20th Century Nostalgia in a 21st Century World, (or How I Learned to Forget About Facebook, Risk My

(By the way, this was posted elsewhere originally; I’ve re-posted here for posterity in advance of Upper Gauley season next weekend and the second annual Steve Creasey Champagne Jam and Gauley River Run.)

Brandon, Brian, Steve and I just got back from a guy’s weekend away; a weekend of debauchery, if you will. Understanding, of course, that debauchery when you’re 34 is much different than it is when you are 24.

In fact, if 24 year-old Andrew met 34 year-old Andrew, I’m not so sure they’d like each other much.

Be that as it may, we spent a weekend rafting on the upper Gauley River, just after the Army Corps of Engineers releases a deluge of water of Biblical proportions from nearby Summersville Dam.

So torrential is the annual release that it instantly turns the Gauley into one of the top five whitewater rivers in the world. It’s the best roller coaster you’ve ever ridden—if the best roller coaster you’ve ever ridden had Mother Nature after a two-day bender of grain alcohol and a carton of Camel straights operating the control booth and you rode it without that safety bar that comes down over your shoulder to keep you falling out during the corkscrew.

Oh, they put a life vest on you, sure. But it’s a misnomer. Having the vest helps just helps them find your body after Pillow Rock spins you like a rag doll a couple hundred times before spitting you out downriver. The helmet you wear? It helps the coroner keep from having to pull your dental records to identify the body.

Ok, so I’m exaggerating a little here (although two of the three people who died during last year’s Gauley run had heart attacks after they made it back to the boat. True story.) The point is, we’re talking about a bucket list item here. People travel from around the world to take a stab at this bad boy. It’s the kind of thing that you’re boasting about 10 years later and, when those around you roll their eyes at having heard the story 100 times, you just offer a simple if-you’d-done-it-you’d-understand smirk and walk away. We’re all appropriately stoked several days after the fact.

Even more than the trip itself is that ages-old tradition of sitting around and reminiscing in front of a camp fire. Really, it’s might just be the best part of a trip like this. Indeed, I can’t imagine it was all that different a couple thousand years ago, when buddies sitting around in bearskin togas, thrilled at the prospect of being away from the wife and kids for a couple of days, tossed around a few stories in the vein of “Remember that time Uglak punked Ergoth by putting wooly mammoth crap in his moccasins?”

Still, things have changed considerably in the last few years. Prepping for this trip, I contemplated just what to pack alongside my tent, sleeping bag, campfire coffee pot, etc. For instance, I had at my disposal a digital still camera; a Sony “Bloggie” video camera with full 1080p high-def capability, complete with a 4GB memory card; an iPhone complete with a whole galaxy of gizmos that will record audio, photo and video; a laptop; a webcam; and access to an Internet that will afford me the opportunity to update my status on Facebook, upload real-time video to Ustream (and a recording of that same video to YouTube) and a chance to add an entire photographic library from the upper Gauley trip to my Flickr photostream, which will, of course, be geotagged with the precise location of each shot and available to the public mere hourse after the photo was taken. Not that I need all of that for the trip, but when you get locked into a serious technology collection, the tendency is the push it as far as you can.

The point is that the trip afforded me the opportunity to record in agonizingly minute detail every moment of the fun, which is something I’ve never had access to throughout my stellar career of being a friend. Oh, I have some photos of that costume party Brian and I hosted back in ’99 (I hope no one else does) and a grainy collection of images from the time Brandon came in from Omaha and the three of us went to see the New Duncan Imperials at the Empty Glass. I think that was in 1999, too, although I could be mistaken.

There exists no documentary evidence of my 21st birthday (no mental evidence, either); there isn’t a single video of that epic weekend when Brian woke me up with a Super Soaker and I spent the next four days brooding over it and looking for a way to get him back. The day we crashed the first (and, to date, the only) WCW pay-per-view show in Charleston? I can’t find a single shred of that on my “live feed.”

In short, my memories, tainted though they may be by time and chemicals, are all I have of countless nights, weekends and parties with my closest friends.

Thing is, I’m at a loss to decide if that’s good or bad. Wouldn’t it be great to watch a video of all of us trampoline wrestling back in ’92? Egging cars at Steve’s bachelor party in 2001? It would be, I’m sure. But there’s a flip side to all of this, and it’s not what you’d imagine. Perhaps you think I’m concerned about any evidence of wrong-doing and aforementioned 20-something debauchery. Well, not really. I’m not that guy anymore, but I’m not ashamed, either. You can’t hide your past. It is what it is, and I am who I am.

No, there’s a more complex issue at stake here.

With the rise of social media comes an inescapable irony: the more we choose to document our memories, the fewer actual memories we have. We are very keen on posting status updates and the like, but that distracts us from the Zen of the moment, doesn’t it? We can’t have our cake and eat it, too. Either we live in the moment and accept it for the unbridled joy it provides, or we document its memory and lose out on the moment itself. After all, how much fun can you really have if you’re taking every few minutes to let 1,238 strangers know, in 140-characters or less, that Steve just puked, that Brandon slow danced with a 60-something biker chick or that Brian stood up in the middle of a coffee shop and screamed “this isn’t shrimp!” about the chicken sandwich he just ordered.

Over-documenting has another consequence as well. It takes the rose-colored view from the experience and lessens is historical impact. Again, I have little documentary evidence of the greatest moments with my friends. We didn’t take photos, didn’t post status updates. Therefore, those moments inevitably become the stuff of legend, and legend is always better than reality. The case can be made, then, to simply live in the moment and let nostalgia fade into fact.

Now, I’m not one of those cranky “I just don’t get it” types when it comes to social media. Far from it. I dig it. I’ve been on Twitter for almost three years, beta tested Bright Kite and even jumped on the nerd bandwagon when Plurk got hot for those three weeks. I get it. What I don’t get is letting the very thing we purport social media to be—a way to be more social, more friendly, more insightful—from becoming a hindrance to what would otherwise be an absolutely epic time.

So what happened? I’m not 100% sure, really. I can’t remember it all. But what I do know is this: there weren’t any live feeds. No status updates. No tweets. Instead, there was simply four best friends sitting down on Saturday evening in front of a campfire, telling a few stories, having a few laughs…and the only people who knows what it feels like to sit in that circle are the four buddies who actually sat there in that sacred hoop.

(Just keep your eyes peeled for the Upper Gauley photo album on Facebook. After all, this is the 21st century, don’t you know.)