Uncharted -- Your Digital Memory Box

I admit it – I’m a pack rat. I have saved, in various boxes, jars, bags, drawers and shelves just about everything from old TAB soda cans to rocks shaped like pig noses, newspaper clippings, photos, books, trinkets, beads and baubles, ties and, in a cardboard apple box underneath the stairs, ten years’ worth of handwritten journals.

Oh. Allow me to introduce myself. You've already met GeoJoe, our capable communications director. Now meet MisterFweem, the company's creative content director. Now, back to that collection of mine:

Fearful as any collector is of a disaster or misfortune that would rob me of my collection, I’ve spent the last several months laboriously scanning every scrap of paper I can find into the computer, in order to preserve a digital copy of the junk I’ve collected (except for the soda cans, of course, They’re hard to put on a flatbed scanner).

Scanning the journals and photos has been especially rewarding. As I’ve separated the yellowing pages, as I’ve read the words and looked at the photos and bits of flotsam that I’ve pasted in these books, I’ve been reminded of all the interesting places I’ve been, and the soaring and humbling experiences I had while I was there.

I remembered Montsegur – sitting atop a lonely mountain in the Pyrenees mountains dividing France and Spain, atop the ruins of an ancient chateau that was built on the ruins of an even older castle where men, women and children lived, herded their sheep, and were killed in a fit of religious persecution.

I remembered Holy Island – wandering the beaches, looking at the overturned boats turned into sheds, the ancient monuments, moss-covered gravestones and the seagulls screaming and crying above the salty waves, a sound that still says England to me.

I remembered Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House – the stilt-tall, narrow building where this family and others hid in vain for so long from their Nazi persecutors.

And I remembered Idaho’s Horseshoe Lake – fog-bound, surrounded by pines lit by a three-quarter moon, with the elk singing and shrieking and bellowing their mating calls through the night.

Uncharted is going to be a place like this. Like these. Uncharted is going to be my digital memory box – this time, shared with the world, not tucked away in cardboard boxes or forgotten on a shelf. See you other pack rats there.