The Making of an Heirloom

In 2013 my father attempted to do a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. It would have been a major undertaking for anyone, but given that my dad is in his late 60’s, it was a really big deal. I wished I could have been involved directly. Had he done the hike 10 years previously, or 10 years in the future, I probably would have begged to go with him for all or part of it. I was sad that I couldn’t join him, but I was excited for him. And even though he ultimately could not finish the thru-hike (but rather had to settle for a section hike), I was incredibly proud of him, and I wanted to document his adventures somehow. I thought that that would be a nice way for me to be involved, and a way to give my dad a gift.

Fortunately, my dad kept an online trail journal along the way. I thought it would be cool to turn it into a book. I wanted to make a family heirloom out of it by including the entire journal, plus a glossary, and maps, and whatever else it took to document the trip thoroughly. I found a couple of websites that would allow me to design a proper book.

It seemed only fitting to approach the project that way. Family history is important to us. Like most people, we have our own family heroes, even a few who are historically significant. We like being able to tell stories about them, and we have those stories now because they were written down at some point by people who cared enough to bother. I thought that by documenting my father’s hike, I could make him an example, for our current and future family, of what one could accomplish with hard work and determination, even late in life.

Looking at it in retrospect, I may have been suffering slightly from delusions of grandeur. Not so my dad. When I talked to him about the project, all he wanted was a photo album, just like the one I make every year for Christmas.

That left me feeling deflated. I was convinced that an ordinary photo album would not be good enough. The photos, by themselves, would be nearly meaningless to anyone but himself. The trail journal seemed necessary to provide context. It came down to this: who was I really making the book for? And I knew I would only be happy if it was for all of us: my dad and me and my kids.

So I decided to try to squeeze the trail journal into the photo album framework. I reasoned that this was possible, because I had, in the past, managed to fits part of my own blog into the larger versions of my annual photo albums.

But what I had failed to consider was the large size of the journal. There was a page for every day that he was on the trail, including the consecutive two months of his attempted thru-hike. I stubbornly tried to shoehorn it in, but I maxed out the book length at Shutterfly before I had laid in all the text. Plus the photos were getting lost in a wilderness of words. In short, it wasn’t working. It was neither the photo album that my dad wanted nor the book that I wanted. I had put a ton of time into the project and had nothing but a jumbled mess to show for it.

I realized that I was going to have to cut some of the text. The problem was which parts to cut. How was I going to decide which parts were important enough to keep? I didn’t know. That kind of editing is out of my sphere.

Undecided, I let the project sit. And sit. Alas, that’s what I tend to do when I cannot make up my mind. When this kind of thing happens at work, eventually a deadline will force me to make a decision. Procrastination is much harder to fight when it comes to personal matters.

Meanwhile, my father recently started gearing up for the next leg of his section hike. He was about to start his 2015 journal, and I hadn’t even finished the 2013 album. Pathetic.

It was time for me to make a decision. At first I thought to simply cut any text that had no direct relation to the pictures. That was a good start, but it was too harsh. It would have eliminated almost all of my dad’s anecdotes, cutting away much of what gave the journal humor and warmth. So I created some “Thoughts Along the Way” pages in which to collect those random stories.

Even though I’d found a way to proceed, it was still a struggle to make it work. I had to undo so much of what I had already done. It was difficult, frustrating, even depressing at times. The format was still constrictive. Things weren’t fitting like I wanted them to.

But I persevered, and today I finally finished the album. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I still have to proofread and print it, but I know that I can accomplish that within a few hours. No stress.

I have only one major decision left to make: should I print it and surprise my dad with it, even though it may contain errors? Or should I send a pdf version to him and let him have a chance to fix anything that’s wrong with it first?