The Forgotten Trip
Late last month and early this month, I got a bit morose about the idea that I’ll never be able to travel again, a thing that’s also all wrapped up in the aphantasia and SDAM which preclude me from being to re-live old travels. As if to emphasize all of this, yesterday my Timehop reminded me of a trip I’d taken since moving to Portland about which I’d entirely forgotten until that moment.
It’s true that much like it’s easier for me to remember the events of a movie than it is for me to remember the events of a book, because there’s no “mind’s eye” required to generate the visual components and triggers for memory, it’s also generally easier for me to remember events during which I’d taken a a lot of photos. Which is what made it all the stranger that I’d completely forgotten my trip to Pendleton, my first-ever (and last) trip to eastern Oregon.
Fourteen years ago last night, I boarded a Greyhound in downtown Portland at around 11:45 PM. Something like six hours later, I disembarked in Pendleton and wandered in the pre-dawn dark.
Even once reminded by Timehop, I really only remembered three things: hiking out of the main drag across the train tracks and up a hill to (I think) a Denny’s, then hiking back down into town proper where I took photos of the only other soul I encountered until later in the day, and of a creeping Betty Boop in the window of a cafe. Even browsing through the photos now I only barely remember a few other moments upon seeing them: the F.O.E., the fisherman, the back door of the JCPenney, that obelisk, that lone boxcar, and this Greyhound “station”.
Most everything else, I just have to take it on faith that I took all these photos and saw all these things, because the photos are in my photoset not someone else’s. Looking at this or that other photo now, I can’t swear that I actually remember being there or if the photo simply is rewriting me back into the events based upon the photo. If travel happened, but I forgot all about it until an app reminds me with pictures, did it really happen to me?