at the time on the memory, what the memory meant to yourself at the time. I guess now I am spelling out the metaphor: the process by which the winemaker completes the wine—new or old oak barrels, for example—ultimately defines its character years later when it is uncorked, quaffed and judged to define its origins.
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