Reactivating the Archival Project

January 3, 2025

As I was saying yesterday, we’ll never be positioned better for taking another whack at our residual belongings that we’ve had have crammed into a 5’x10’ storage locker ever since we went vagabond seven years ago this week. The unit is directly across the street from us so it’s an easy task to walk across the street and crack open another box that’s been labeled but taped shut and unexamined for seven years. The immediate goal is to keep looking for a few specific photos I hope to find. The longer term goal is to severely shrink our footprint here by finally getting rid of belongings we obviously don’t need in our lives any more since we haven’t seen or thought about them for seven years.

And with the expected rainy day washout coming through today and keeping us off the streets, the time is now. There’s no better time to dig into that storage locker than now. It’s time to reactivate the Archival Project.

Those wonderful folks who have been with us for the long haul will remember the Archival Project, a part of our strategy for reducing our footprint from a 1,500 square foot corner unit 2 bedroom 2 bath condo in the Pearl District to a 5’x10’ box and a bike locker. A part of this, alomgside many trips to the Goodwill, was to save digital images of such space consuming objects as our library of books. I’ve always loved being surrounded by books I’ve read, collected and loved over the years, not that I ever reread any of them very often. I just loved looking at them and pulling them out to look at the cover and briefly crack it open to a randomly chosen passage and be reminded of where I was when I originally read it. Oh, Jack Maggs! Remember Rachael, when you left it on a seat on the other half of the train from Passau to Innsbruck and lost it when we were moved to the front half before the train decoupled. And then another passenger sat down across the aisle from us in our new seats and starts reading the same book. What a coincidence! Except he’s holding it upside down; and when I check to see if he’s really reading it, I learn that he doesn’t speak word one of the language it’s printed in. He picked it up off the our other seat where we left it and by chance has ended up sitting right next to us. It’s no problem pantomiming that it’s our book, and could we please have it back?

But you can’t keep them all and fit them into a 5’x10’ box with all your other stuff you can’t bear to part with just yet - that lamp and the glass coffee table you both love and imagine will still look perfect in our new home when we start over some day, for example.

So we did this instead: we created a digital memory book from the physical books and playbills and concert programs that were destined for Goodwill or the dump:

And saw all these plays, and so many more.

We got rid of so much stuff that first month when we were ferociously decluttering our lives in preparation for selling our home; and a couple of years later we came back and chipped away at the heap some more. This time though we come loaded for bear and anticipate cutting out at least half of what still remains while we’re waiting around hoping for that second green light to shine our direction and free us to fly off to Italy and France for the Spring.

It’s so close here, so we’ll just keep plugging away one step at a time. My contribution today is to walk across the sreeet and bring back a sealed box enticingly laveled Souveniers. I’ve picked it up because I’m still hoping to find a few specific photos I’ve been on the hunt for but without success so far.

I crack the box open for the first time in seven years and am not surprised to find it full of memory items of all kinds. I dig in, and separate the contents into three groups.

Group one is for items we can afford to get rid of today, such as hardcopy catalogs from PIFF (the Portland Foreign Film Festival) and Sisters Folk Festival we loved so much. Both were an important part of our lives, but especially the February PIFF festival. For maybe fifteen years we’d dedicate the better part of three weeks to a whirlwind tour of the world, seeing thirty five to forty films while rushing from one showing to another and grabbing a quick bite somewhere on the way. It broke our hearts when it finally anbruptly ended its nearly fifty year just about the time Covid broke out. We took it as a sign that we were doing the smart thing by going vagabond.

But we don’t need the physical paper to remember PIFF by. We’ll take photos of many of the catalogs and file them away where we can find them and remind ourselves about them down the road, and then recycle the paper.

We’ll probably take a copy of the covers of most of the programs. This is from one of the best years, 2009.

And we’ll take shots of samples from the contents, where each film in the program this year is described so you can make your choices.

And we’ll probably take copies of all the indices that list the entire program. At the end of the festival we’d save a fresh copy and mark up the index to identify all the films viewed that year.

So that’s group one, and tossing the paper clears out about a third of one box.

Group two occupies most of the rest of the Souveniers box, and is the hardest group to think about. This is mostly a collection of guidebooks we’ve collected from our lives and travels. Every one is a Mathom (ref: a word invented by J.R.R. Tolkien, in case you’ve forgotten) that holds a precious memory. These are a judgement call as to whether we really need to make a decision on it yet. Any one of them doesn’t take up much space after all, and isn’t it likely that we’ll have a coffee table again some day that we can set them out on and remind ourselves of times past?

In the end, this is an easy call and they all stay in the box. We have a lot of boxes out there that are much easier targets and where that whole box will likely get tossed. This one includes items like these:

a guide to Aigues-Mortes and the nearby Camargue (walled cities and flamingoes, Kelly!), from our 2017 ride from Santiago to Sete.
A guide to the petrified forest on Lesbos, from our tour of Crete and Eastern Greece in 2012.
A brochure for the 14rh century Kendov dvorec manor Slovenia. We stayed there in 1998 on our ride from Ljubljana to Venice more or less out of desperation when the found the hotel Idrija was booked solid from a bike tour group we’d just passed on the road a few days earlier on the other side of the country. The manor was recently converted to a hotel, perhaps just that year because it hadn’t been long since Slovenia broke away in its little war of independence and tourism was just starting to return. They treated us like royalty, washing our laundry for free and then feeding us, the only guests for the night, by serving up an elegant multi course meal from mostly local produce, as we sar in a great rhe center of a long table that seated perhaps thirty or forty. In front of us was a wide mural that spanned the long wall, a painting of the lord of the manor winged by dozens of other seated folks, looking like a last Supper representation. It was arguably the most memorable hotel stay from all our travels, so of course this little pamphlet can stay with us a bit longer at least.
A photo guide to the fabulous floor mosaics in the Siena cathedral, seen on a day that by luck they were uncovered when we passed through on our way from Florence to Dubrovnik on our first tour of Tuscany, Umbria and Croatia. A week later we’ll be looking in awe at Orvieto’s also great cathedral, and the next morning we’ll look in stunned amazement at the Italian newspapers showing photos of the Twin Towers that fell the day before.

Another one is a hiking guide to the Dachstein Mountains south of Hallstadt, near the conclusion of our tour from Krakow to Salzburg - the same tour in which Rachael nearly lost Jack Maggs a week earlier in the Passau train station.

The final one in the set is by far the oldest, predating my life with Rachael by nearly 20 years. It’s a definitive guide to the butterflies of Washington state, written by Robert Pyle and illustrated by his wife Joanna. This is the renowned Robert Michael Pyle, American lepidopterist, writer, teacher, and founder of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. IRS personal significance to me? My first wife Carol Ajo and I lived there for part of the summer we were first married while Bob and Johanna were in Euripooe if I remember correctly. It was a small house a few blocks away from the Seattle Arboretum, and surrounded by a large yard and garden gone completely wild. We shared the small Pyle living room with a wood stove and an enormous paper mache bullfrog that occupied an entire corner of the room. And about two years later Carol and I will be blown away when my best friend in the army - the one I commuted to Fort Lewis every morning with from our apartments in Olympia, Gary carrying on a nonstop monologue like a standup comic most mornings about his detestation for all things military - when he hears me describe our experience in the Pyle home and proceeds to do a double and then a triple take because he went to high school with Robert in Aurora, Colorado. And then he just picks up with the monologue, this time sharing stories about Robert from the aurora locker room.

So that one might as well stay a little longer too, along with about forty other like items with similar very high value/space ratios.

The last group is by far the smallest space-wise, and by far the easiest set to think through. Every item in the set has over the top sentimental value for the small space it occupies. Every one stays, likely for the rest of my life.

So goes a day in the Archival Project. We’ll crack open another box tomorrow if it’s still raining, because I’m still missing a few important photos.

My stopwatch from high school from my years as a long distance runner.

The hand-drawn food map to rhe dinner we were being served at a ryokan in Japan.

And a map to our breakfast the next morning. Until opening the box today I’d forgotten we’d gotten a breakfast map also.

The diary I began maintaining on New Years Day in 1969 - 55 years ago - at a pivotal point in life. It begins by stating that I just finished reading Catch-22 and that Carol and I are discussing whether I should register for another quarter at rhe UW where I’m on the verge of failing out, hoping it will keep me deferred from the draft a little longer and because we’re almost too broke to cover the tuition anyway. Too late - by the end of the month I’m stationed in Fort Lewis, initially tracked for infantry in Viet Nam. I really can hardly wait to crack this book open again.

The map of Western Europe that hung on the wall of our condo for fifteen years, gradually filling up with new lines marking the routes of our European bike tours.

Maybe someday we’ll have a wall big enough to display it again, and I’ll fill in the blanks for all of our tours since then.

And finally there’s this priceless item, the hand written set of essays I started writing in 1975, the year Carol, Shawn and I moved down to a farmhouse in the middle of the grass fields northeast of Salem, me apparently envisioning myself as some sort of 20th century Thoreau. Now that should make an interesting read on a cold winter night. It was the 70’s, remember? Cut me some slack.

And there’s this, my oldest belonging, picked up in the summer of 1956 when I found a crusty, rounded boulder in the woods high on Mount Rushmore and smashed it open. I’m wandering around in the woods while the rest of the family was waiting beside our black 1949 Chevy. We’re on our way back to the PNW from West Virginia, and they’re waiting because the car has overheated and its radiator is steaming. I can still feel the thrill of viewing its bright pink, glassy interior. Rose quartz. I pocketed this small chunk, and kept it for 68 years now,

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Steve Miller/GrampiesWeird, Steve and I are engaged in a similar futile attempt to continue to declutter our house. We have boxes, bookshelves and drawers of multiple dressers, all filled with memorabilia, books and clothing/other stuff which we promise ourselves regularly will be sorted and thinned out. Who knows, this may be the year?
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2 weeks ago

Scott AndersonTo Steve Miller/GrampiesFor me, the only thing that ever really worked was downsizing the space itself. If you make it small enough, something’s got to give and you have to make choices. We got rid of over half our belongings by bulk when we sold our home in Salem and bought a condo in Portland. And we reduced it by another 90+ when we went vagabond. Ever since collage Thoreau’s Walden was one of my guide stars through life.

“ Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”
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2 weeks ago

Karen PoretOh, if ONLY I could get my “other half” to follow Thoreau’s mantra despite the part he literally is akin to him!
He has a rock, book, letters, papers collection all over the house, in the shed, in the garage. His reasoning is he may need it all again “someday”, despite the 48 years we have already been married… 🙄
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2 weeks ago

Scott AndersonTo Karen Poret48! Well done, you’re almost golden. I’ve been married over 50 myself, but it sounds less impressive when you split it four ways.
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2 weeks ago

Robyn RichardsThis was a fascinating read, thanks Scott! On the rare occasions I look back at my life, Younger Me seems familiar but not real - a distant cousin perhaps.
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2 weeks ago