John Pepin

“When I was younger

I believed that

dreams came true,

now I wonder.”

– Chris Isaak

It was a summery day as I recall.

I don’t remember there being any wind, but the day was warm, and the sun was certainly shining. With big, white cumulus clouds floating around the sky, perhaps an afternoon thunderstorm hung just over the horizon.

I was in our family station wagon riding in the back seat passenger side with the window rolled all the way down. I don’t remember with any certainty who else was in the car, but it certainly would have been my dad driving.

We were traveling down a sandy two-track road with green grass and other vegetation growing up through the center of it, including some gold-petaled black-eyed Susans and crimson-colored columbine.

This road circled down into a meadow where there was an abundance of greenery growing along the banks of a small stream.

Ahead of us, there was a short and narrow worn, wooden-plank bridge that the creek ran under. We pulled off the road into the grass at the right and followed some car tracks to a clearing where we parked.

I got out of the car with a fishing pole and some worms in a tin worm container, the kind that has a curved back to fit with an angler’s hip that you can run your belt through to attach it.

When I approached the creek, I could see the black water moving slowly like spilled ink that moved toward me and then away like a long, dark snake.

There has a sand and grass-covered bank that was perched above the stream. I looked over this embankment for a place below to stand and cast my line.

There were several spots where the grass had been pushed down and flattened by people who had fished here before. However, there was no one here now.

I was waiting for my parents to catch up.

While standing and looking around, I saw a couple of small redhorse suckers shriveled and dead in the grass, flies were buzzing around the dead fish and landing.

Then the image in my mind’s looking glass goes dark.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot reconstruct any more of this memory. It’s like I was watching an old 8-milimeter film that suddenly got caught and torn in two inside the projector.

From such clear images to nothing whatsoever is hard to reconcile.

For me, maybe for everybody, the link between dreams, reality and memories is shadowy, elusive.

Sometimes, the images are visible only long enough to discern a setting or a situation and then they disappear into the blackness like an animal dissolving into the tall grass.

It’s also not always clear whether something I’ve seen in my dreams is something that has happened before or will occur in the future, later leaving me with a spell of déjà vu.

I knew a friend who died recently who used to keep a list of all the birds he’d encountered in his dreams. Now that he’s gone beyond, I wonder if he can still visualize those birds or has everything black and nothingness.

I also try to reason why some memories persist longer than others.

It’s a strange business to me.

I have had occurrences when experiencing a familiar smell or feeling or sound, my memory is triggered, and I recall things I had not thought about for decades. These things also happen for me sometimes with no sparking sensation that I can detect.

Often, my dreams are made up from memories of things that happened in reality. It’s all connected, but hard to figure out in any concrete real sense.

A lot of this is also tied to a strong sense of feeling various emotions – love, excitement, disappointment, fear, et cetera.

Will something that happens today be something I will recall years from now as a memory or will it recur to me in a dream, or will it be an experience I will have no recollection of at all in any form?

I guess only time will tell.

These types of questions roll around in my head like eggs, lopsided thoughts that move awkwardly in my head.

I wonder if the other pieces of the film that I am missing in the recollection of the summer day at the bridge are on my brain’s cutting room floor, having been edited and cut out as unimportant.

Or are they still there on a B-roll reel in the back of my mind somewhere and could be recalled if there was some apparent need?

Why are some things so vivid and in color in memories and dreams and others seem to appear only like shadows on a wall in a dark room where a candle flickers inadequate light?

Why are some days and nights full of recollections and dreams and at other times I can go seemingly weeks without dreaming or recalling much of anything from long ago?

More eggs rolling around up there in my head, clanging into each other.

Of course, some events that have obviously had a significant impact on our lives are more likely to remain recoverable than others. This is also true for movies we’ve seen, books we’ve read or paintings and sculptures we’ve appreciated.

Another interesting thing is how our brains can retrieve recollections on demand, with some seemingly closer to the top of the library stacks because we choose to think about them more frequently than others.

All this stuff is intriguing to me.

I sometimes think I am thinking about these kinds of things on some background track in my brain while my mind is more occupied on another level, with more pressing things happening in the moment.

I am grateful for the ability to recall among my memories so many captivating and wonderful scenes from nature that I have experienced.

I worry about the potential of losing that ability the older I get.

I’ve recently had some uncharacteristic gaps in trying to recall simple things like names of people, places or other things. Maybe, rather than a memory issue, it’s just a problem I have with nouns.

Maybe I don’t particularly like those parts of speech, possessing a previously unknown preference for verbs, adjectives or adverbs.

Whatever it is, I am hoping it is only a short-term phase I’ll be passing through quickly, like a ghost town along a lost desert highway.

I know part of my concern is because my dad experienced significant decline in his powers to recall things as he slipped down a long slide into dementia before he died.

He eventually lost the characteristics of speech that I identified as being vital parts of who he was. His cadence slowed, his word choice abilities diminished, and his humor dissipated into nonexistence.

He even abruptly changed habits that he had held for as long as I had known him.

A lifelong coffee drinker, he one day proclaimed that he didn’t want coffee and had never drunk it regularly. Eventually, he was unable to remember who me and my brother were.

My hope for him was that he couldn’t remember what he couldn’t remember. Whatever the case, it likely was a scary trip for him and I am still hurt more than 15 years later that he had to experience it.

I wonder if his recollections were restored in the process of passing over the threshold of death, even if only briefly? I like to think that they were.

In the meantime, I keep trying to pack five days into every one, experiencing all I can.

I hope one day the exact location of that creek from the old memory of mine, on the summery day with the wildflowers and redhorses, pops into my egg head.

I would really like to go there again sometime.

If I do get to go, will the place itself and I have changed so much neither one of us recognizes the other?

I wonder.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.