Welcome to the archives of my mind.
If you’re wondering what to expect here, that’s great, because I am also wondering the same thing. Please let me know as soon as you figure it out.
I started this project in a fleeting bout of productivity I capitalized upon in order to trick Future Bailey into writing more. (Ha, suck it.) But really, I started The Archivist because I’m tired of calling myself a writer but refusing to accept readers.
That’s where you come in.
It’s been a while since I’ve flexed my creative muscles, so don’t let my vastly different writing styles and unkillable darlings turn you away. I think this is me trying to find my voice.
What you are signing up for is disinclined romanticism, sharp bluntness, humorless wit, and so much foul language. (Sorry, Mom. Lyshia, you swear like a sailor so you don’t need an apology.) I’m trepidatiously excited to show you my work. I have so much to tell you, and it means the world to me that you’re willing to listen.
I started my adventure at the park in mid-May when the falls were postcard-perfect and the dogwoods were in full bloom. I work the front desk at Housekeeping Camp, and I’m pretty sure it’s the coolest place in the entire park. (Totally not biased.)
On the clock, I get into rubber band-slinging competitions, Rubix cube wars, thirty-second raves to The Office theme music, and seriously intense games of tic-tac-toe, dots and squares, and Yosemite hang-man.
On lunch breaks, you can find me kicking it in the boneyard, licking up whatever scraps of food large parties have donated (intentionally or not—someone accidentally left a cooler full of sixty tamales once that definitely wasn’t meant for us), and shooting the shit with my co-workers. That tends to look something like this:
Occasionally I get special “outside tasks” that get me out from behind the desk. It’s a tough call between mushroom foraging and a very serious walkie-talkie return mission, but my favorite of such duties has to be when our staff was called to witness a potato wedding at Unit E118.
We don’t talk about what happens after hours. But if you hear someone shouting for Elmer, you better call back.
Being a park employee comes with a lot of perks—though I wouldn’t consider our 15% discount at the Village Store to be one of them. (Seriously, Aramark? Weak.)
One of the best things about living in the valley is learning all the locals-only hiking spots you won’t find on any map. I’ve been to Hidden Falls, Sierra Point, Sunset Dome, and Middle Earth (yes, that’s really what it’s called), but my favorite adventure by far was exploring Indian Cave.
I made the pilgrimage four days after I had moved into the park. I was promised a five-minute night walk to an undisclosed location, and I had half of Boystown trailing behind me. A pair of park veterans took the lead. They got us unequivocably lost.
We arrived at Indian Cave in twice the amount of time it should’ve taken us, and when the first two headlamps dropped down into the tight cavern between the pile of boulders on the crest of Bear Cave, my most immediate thought was: I am wearing the wrong shoes for this.
It was just a quick off-trail trample from the paved road to Mirror Lake. No one told me we were going spelunking.
The group of us crowded around the rocks, twenty-five or so valley rookies sizing up the cave's pursed mouth, wondering if they could do it. A few people teetered toward the edge, trying to psych themselves up enough to shimmy down, all of us little kids summoning the courage to take that first leap off the diving board. I guess the vertigo got the better of some, because the brave ones backed away.
I went next.
I gripped the rocks with my forearms, palms splayed out like Spider-Man, and I tried to slide my foot down into a hold in the cave’s esophagus. I felt like I was one slip away from being dragged into Wonderland. Like if I started falling, maybe I wouldn’t stop.
I made an arrogant joke blaming my sudden standstill on my tractionless shoes to save face from my tractionless sense of adventure. It’ll be impossible in these slides! I insisted. Maybe I should just go barefoot! (As if.)
“No way you’re raw-dogging Indian Cave,” someone challenged.
I was up to my ears in the mouth of the first chamber when the words floated down like a dare.
I slipped off my socks and shoes.
“Hold my Bostons,” I dared back, sticking out my knock-off Birkenstocks and stamping my bare feet on the cold, damp granite like a sumo wrestler practicing shiko. I tightened my headlamp. Everyone started chanting my name.
When I finally landed in the first stomach of the cave, I sounded my barbaric yawp against the damp granite walls and slithering centipedes, and all of Boystown barked back at me. A few others climbed down with me. I was one of only three who made it all the way to “the basement.”
In the second chamber of Indian Cave, past a tight triangular squeeze and down another rabbit hole, there two ammo boxes. Each contains a single college-ruled composition notebook and a miraculously functional pen. The tradition? Sign your name. Archive your precise existence in this time and place.
At the beginning of the summer, I had this conquistador sense of bravado and thought surely I would be the first human ever to set foot somewhere in Yosemite. What a foolish way of looking at things. Flipping through years of signatures from summers past, knowing I was taking part in a tradition that’s been around for my lifetime at least, I couldn’t help but feel like these cheap Five Star notebooks were modern cave paintings. And there I was, where so many humans have set foot for decades, adding my handprint to something much larger than myself.
I like to imagine anthropologists years from now will uncover those ammo boxes and speculate about the stories contained in each signature. I spent an entire math class practicing my cursive once for when I’ll be signing books someday. This felt like a solid start. I looped the letters, dated it, and added at the bottom:
Future Author.
Future.
Meaning I wasn’t one yet.
My two cave brothers, the only others to make it all the way to the bottom, both hail from Louisiana, and they’re the funniest motherfuckers I’ve ever had the pleasure of getting claustrophobic with. They’re stupid and loud and they make the best cajun pasta on the planet. I don’t think I’ll ever be homesick with them.
We’ll call them B and L. Remember those, because they’re important figures in my summer and will definitely be showing up in future posts. (It’s not like I have the next three newsletters planned out…)
Unbeknownst to me, B took note of my signature that night in Indian Cave, because upon our return to Boystown (after getting even more lost on the way back), he mocked a star-stricken look.
“Is that—?!” he gasped, clutching his heart dramatically, and sly look overtook his expression long enough for him to break character. Grinning like the devil, he called me “future author” in his exaggerated southern drawl: Fuchah Outhah. My dear sweet thing.
I ate it up.
Yosemite was the first place where I introduced this version of myself to other people. “Future Author” is usually someone people only meet when I’m deeply comfortable with them. But when you’re living in a place with an infestation of moths in the communal bathrooms and only one fridge, comfort no longer applies. Yosemite—and Boystown especially—invites everyone to skip the pleasantries and get down to the root of things. There’s no time, energy, or air-conditioning to afford the luxury of masking. In this space, I have no choice but to be myself.
So I became “Future Author” Bailey Carr.
I didn’t see the complacency in that mindset until the person who gave me my namesake let me pause our conversation long enough for me to jot down a story idea.
I was sitting on his bed in Boystown, messy hair sticking to my temples in the muggy heat, and I was squinting at my notes app through a pair of scratched up blue light glasses I most certainly don’t need (they make me feel “studious,” sue me) with such intense concentration. The silence that followed, the silence I asked for, made me uncomfortably aware of how dorky I looked.
“Sorry,” I blurted out. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I needed to stop saying that. I liked to joke that it’s a Southern thing. Told a friend from home once that we’re basically Canadians: so far South we went North.
He asked me why I was apologizing.
I told him that people don’t usually get my impulse to record everything. Not everyone is an archivist. What I didn’t tell him, though, is that this is why I’m usually afraid to introduce this part of myself to other people.
“Then explain it to me,” he said.
I fumbled for the right words and dropped them all at my feet. Every clever or flowery phrase scattered across the floor. What remained was the simple, distilled truth:
“Everything is a story to me,” I told him, “and I want to share those stories with other people.”
He looked at me intently. “What’s so hard to understand about that?”
Except for some people, it really isn’t so simple to understand. All anyone (all everyone) has asked me for the last three years is, “What’s your plan?” For the longest time, I put off making one entirely because I didn’t want to disappoint them. So many people in my life—relatives, teachers, strangers I’ve met at coffee shops—expect so much from me. I know it’s out of love, make no mistake. But when they ask, “What will she do next?” I can’t help but sense the undertone: How will she top her last great achievement? How will she do even more?
The pressure is exhausting. But what’s even more exhausting is watching their faces change when I don’t give them the answer they’re looking for. I’m tired of justifying my plans to fit everyone else’s image of me.
I explained all this to a co-worker one night after we had both gotten off our shift early. We were sitting in the middle of Housekeeping Camp beach watching the stars sharpen into focus as night befell the valley.
“No wonder you were so secretive when I asked you what you were writing earlier,” he pointed out.
“Oh shit,” I responded (rather eloquently), realizing how right he was. “Yeah, that must be it.”
The instance he was referring to: earlier that day, I was crouching behind the front desk, scribbling on the back of an undated shower pass and trying to rework my (twenty) five year plan to include New Zealand. (More on that in future posts. What? I told you I have the next three planned out.) Funny how the only place I felt like I could mark down my dreams was a scrappy piece of paper the size of a ticket stub, and I cupped it with my fingers so no one else could see what I was so feverishly scribbling.
“Sorry,” I told him.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
I leaned back in the sand and tilted my head toward the Milky Way. We were quiet for a while. Just listening to the river flowing gently and making up our own constellations.
I told him my theory about how this place almost forces you to be authentic, and how good that can be for some of us—the recovering people-pleasers, like me.
He didn’t seem to agree.
“Yes, being yourself,” he said slowly, “but it sucks that you don’t have a choice. Wouldn’t it be nicer to choose authenticity?”
I thought about that for a moment.
“Like, intentionally being yourself?”
I could hear the grin before he spoke. The beach was so quiet, but something in the dry air crackled. It was like all the particles around us were just as excited about a snappy mic-drop line of dialogue. Is this what people mean when they say they feel ec-static? That you can feel the electricity in the air around you?
“That’s it!” he said like it was congratulations. “You got it!”
What a title drop.
“Because you can unintentionally be yourself,” he continued, “but being yourself on purpose takes a whole different kind of audacity.”
I liked that word. Two years ago, when I was still a starry-eyed freshman, I was part of an informal writer’s group that met weekly for lunch. One of our members talked about how intimidating it can seem trying to make it in the industry and how rampant imposter syndrome is among artists, especially of our generation. “Fuck the rest,” he told us. “What’s missing from the industry isn’t talent. It’s audacity.”
I realized in the wake of this conversation that perhaps the reason I’m so afraid to share my plans for the future is the same reason I’m so afraid to share my writing. Writing, for me, is the most intentional way of being myself. That kind of vulnerability terrifies me.
But, I did Indian Cave. I’m fucking brave as hell.
Perhaps I will have the audacity to intentionally be myself in this newsletter.
Back in Boystown those several weeks prior, when B tentatively asked me what I was writing about as I sat on his bed looking like a mad scientist, I gave him a cheeky response: “If you’re lucky, you’ll find out in twenty-five years when it becomes a bestseller.”
“Twenty-five years?” he asked, incredulous. “Why not write it now?”
I told him I have a plan, that the dominoes have to fall in place, it’s all very specific, and he said: “If you wait twenty-five years to write this story, it’ll be dog shit. Write it now.”
And that, dear reader, is why I need you.
I have always been a writer. But as far as I’m concerned, the only thing that can make me an author, is you.
All my love and adoration,
Bailey Carr (Future Author)
P.S. Here’s the full, unedited video of the potato wedding, for your viewing enjoyment.
Fucking fantastic. Keep going.
Bailey -- you are a writer, not a future writer. You may be a future published writer, but as long as you write you are a writer. Take all that confidence you brought to class and let it dribble out of your fingers onto the screen and we, the readers, will delight in the journey. Let me know if I can offer any support. Now -- get back to work ... Dr:D