I have accumulated an unreasonable amount of evidence of my own existence. Blog posts, LiveJournal entries, tweets, Instagram posts, Threads, photographs, emails, messages, concert records, things I wrote and forgot I wrote, things other people wrote to me that I forgot they wrote, and apparently enough miscellaneous digital sediment that ChatGPT and I can now play a game I’m calling Random Date Archaeology. The rules are simple: pick a completely random date somewhere inside the period where my archive exists, don’t reroll it because the date looks boring, search only deeply enough to see what survives, and then let the artifacts interrogate my memory. The idea isn’t necessarily to find an important day. In fact, I’m hoping most of them aren’t important. I want to know what an ordinary Friday looked like when I was twenty, or thirty-three, or forty-one. What was I worried about? What did I eat? Who was around? What stupid joke did I think was funny enough to preserve forever? The first spin of the calendar landed on Friday, July 13, 2001, which seemed auspicious because apparently twenty-year-old Adam also noticed that it was Friday the 13th. And because twenty-year-old Adam’s car immediately tried to kill itself.

The first artifact was almost useless. At 3:00 in the morning, I wrote this on Adam At Last:

remind me to tell you the story about driving home from tadmor (and
what tadmor is). it’s a good one, i swear.
adam.

That was it. No story. Just Past Adam dangling information in front of Future Adam and then wandering away for twenty-five years. Fortunately, at 2:50 the following morning I came back and actually did what I promised, although in the particular compressed style I sometimes used when I was twenty:

quickly
when i was driving home from visiting my sister last night at 12 midnight my car’s internal calander turned to 13, knowing it to be friday the 13th. so gear 5 gave out, down to 4. 4? out. into neutral and the side of the road. into 2nd and stop because it’s stuck. get out, walk to woodburn, only two and a half miles at midnight. find a denny’s call mom with 1-800-COLLECT, 7 times and keep doing so until on the 8th time she answers and says, “i’ll be there in half an hour” eat banana split and wait. drink two cups of coffee. mom. car. home. morning. dad. truck. drive. tow-truck. drive. “the transmission went out, i’ll fix it on my own time and not company time” “thanks butch.”
adam.

And weirdly, reading that brought the night back. Not every part of it. I don’t remember the walk especially well, or exactly what my mom said when she finally arrived, and I have no fucking idea who Butch was. Maybe the tow-truck driver? Maybe a mechanic? Apparently twenty-year-old Adam felt no obligation to explain Butch to forty-five-year-old Adam, so Butch remains a mysterious transmission angel. But the 1-800-COLLECT thing hit me immediately and hard. I remembered exactly what I used to do. Those services would let you record your name before asking the other person whether they wanted to accept the charges, which meant that if you were a broke young person in the pre-smartphone era, you could treat the “state your name” prompt as a tiny free voice message. I’d cram everything into it as fast as humanly possible: “itsadammycarbrokedownimatthedenneyscallmeback.” Or something very much like that. Then my parents could refuse the collect call, know where the hell I was, and call me back without paying whatever ridiculous fee the phone company wanted. This was text messaging before text messaging, except the character limit was determined by how rapidly you could yell into a telephone.

The car was my red 1989 Acura Integra, and it already had enough personality that a transmission problem did not immediately strike me as a transmission problem. That car had a mind of its own. If the weather was too hot, sometimes it simply would not start. My highly sophisticated repair procedure was to open the hood and let the breeze cool the engine until the Acura decided it was willing to be a car again. So when I was driving north on I-5 around midnight and fifth gear disappeared, then fourth started disappearing, my first instinct was not, Ah yes, catastrophic mechanical failure. It was more like, Goddammit, what are you doing now? I got it onto the shoulder, shut it off and tried restarting it because that was the sort of relationship I had with this automobile. Restarting did not regenerate the missing transmission. Eventually second gear got stuck too, and I arrived at the very technical conclusion that I was fucked.

So I started walking.

I knew where I was. That’s an important distinction. I had driven that stretch of I-5 so many times that twenty-year-old me knew the corridor almost by muscle memory. My sister was working that summer at Camp Tadmor, a place I had spent many summers growing up and where I had worked myself before Ecola. The same highway also took us south toward my grandma’s house in Junction City. I knew the exits. I knew the farms. I knew that there was a Denny’s in Woodburn somewhere ahead of me. What I did not know was what that familiar landscape felt like at walking speed. In a car, an exit is just a few minutes away. On foot, at midnight, surrounded mostly by farmland, “the next exit” becomes an abstract theological concept. I don’t remember being terrified. I remember being tired, somewhat worried because of the hour, and feeling like it was a very, very long hike. Young Adam later wrote “only two and a half miles,” because once you know the number, two and a half miles sounds almost cute. Walking north on I-5 without knowing how far remained probably felt considerably less cute.

Eventually the lights of Woodburn appeared, and so did the Denny’s. I looked it up while reconstructing this story because of course I did, and the damn Denny’s is still there, at 2919 Tom Tennant Drive. Twenty-five years later, you can apparently still go sit roughly where twenty-year-old me sat after hiking off the freeway with a dead Integra several miles behind him. I ordered a banana split and drank two cups of coffee, which seems like an entirely reasonable midnight emergency meal. Then I repeatedly tried 1-800-COLLECT until my mother finally woke up enough to decode the human audio compression algorithm I was screaming into the phone. Eight attempts, according to the original post. She told me she’d be there in half an hour.

My mom was coming from Milwaukie. It was around one in the morning. Driving to Woodburn to retrieve her adult son from a Denny’s because his shitty red Acura had thrown away several gears was probably not the evening she had planned. I’m pretty sure she arrived exhausted, and I think I probably drove her car home, although that part is memory rather than archive and I’m learning not to promote “probably” into “definitely” just because it makes a smoother story. The next morning Dad and I went back down with a truck and a tow truck, which is where the enigmatic Butch enters the historical record, pronounces the transmission dead, and says he’ll fix it “on my own time and not company time.” Thanks, Butch. Whoever you were.

The most interesting thing about doing this archaeology, though, is that the dead Acura opened a door into a completely different memory. The first post had said I was driving home from Tadmor, while the second only said I had been visiting my sister. At first those looked like two separate dangling threads. Then I remembered: my sister was working at Tadmor that summer. Of course they were the same trip. And suddenly “what Tadmor is,” the explanation I promised my readers in 2001 and apparently never supplied, became the bigger excavation hiding behind the transmission story.

Tadmor was the woods. The people. The songs. The skits. The lake. Joy. It was an enormous amount of happiness packed into one place. I spent summers there growing up, and the lake was probably my favorite part—swimming and screwing around with my friends—but the memories that really light up are the night games. When we got older, we would stay up late, dress in dark clothes, disappear into the woods and take utterly ridiculous camp games with the seriousness of a covert military operation. One of the greats was called Bible Smugglers, because Christian summer camp in the ’80s and ’90s was not interested in subtlety. Campers were smugglers trying to carry contraband Bibles across imaginary national borders. Staff members were guards hiding in the forest trying to intercept them. If the guards caught you, they confiscated the contraband, sent you back to base for another Bible, and redeployed you into hostile territory for Jesus.

As a camper, I smuggled. Once I became staff, you bet your bottom dollar I became a guard, and I was really, really good at it. My particular talent was not running people down. I could hide. I would lie flat in bushes and stay completely motionless while campers walked close enough that I could hear them, never realizing I was there. I had been training for this highly specialized ministry my entire childhood because my friends and I played night games around the neighborhood growing up. What I loved wasn’t even springing out and catching somebody. The hiding itself was the reward. There is something I have apparently loved since I was tiny about being physically present and completely unobserved.

That realization connected this random Friday to another story we’d recovered elsewhere in the archive. When I was about five, after coming home from the zoo, I crawled under a beanbag and hid while my parents looked for me. I stayed so still that they genuinely began to worry I might somehow have been left at the zoo. I remember the whole thing as an extraordinarily long joke. The joy was simple: I was right there and they couldn’t see me. That same feeling shows up years later in neighborhood night games, then again as a staff member lying motionless on the forest floor waiting for Bible smugglers to wander past. I have apparently always enjoyed being invisible.

None of this is what I expected to find when the randomizer landed on July 13, 2001.

That may be the thing I like most about this game. If I had sat down and said, “I should write an important story about myself,” I would never have chosen the night the Integra’s transmission died outside Woodburn. It was just one bad drive out of hundreds. I didn’t even remember that particular visit to Tadmor because there were so many of them. But the archive preserved enough crumbs to reopen the door: Friday the 13th appearing on the dashboard. Fifth gear disappearing. Then fourth. Walking through farmland toward an exit I knew perfectly well at sixty-five miles an hour and had never understood at three. A banana split under fluorescent lights. Eight free collect-call messages compressed into two frantic seconds. My exhausted mother driving south in the middle of the night. Butch, Patron Saint of Broken Transmissions. And behind all of it, Tadmor: the lake, the songs, the woods, friends running around in the dark, and me flattened into a bush experiencing one of my oldest and strangest little joys—the magic of being there without being seen.

Twenty-year-old Adam thought he was writing down a funny story about his car breaking.

Twenty-five years later, it turns out he left me directions back into the woods.