Eurybia avita

I am no kind of expert on the science of memory, and so I don’t know whether turning 50 last year is the reason why I recently reached to remove my glasses only to find that they were not on my face; or whether there are other reasons for these sometimes amusing slips. These days, I have just started wrapping my mind around the idea that my memories of the past are happening in the present, and also that memories themselves can change. A strange thought for a relatively simple guy like me! Amusing slips or not, some of my childhood memories seem fixed in a sea of vague events and suppositions. Details come to the front and claim my attention.

I don’t need a doctorate to assume that memory is connected to trauma, and so without studying it formally, I frequently go back and access my life around the time when my dad announced to the family that he was going to move away. He had found someone else, someone who really understood him. A way to break out of this little town and the backwards ideals that it represented.

So at this point, time seems frozen. I remember maybe 5 percent of everything that happens within the span of two years, the span of time between Mom and Dad’s separation and their divorce. Fragments of conversation; jawing with my big brother about nonsense verse or about nothing at all; a new board game that grabs my life for a few hours or days; kickball with friends. No dates come to mind except January 12, 1980, which was the morning that Andy (11) and myself (9) ended up punching and kicking Dad on the bottom floor of his tiny apartment in Belton, SC. All three of us ended up in a puddle, all three crying our eyes out. The die had been cast. Only when he mentioned Chicago about three hours later did we cheer up. He was moving to Chicagoland to take a job in an arboretum. I guess the promise of road and plane trips can capture the attention of young boys. And honestly, tons of emotion was wrung out in that room. Relief was inevitable.

My dad has been a lifelong botanist. He is especially well versed in taxonomy - the naming of plants, and at 80 is still regularly taking walks to identify plants in his vicinity. A vague childhood memory: I would take innumerable county maps of Alabama, then color them or cut the counties out to make puzzles; these maps being leftovers from his diagrams from his dissertation, indicating where woody plants resided in the state.

Later during our teen years, he would take us for walks in the Virginia woods where he grew up, and randomly stop to say: “Allright, Quiz Time!” Andy and I would look around and utter things like, “Pipsissewa. Virginia Creeper. Birch. Hackberry.” We were paid small amounts of money for getting right answers; it’s funny and clever the way he got us to remember, although if I was a parent this might be quite common and exactly the way I would go about it too.

Back in that swirling vortex of memory, either before or after the split, he would continually talk to us about rare plants that he was looking for in the areas where we lived: I don’t remember when he first mentioned Eurybia avita, Alexander’s Rock Aster, but it must have been enough times where I could tell that he was looking for this more than he was looking for anything else. “It has to be somewhere in South Carolina, but no one seems to have found it.” I think he must have given us a general description. I stored it away in what, at the time, was a sharper memory.

During that strange time where memories fail and fade, a few details are fixed, and any bigger picture is not. Maybe it’s just because I didn’t have a job or bills to pay; I didn’t gas up the car; I didn’t set the itinerary or call anyone to tell them where I was going. But Dad and I somehow ended up at the trailhead of Table Rock Trail in Pickens County, SC.

You may ask: “What was the date, Dan?”

My answer: “I don’t remember.”

“Where was your brother Andy, was he with the other Scouts at Camp Old Indian?” “I don’t remember.”

“Was this before or after January 12, 1980?” “I don’t remember.”

Snippets of memory. Details, no bigger pictures. Trauma? Attention deficit disorder? (the stuff another round of short stories are made of). Both?

Right at the beginning of the Table Rock trail, Dad magically produced a bag of M&M’s: “Here, this will give you quick energy.”

“Were you carrying anything? Did you leave Dad to carry everything?” “I don’t remember.”

Another vague childhood memory: Before this time, I remember waking up in the back seat of our old Honda more than once near the end of long road trips, with Andy next to me just waking up also, and seeing Dad drop a bag of candy for us through the cracked-open rear window while we were at the gas pumps. Looking back on that now, I laugh at my parents’ decision to shower the kids with sugar during the evening right before coming home, but kids don’t think about that! It made me feel cared for. “Andy and Dan, you are in the family.” I thought: My family will stay together forever.

So to catch everyone up: Date of our hike? Pictures? Souvenirs? Where was Andy? How was Mom? Was this before the separation or after? “I don’t remember.”

To me, details sometimes make the whole thing. I remember waterfalls, small bridges across streams, and walking around huge boulders. I remember also at one point or another at the ascent where there was an escarpment without trees, that it was the steepest slope I have ever climbed, before going into a wooded area again.

Dad: “Dan, take these two cans and bury them here in the still part of the stream.” I obediently shoved them into the cool water, below dead leaves.

“Was this during the fall?” “I don’t remember.”

One thing I do remember was that the view at the top was thrilling. I didn’t want to leave. I laid out onto the vast expanse of rock.

Time seemed to freeze again. “Hey, Dad? Is this like the plant you are looking for? Alexander’s Rock Aster?” The clump of weeds (weeds through the eyes of a kid, until I looked further and remembered his description) was just a yard or so from my little left hiking boot.

Dad’s reaction was priceless. “Dan, YOU FOUND IT!”

Not a memory, but a supposition: Did Dad know that Eurybia avita was around there all along and was just waiting for me to find it for him? “I don’t know, but I would bet all the money I earned from Quiz Time, and much much more.”

Crossing a small bridge across a stream on the way down, Dad placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “Son, remember.”

“Remember what, Dad?”

“Remember your drink!” I reached into the water, well below the dead leaves, and took out my Mountain Dew, and his. Both ice-cold.

In that moment, my Dad was the coolest Dad ever.

“Did you love your Dad?" "Yes. I did, and I do!"