Human eyes are in constant micro-oscillation, flicking back and forth from 20 to 150 times per second, in order to scan or ‘map’ the entire visual scene from various lines of sight.  These saccades seem to be our body’s desperate attempt to see the world from multiple points of view.  Images fire in faster than consciousness and lie flush, one against the next, eliminating time gaps.  Our memories spring from these sutured snapshots.  We think we see reality, whole and uninterrupted, but our minds are sluggish and easily fooled.

As time passes, we recall the sensations and images in varying prominence. We often remember different elements on different days.  How different must be the memory of a single event shared by strangers.  Their stories have different beginnings and endings—they trace entirely different arcs—and yet, for at least a moment, reality happens.  Then it is gone forever.  We could almost get the moment back, it seems to me, if we could collect enough memory.  If I began weaving all the memories of all the participants of a shared event, stapling details together where they overlap, might I find a way to slip back into the scene?  I could capture their sensations and images.  I'll collect so many that my own memory will swell to bursting with reality, and I'll breathe in a perfect afternoon. 

There was bumper-to-bumper traffic on a summer day in January.  And kayaks and machetes and Kung-Pao Chicken.  Our memories are full of sounds and silences.  The diesel truck that clucks like a four-ton rooster.  The heavy sigh of the river.  The drip of sweat down our foreheads.

***

We sit up in the supercharged diesel F-450, eating Kung-Pao Chicken, as miles of traffic wind out of sight down between the hills.  As the truck crawls forward, idling heavily, Eric tries to cut into a tough piece of chicken with a plastic knife.  The end snaps off.  He reaches under the seat, removes a machete from its case.  When he straightens up, his helmet falls off and rolls against the door.  Gripping the handle of the foot-and-a-half-long knife, Eric attempts to maneuver the tip of the blade onto the chicken, his elbow banging the window, then the seat and the dashboard.  He gives up then, dropping the machete onto the floor.  It bounces once on the helmet, which wobbles once from the weight of the knife.  He seals up the plastic container of chicken and sets it on the dashboard.  

I step on the brake as the car ahead of us pulls left for a u-turn.  The silver station wagon has two sleek and pointed kayaks on the roof.  Both boats look new and fast – like they could fly if the straps were released.  The station wagon reverses to make the turn on the narrow road.  They make a five-point turn, leaving space at both edges of the road because of the foot-high drop-off down to the dirt shoulder.  I roll down my window as they speed off up the hill and back the way we’ve come.  We both turn our faces towards the open window.  We could hardly help it, I think.  Air that warm in January has power over a person.  The proof is in the long line of cars waiting to get into a park that is all but deserted on typical January days.  Nature calls.

***

Anyway, we cross the street onto the bike path and start walking towards the park.  The kids are running ahead, playing a spontaneous game of tag.  Despite their joy, I can’t help feeling a terrible sense of foreboding—not for the kids exactly but the world they are going to live.  Here it is January in Washington, DC and instead of the typical 32 degrees, we’re having another 70 degree day.  A buddy from work keeps quipping, “this heat ought to take care of the mosquito problem this summer,” and I can’t but wonder what else this heat will “take care of.”  The Cherry Blossom festival is doomed, of course (I’ve heard that some buds and blooms are already appearing—they’ll freeze come February), and the local wildlife populations are sure to spiral out of control.  Deer rutting in January means—well I can’t say this without sounding like Mr. Doom and Gloom but there’s no way around it—it means more roadkill as the deer start foraging by roadsides.

    Here I am being a total downer while the kids having the time of their lives wearing t-shirts and shorts and running circles around each other.  When I look over to where the kids are, they aren’t running anymore.  They are standing transfixed at the edge of the crosswalk.  On the other side of the road, two kayakers are running towards the park with their boats on their shoulders.  Sleek racing boats.  They’ve got all their kayaking gear on, even their helmets.  One is wearing some sort of neoprene booties (they must be wet because I hear the squelch with every footfall) and the other is wearing normal running shoes as though they aren’t going kayaking at all but only carrying their boats while they jog.  In an instant I’ve forgotten my anxiety about today and the future.  Two smiling kayakers, chatting animatedly, running through the neighborhood and towards the river (which is more than two miles away) has that cheering effect on me.  Charlie Kaufman described it best when he wrote, “Like when characters [in movies] sing pop songs in their pajamas and dance around.”  You can’t help feeling good.

    We can hear them talking from across the road.  They’re talking loudly probably because they have their boats up by their ears and they’re running.  I hear something about Mexico, waterfalls, and jungle machetes before a big diesel pickup roars past, drowning out their words.  When the sound of the truck has finally faded,  the kayakers are out of earshot.  I stand watching them run side-by-side down the bike path.  They keep veering off the trail, avoiding patches of thick mud from a construction site on the next block.  I think, “What a great day to be out in a boat” and suddenly Eric is there in front of me.  He looks up at me and when I smile he can see that I’m focused on him, not on the pictures in my head.  “Those were pretty cool-looking kayaks weren’t they?” I say.  “Can I do kayaking?” he says, hopefully.  A kid with his energy and enthusiasm, with his adventuresome nature?  It’s perfect.  “Definitely,” I say, and he can tell I mean it because I say “Yes” with my eyes too.  We cross the street with some kids on bikes and an elderly couple walking their terrier.  On the other side, just before he starts to run again, Eric turns to me again, curious as ever, and asks, “What’s a machete?”

***

    I’m sitting in the sand.  It’s mostly not sand.  It’s mostly shells like upside-down hats.  They have colors like if you put pepper onto toothpaste…And bumpy like that too.

    My shoes are off.  So are his even though they’re not wet.  They told us not to…but there was a nut like an owl face floating.  I wanted to get it.  When I went there the sand started moving down and then I was too like on an escalator. I remembered…but I couldn’t stop because it was the sand doing it not me…And he had to take his off too to keep them dry…He is Eric my friend.

    It’s warm on the top of the shells but cold under.  I’m pushing the warm shells so the cold shells can be in the sun too.  The sun makes my face wet and dripping down on my eyes but I wasn’t crying.  They are saying, “I can’t believe this I can’t believe this weather,” and their faces look happy.  My face is happy too because I can take off my jacket and put the sand on my toes.

    Eric is going around and around. I can hear the shells when he steps like they are clapping.  He jumps over my feet and runs around me until I can’t see him.  Then the shells stop clapping.  I turn around to see why, and I see two men with boats walking down the sand.  One has the helmet on his head and one has the helmet missing.  

    They go to the water and one walks in but the other takes his shoes off first.  The boats float on the water like the owl-face nut.  The one with the orange boat that has blue says, “you carried water with you?”  The one with the missing helmet was just hiding his helmet in the boat.  He says, “no we had filtered water bottles.”  They sit in their boats and one man sees the nut with the owl-face.  He takes it out of the water and throws it onto the sand.  Then they put their paddles in the water on one side and then the other side and back and forth and make the boats go away.  I can’t see them anymore but I can see Eric.  He has the owl-face nut in his hand.

My face is suddenly hot again.  But then Eric throws the nut up in the air and I don’t...It bounces and rolls around on the cold shells that are near me in the sun.  I pick it up.  Eric runs again.  I can look into the owl eyes but it is dark in the nut.  Some wind blows and the water looks like snake skin.  We put my shoes on and I don’t like it because the sand is in my socks.  But I’m quiet because I want to go to the place that has wooden sticks instead of forks and cookies with paper inside.

***

    Out through the front window, I can see a car parking on the street in front of my house.  A family with several kids unload.  They stand in the street, talking and gesturing towards the park.  Eric and Kristine drive up in their white, 1988 Toyota Landcruiser after a quick lunch at the Fortune Garden.  Kristine drives away while we load boats onto my silver Volvo station wagon.  We arc our of the driveway and towards the national park.

Halfway down the hill to the park feebooth—nearly a mile to go before the fee booth—we reach the dead stop traffic jam.  Five minutes of waiting and we move forward only half the circumference of the tires. The river is only two miles from home, I think.  I swing us left across the yellow lines for a u-turn. The road edges drop off steeply, so in spite of my eagerness to get to the river, I make a cautious five-point turn.  The diesel truck behind us clucks its engine disapprovingly.  We speed back up the hill to the house.  

    Only 2 hours of daylight left, and I’m changing so fast you’d think I was a magnet changing polarity.  Positive throws the clothes off.  Negative pulls the gear on.  I lace up my running shoes and Eric slips into his booties.  We slide the kayaks off the roof and start jogging for the park.  “I haven’t run with my boat to the river in 11 years,” I shout.  I’m almost too giddy to get the words out.  “Last time you ran,” Eric says, “you didn’t have a drivers’ license.”

We run on, and I’m curious about his trip to Mexico.  I saw videos of the waterfalls.  First descents of steep jungle gorges.  Impassable without a machete.  “We had to carry the machete with us for the whole trip,” Eric explains.  “One of us would lead and clear the path until he was tired.”

We dodge the mud slicks as we pass the construction area and head for the woods.  “Take the most direct route,” Eric reminds me as I hesitate at the trailhead.  Automatically discounting the road because of traffic and steep pavement, I think the Tavern Trail will get us down to the C&O in about one mile.  We sweat dreadfully in our waterproof paddling jackets.  Eric belches and pulls a face.  “Whoa, Kung-Pao chicken,” he says, trying to get the taste out of his mouth.

    Eric is listing all the things they carried on the Mexico expedition because the preparations and precautions help illustrate what kind of challenges they faced.  Finally we’re jogging down the sandy beach to the river, dodging kids playing in the sand, and he says, “we had filtered water bottles but they could never keep up with your thirst.”  We hop in our boats, and as I reach to push off from shore, I see walnut half floating near the sand.  I pick it up and toss it up onto the beach made of many thumbnail-sized clamshell halves.  We paddle off across the flatwater towards the main river channel, while that crazy January sun warms our skin.

***

Memory is a chimera, a composite, an ever-shifting beast. Memory doesn’t tell what happened or why.  Memory is bits and pieces of what you remember whirling and clinging together.  Memory is a million image magnets flung together so that those same million squares of metal will join pole-to-pole in new combinations with every toss, clicking and flipping their faces into view.  Pictures and words.  People and stones. We try to use memory to reconstruct the reality of our favorite afternoons, but reality is the space between our senses, when our eyes flick to the side and we miss it.