Essay: Photographic Memory Fish

From 2008 to 2010 i completed a number of courses from Athabasca University. I thought that it might be fun to convert some of the essay assignments into blog postings. 

One course was called Writing Creative Non-Fiction and this was what I wrote as a class assignment:

Like salmon pulled from great depths, my memories are hooked from a vast sea of photographic images. These images began to accumulate after I received my first Kodak camera on my eleventh birthday. Behind my Vancouver childhood home, family members were captured as they squinted into the summer sunshine. These black and white memory-captures would have long faded if they were not glued onto the black-paper pages of my first photo album. They remain there, complete with pencil captions so carefully written in my seventh-grade hand.

Memory images from later decades were captured on film slides that I shot, sorted and boxed. I wrote short comments on the paper borders: “Bangkok Reclining Buddha” or “Sam in Edmonton”. From their storage boxes I can dredge up images that would otherwise have long ago escaped. Looking at these pictures, I recall the exact colour of the South China Sea or the precise shape of my moustache in 1989. Among my clearest memories are certainly those “frozen” on film.

Yet, that is not entirely true.  Many of my memories remain so alive that they leap above the surface without ever having been developed on film. More than three decades ago, a friend drove me from Texas to Alberta in an ancient Volkswagen Beetle. At the trip’s end, when I opened my camera, the film had not rewound and an entire roll was ruined by the bright sun. Even so, I can easily recall our non-air-conditioned desert drive into Las Vegas. The car radio announced the temperature as 113 degrees Fahrenheit. (I remember not 112 or 111, but precisely 113). We slaked our desert thirst with ice-cold low-alcohol low-taste Coors beer. While I can recall the taste of that beer, my memory contains few images from that particular trip. No photographs were processed for storage in my boxes and albums.

During one of my earliest jobs, I worked on the railway for just a few mid-winter weeks in northern British Columbia. Even though no photos were taken, I remember quite precise details. The cold weather was intense, painful and frightening. The crew included the Blangy brothers, plus a tough Ukrainian named Heller whose face retained a jagged scar from a grizzly bear encounter. Otto Caputo, our Italian foreman, prodded us with exhortations of “The trains a-coming! The trains a-coming!” We longed for lunch breaks and the solace of hot coffee. Once, after the glass in my cheap Thermos broke, I discovered my coffee to be frozen solid. Now decades later, I remember my disappointment. Why are those memories easier to recall than the names and faces of people I worked with just last year?

Memories are such mysterious fish. Some struggle from great depth and never emerge into full clarity. Others exist solely in old photographs. Yet other memories refuse to stay hidden and leap unbidden to bite me at the oddest moments.