Memory Is Not Private Property

FIELD NOTE No. 022

Memory is unreliable. Not necessarily dishonest. Just badly organized.

It keeps the smell of an old boathouse and throws away entire years.

It remembers rainy days spent swimming out to the little rock island beyond the cabin bay and back. Three brothers racing the whole way.

Fish slime.
Mosquito coils.
A bat flying through the cabin.
Blueberry pie.
Important stuff.

There are photographs too.

Somewhere in a tub.

Boats.
Docks.
Fish.
Islands.
A float plane.
Gold water.

Fragments of a place somebody thought worth photographing before anyone knew what would be worth remembering.

Then something unexpected arrives from your dad.

A few pages.
Stapled.

MEMORIES.

Not really a letter. More like an inventory.

Lake Nipissing.
Ontario.
Memquisit Lodge.
Three generations returning to the same place.

Everything weathered.
Nothing particularly precious.
Built for another winter’s snow load, another spring thaw, another summer of people showing up.

Cedar-strip boats.
A 9.9 Johnson.
Pike.
Musky.
Smallmouth.
Walleye.
Birch.
Cedar.
Pine.
Fish hawks.
Eagles.
Bats.
Mouse traps.
Chipmunks.
Mosquitoes.
Campfire smoke.
A suspension bridge to the good cabins.
Wool blankets.
Blueberry pie… A lot of blueberry pie.

Three boys once wandered into the lodge while the cooks were pulling homemade pies from the oven. They wanted one. Somehow, they convinced the cooks to hand over an entire hot blueberry pie.

Charge it to the cabin.

Dad’s assessment thirty years later: “Not sure which cost more for a week… boat gas or pies?”

Fair question.

That’s the stuff you expect memory to keep.

The stupid stories.
The rituals.
The things repeated enough times that nobody remembers when they became tradition.

But the letter keeps going.

Little boys who needed Dad to take them fishing.

Then boys learning boats.
Motors.
Fish.
Firewood.
Weather.
A hatchet.
A float plane.

Eventually taking boats out themselves.

Growing up without anybody stopping to announce that growing up was happening.

Then there’s one story about a cedar-strip rental boat with a 9.9 on the back.

A family had hit a submerged rock.
Motor gone.
Miles from camp.
The boy stopped.
Hooked them up.

That little 9.9 dragged both boats all the way back for several miles. Then everyone went on with their day. The boy remembers going fishing. His father remembers that he stopped.

Well, shit.

There’s the problem with believing your memories belong to you.

They don’t.

Not entirely.

You remember your childhood from inside the kid.

What was fun.
What scared you.
The fish you caught.
The fish you lost.
Your brothers.
The stupid story.
The pie.

Meanwhile, somebody ten feet away was keeping another version.

The kid cutting firewood with a hatchet.
The kid learning the boat.
The kid with his hands on the controls of a float plane.
The kid stopping for strangers.

Things that probably didn’t feel important while they were happening. They were just happening.

While you were busy becoming somebody, somebody else was watching it happen.

Paying attention.

The photographs caught some of it.

Dad caught something else.

A photograph can show the cedar boat.
The dock.
The fish.
The float plane.

It can’t tell you what somebody standing outside the frame noticed about you that day.

Forty years later, a few stapled pages in your favorite handwriting can.

No grand speech.

Just evidence.

The memories you kept.

The memories he kept.

Same place.
Same years.
Different view.

Near the end, after forty years of fish, boats, brothers and blueberry pie, the language changes. The boy becomes a man. And then Dad gets the last word.

“Wonderful trips for a young boy to grow up! Young man you have 40 years of memories of this spot already!”

“Dang Pie… Burnt my tongue!!!”

— Esker