The Quest

 
Cooking kangaroo meatballs on Thanksgiving 2015, Melbourne, Australia


I am on a quest this morning. Sitting here at my kitchen table, firmly planted in my chair with a box of peanut butter pretzels and a cup of tea, I am going on an adventure through time to find a lost piece of writing. I woke up this morning with a wriggling thought in my head about an idea that I had back in 2015 while camping in Tasmania. My sleepy brain thought that it would be a great idea to write today’s column about this really cool idea, except my awake brain demands more accurate information. What I meant to be a thirty second trip down memory lane has become a full fledged archaeological expedition into my distant past.  

Cue the hurtling credits of Indiana Jones as I plug my external hard drive into my computer. I have opened a portal to the past and there is no telling when I may return to the present. This hard drive is my Holy Grail of memories; telling the tales of all my great adventures; hitchhiking across Australia, sailing in Baja, lost in Norway, riding out a hurricane in Newfoundland, various road trips to and from places that I can scarcely recall visiting. I am seeking a small gem hidden among a dragon’s hoard of distraction and sidetracking. My return in a timely manner looks bleak. In ninety minutes I am supposed to be tiling a shower at my daily paying job, but right now, I am Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, searching the ruins of an ancient temple for the founder’s ancient wisdom.

A little screen of icons appears. The backup folders from three different computers and two external previous hard drives. During a bout with the flu a few years ago, I tried to stay busy by organizing the hard drive, but in my need to order my life, I created a great bureaucracy. All nicely labeled, but leading nowhere and causing endless headaches for navigators. Files torn from their old locations and stashed in some folder that made sense to the lunatic in the fever dream, but are now indecipherable to present-day me. 

I click on the folder Surface Tablet backup 2016, the most likely source of memories from that era. I am looking for an Australia writing folder, but the folder labeled Australia only has receipts of plane tickets and hotel bookings and randomly the contact information from the Tasmanian Guitar Duel (a story for a different time). The tendrils of memory are leading me astray. Suddenly I find myself reading a nugget of inspirational wisdom given to me by a lawyer named Magic in Canberra when I was waylaid by plantar fasciitis. And here is a photo of Ted and his grandson, Teddy who took me on a boating weekend to the south shore. The trailer jumped the hitch on a scary switchback descent into Sensation Gorge and I saw a koala bear for the first and only time. That whole area burned last year in a wildfire. The memory vortex has got a hold of me, I must retreat to the folder page before I get really lost.

After clawing my way out of the Australia folder, I make four more false starts before I find the original manuscript copy of my first book. The book would later take on the title Never Homeless, but at the time, it was called The Big Document. Before the editing and chapters, while I was still on the road, living out of a backpack, I would find a shady spot under a eucalyptus tree and transcribe my written journals. Like Nic Cage in National Treasure unearthing a diary of Thomas Jefferson, I have stumbled upon the source material, the non-descript document that holds the key to my quest. 

One hundred and fifty typed pages of random information without line breaks or chapters; straight stream of consciousness thoughts from a 25 year old hippie who thinks he knows everything and has all the time in the world to write about it. What I seek is hidden within this document, my archaeological spidey senses just know it.  

Fast forward two hours and my phone is ringing, startling me from my reverie. It is my co-workers wondering where I am. Whoops. I reply that I am somewhere between Melbourne and Devonport aboard the Spirit of Tasmania Ferry on Thanksgiving 2015, seasick and puking up kangaroo meatballs. My morning quest is in shambles, but I will persevere. In eight hours, I will return from my present day task of grout and caulk and dive back into the manuscript. Somewhere in there is a story worth writing a column about.


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