Artifact

ARTifact

A true story by Erick Sahler

Collect experiences, not souvenirs — that has been one of the great lessons of the Sahler family road trips.

Over the past decade we waded in an Oregon cove as the sun set on the Pacific Ocean, dipped our toes in the Rhine, hiked the lunar-like landscape of Canyonlands and literally got lost in the Sonoran desert. We wandered in wonder through dank caves, spray-painted classic cars at Cadillac Ranch, threw a rock over the wall at the US-Mexico border in Arizona and danced away a warm Kentucky night with Pokey Lafarge.

Collecting experiences was a lesson I learned early. By the time I was a teenager, my parents had taken me to every battlefield and presidents’ home east of the Mississippi, and pretty much every national park west of it. With Dad and Mom, we may have experienced a lot, but we never returned home with a carload of tchotchkes.

And so it was experiences I sought on Thanksgiving weekend 1989, when Michael Tracey White and I boarded an Amtrak train in Wilmington, Delaware, to visit our high school classmate Ray Holloway, who was studying in Chicago to become a dentist.

We were 22 years old. Wild and free, with the world before us.

And it was experiences we made.

— We partied like it was 1989.

Somewhere in the dark of that first night on the train, Michael and I were ordered by an Amtrak conductor to return to our seats after inciting a party in the lounge car. We were informed that travelers do not use Amtrak to get inebriated. We responded that was precisely why we had chosen to travel by train instead of driving. Our reasoning didn’t fly with management, but after sharing our tale with an elderly gentlemen back at our seats, he snickered and informed us he had brought along some moonshine. “You prefer brown or clear?” he asked, offering two large Mason jars.

— We feasted like kings.

Ray had worked in fine restaurants and had no fear when we found a Perdue (yay Salisbury!) turkey in a Chicago supermarket. He prepared a first-class Thanksgiving meal for us. We also delighted in a huge sushi lunch — sushi was still a delicacy in the late 1980s — and devoured a pile of Chincoteague oysters — the irony not lost on a trio of Eastern Shore boys who traveled 900 miles from home to slurp down Delmarva’s finest.

— We rocked out.

Michael discovered the Detroit power-pop band The Romantics were in Chicago for a performance. We had seen the band when it played the Ocean City Convention Center the summer before our senior year of high school. We’d also been there the previous winter, when they played the old Scandal’s Night Club in Ocean City. It’s always a party when The Romantics take the stage and they remain one of my all-time favorite bands. Yet, my musical highlight of the Chicago adventure was mellow evening draining multiple bottles of red wine at Ray’s apartment, with a blazing fire in the fireplace as The Smiths’ “Louder than Bombs” CD played and snow gently drifted past the windows. It was perfect.

— We got cultured.

Ray’s Oak Park neighborhood hosts the world’s largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, and we made a pilgrimage to his stunningly minimalistic Unity Temple. Downtown we visited the Art Institute of Chicago, where we stood trancelike, lost in the pointillism of George Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte,” like the trio of friends in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” It was there I purchased my only souvenir of the trip: a red mug featuring the signatures of the most famous artists from the museum’s collections.

After four days in Chicago, Michael and I returned home exhausted late Sunday night of Thanksgiving weekend.

The next day, Monday, Nov. 29, 1989 — 30 years ago today — I slung on a necktie, went down to the local paper and started growing up. It was the first day on the job of what would be a 22-year career in the news business.

On my desk, I placed the red mug from the Art Institute, filling it with pens and pencils for my new job. It stayed there my entire career, and when I left the paper in 2011, the mug moved to the workbench in my print shop, where it remains.

Michael passed away unexpectedly in 2006, and Ray — Dr. Holloway now — moved to Alaska long ago to launch a dentistry practice.

But I still get a warm feeling whenever I see that old mug.

It stirs the memory of those wild boys and that crazy, wonderful Thanksgiving in Chicago. It is the definition of a true souvenir — a remembrance — of the experiences of what now seem like a lifetime ago.

Cheers, mates.

This mug from the Art Institute in Chicago has been on my desktop since 1989.