Growing up, I thought my trail journal was the coolest thing. It looked like Henry Jones’s Grail journal from the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It had multi-coloured trail notes, sketches, photos, postcards, receipts, locations and dates of the hikes I completed, and lots of addresses and phone numbers from people I met on my travels. It was made of leather and I held it closed with a leather shoelace. When it was full, I put it in a box. And sometime over the years, it was lost.
I’ve been thinking about trail journals again. I was telling a friend recently about an incident that happened years ago, when I slipped into a crevice along Helena Ridge in the Canadian Rockies. It was a pretty significant event. I remember where it happened, who I was with, the bear encounter on the descent, and spending time at the hospital getting my fingertips sewn back on, but much of the detail has become sketchy over time.
And many of the photos I’ve taken in the last thirty years are either gone or stored in boxes and albums, possibly tucked away in a box somewhere, but most likely lost to time. The only photos I look at now are the ones that I took with my digital camera and saved on my computer. And considering how much time I’ve spent on the trails, hiking and scrambling, I don’t have many photos to show for it. In fact, I took six months off to travel and hike in the United States a few years ago and came back with fewer than 100 photos. My daughter was with me for two weeks of that trip and took nearly 600.
I’ve scrambled up the back side of Yamnuska in Kananaskis Country over 50 times, solo, with friends, family, and groups, ran up and down it once in 100 minutes, and another time I spent nine hours exploring the ridge. But I made no journal notes, and when I look at the notes I made in my dog-eared copy of Scrambles in the Canadian Rockies by Alan Kane, on the Yamnuska page is a single notation: clear sky; I can see Calgary. A rather poor summary of my experience, I would say.
I will endeavor to do better, and I have lately, at least somewhat. A journal is the best way to retain a memory. I have been telling people over the last five years about an eerie story when I felt a presence while traveling through the Canadian Rockies. It’s a creepy sort of ghost story. But I came across my notes in my journal, taken immediately after the event, and it wasn’t nearly as mysterious as I made it out to be. I was embarrassed.
There has been a lot of research in the last few decades about human memory. The results show that our memories, frankly, suck. In fact, they suck big time. We fill in many gaps from our experiences. We even screw up for really important events. I distinctly remember exactly where I was when Lady Diana’s car crash was first televised. I was in a hotel in Canmore, walking down a staircase toward the front desk, and saw the announcement on the television in the lobby. Standing in front of the television with others, I remember looking back and seeing my family on the staircase coming down to the lobby. A dozen years later, I returned to the hotel, which had been turned into a hostel. It was all very familiar. But when I was checking in, I looked behind me and noticed there was no stairwell. I mentioned it to the clerk, asking when they had done a renovation. I said that I had loved that majestic staircase and it was a shame that it was gone. He said that he had been working there for fifteen years and there had never been a staircase there. Was he sure? Well, he should know.
The best way to remember the important things in our lives is to record the experience immediately after the event – through words, photos, and mementos – and to get the perspectives of other people who were there. I think it’s the closest to reality that we can get.
Many of my memories – and probably yours – aren’t very accurate. And I suppose that’s okay. We will create a story around ourselves, hopefully one that pleases us and humbly puts us in good light. But when it comes to travel, I want to get better at capturing the details of those experiences. Despite that I’ve made progress – I do, after all, have several full journals from the last few years of travel – I still miss a lot of detail. Oh well. Progress, not perfection, as they say.