Lost and Found

There’s always been something captivating about the road less traveled. Throughout time humans have blazed trails and roads to new ideas and territory. There’s something thrilling about breaking ground that hasn’t been broken before. However with each new trail or road blazed, there’s often a wake of forgotten routes left behind by past wayfarers.

Throughout time there’s also a deep rooted fascination held by many about the past. A fascination over the arcane and esoteric, about what came before. Something about the murky past captures the imagination and makes minds run wild piecing together a history or narrative to try and understand how things were and how things came to be.

As the internet has marched on decade by decade there’s been a wake of websites that’ve come and gone with the tides. Untold amounts of geocities pages, blogs, forums, image boards, guides, wild and wacky places pieced together by individuals carving out a space for themselves in a digital landscape. With the transition from physical to digital there’s been a newfound fascination in many circles regarding the idea of “lost media.”

The internet is something that’s easy to take for granted, especially for those among my generation that’ve only known a world with the internet. It’s hard to put yourself into a head space where you would argue with a friend over the validity of a basic fact or statement, when any false notions or harebrained ideas can be cleared up with a five second Google search. The internet feels like an immutable constant that will remain pervasive until the extinction of humanity. It’s all too easy to forget the legwork that used to be required to seek out information and media. An era where to seek out information you had to put in actual legwork. Go out and talk to people, go to a library, read through the index cards, check sources, or perhaps get handed a physical tape for that friend’s favorite local band.

Some years ago I was on a road trip with my brother, and in the monotonous boredom of American interstates I started to take a keen interest in the route markers that dotted the landscape of American highways. Most people don’t really pay them any mind, they’re a constant marker that will remain steadfast in the way we navigate the tapestry of roads. It’s all too easy to forget the era of cow paths, dirt roads, and incomplete directions. An era where to get to where you wanted to go required thoughtfulness and planning, paying mind to your surroundings and anticipating the next marker, getting lost requiring asking for help from the locals. I couldn’t shake this fascination for route markers or why that was.

Living in a rural area of the north eastern United States, often at times there isn’t much to do but go outside and mull about for a bit before you finally decide to go on a hike. After this road trip and earnestly trying to hike more of the famous 4,000 footers in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I found my attention turned towards the blazes of the trails that lead to the peaks of these mountains. Moreover, I’d found an older edition of an AMC White Mountain hiking guide to help find my way while hiking these trails. Pouring over this guide I started looking up certain trails, only to realize they didn’t exist anymore.

In reading more about these trails, there were posts from intrepid souls online that had the gumption to try and track down these old trails and map them out with modern means. The most interesting in my mind being the Adam’s Slide Trail of Mt. Adams in the Presidential range. This trail was cut in 1909 and abandoned at some point in the 1960s. The trail was only 1.3 miles in length, however was formerly the steepest trail in all of the White Mountains. Quite an interesting challenge for an able bodied hiker. I’d assumed the trail would only be vaguely able to be followed considering the unforgiving nature of the White Mountains, and the toll that 60 years of no maintenance would take on a trail in such an environment.

To my amazement, keen eyes can still spot painted blazes, notches in trees, and quartz topped cairns after venturing up the obfuscated start of the trail. It’s not without its challenges though. Blow downs have littered the trail with trees and brush. The slow growth of alpine flora have tried their hardest to swallow up the wooded portion of the trail, leading to cuts, snags, and confusion to anyone brave enough to attempt the trail. It takes a certain kind of careful navigation and determination to slog up what was formerly the steepest trail in the entire region. Yet, if you’re just as determined as the 60 year old paint that barely clings to the weathered rocks and trees, the mountain can still be summited on that trail cut over 100 years ago.

Broader American mythology is filled with legendary routes and trails, most notably The Oregon Trail and Route 66 among others. The reasons for their abandonment and displacement are numerous. There are other, better routes now. The other routes are easier to follow and maintain, perhaps more efficient in getting you from point A to point B. Yet these routes remain ever pervasive and beloved in the minds of many. Though Route 66 hasn’t been an official route since 1985, nor have pioneers traveled the Oregon Trail since the 1860s it captivates the minds of many. There are a few who are determined to make pilgrimage along these routes.

Why is that? I suppose everyone will have their own reasons for doing so. Perhaps to connect with the past in some way. To gain a deeper understanding of the way things were, to understand how people lived and traveled in decades and eons before. Maybe they’re in search of something. It could be something as simple as adventure, or something more mercurial and hard to define. I can’t quite easily explain why I’m so captivated by the fact that the markers of the Adam’s Slide Trail stubbornly cling to the trees and rocks on the side of a remote mountain, yet I am.

Perhaps there’s an understanding that eventually no matter how stubborn that 60 year old paint may be, no matter how the white quartz tipped cairns weather the harsh conditions of an exposed mountainside, eventually all that will be left of the tail is written word. Eventually those words will vanish. Maybe there’s a feeling of wanting to experience living history before it’s forgotten, or a sense of preservation. Maybe a bit of all of the above.

So what does this have to do with the internet, or the idea of “lost media?” More and more I’ve seen waves of content on the internet with people spelunking old records, cassette tapes, VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs, any old physical media in search of lost content. Sometimes it’s simply the thrill of the hunt, like digging in the crates for records and cassettes to find forgotten songs and bands. Perhaps chasing the dragon of the next great Hop Hop sample. Finding a quaint old home video that shows the way things were. Sometimes there’s a more direct goal in mind, knowing a specific piece of media was lost and undertaking a herculean intercontinental effort to find a copy of an obscure anime. More well known examples are the scores of lost silent films, or the dozens of missing Doctor Who episodes.

It seems absurd to consider, a cultural tour de force like Doctor Who missing 97 episodes? If something as culturally significant to as many people as Doctor Who can have 97 episodes missing what does that say about how we value art and media? What does that say about how we value the things outside of art?

The internet feels like a constant in our lives. For some it’s their entire lives, for others it’s simply a means to an end. Either a quick Google search or a means to a quick answer to end a silly argument between friends and family around a kitchen table or a way to access their bank account. Yet anyone who’s engaged with the internet long enough has seen that one meme, that one video, or once read a blog that was really interesting that simply no longer exists anymore. It faded from public memory, the artist or author passed away, DNS and domain names have expired. Yet with the internet, unlike our previous iterations of media, there are no blazes or markers left behind to be followed. There are no cartridges, cassettes, or discs whose contents can be extracted. There are only expired addresses and dead links.

Every once in a while there are divine strokes of luck. One slightly neurotic data hoarder had a cache of a website or content in their terabytes deep array of shoddy hard drives hanging on by a thread. One neurotic woman happened to fill her entire apartment, and pay for storage units for a massive hoard of Betamax tapes. A woman who decided to record current events on the news for several decades saving culturally significant recordings every single day. These people are so far out there for statistical outliers to barely even register on a scatter plot. Yet for the right people, they’re doing perhaps some of the most important work for humanity.

For a litany of reasons there are even those who seek to obfuscate preservation. The Internet Archive has been taking snapshots of the internet for several decades now and for all that they have saved, there’s petabytes, perhaps exabytes worth of content they have not been able to save and preserve for future generations. Not for lack of trying, but because of the complicated legal web of regulations that prevent them from doing so. Scores of cases of litigation against the preservation of literature. Or for younger folks, many instances of Nintendo actively fighting the preservation of their catalogue for things they haven’t offered a legal way of obtaining since 1986.

There are many real world examples of this happening too. Those white quartz tipped cairns on the Adam’s Slide Trail for instance. For sixty years after its decommissioning those quartz cairns stood proudly on the mountainside just out of view of the summit. However the forestry service has been systematically dismantling them over the last decade due to concerns over safety. Hikers on other trails wandering off trail and finding those markers, becoming confused and lost on the side of the mountain. As much as it pains me to see the dismantling of local history, I can understand the reasons for doing so in this case.

I cannot in good conscience understand the scores of roadblocks and dismantling the efforts of preserving culture and history elsewhere, though. Call it Nintendo’s legal right to have their obscure Pac Man clone Devil World forgotten by modern audiences, sure. However the cultural significance of forgetting and losing the ability to play the first home console game Shigeru Miyamoto ever worked on in his game design career? It seems a shame to me, no matter how insignificant it may seem to many.

There’s a perverse order of priorities we have as a culture when it comes to preserving things that matter to us, and in the United States at least it’s been perverted since the advent of the copyright system. Take Disney lobbying for ninety five years for anything to enter the public domain. By the time formerly culturally significant pieces of media have reached the public domain, the majority are so far out of public purview to be ancient history and likely to have been lost. At least in the past there were physical markers to be found again.

With the historic lack of care towards preservation and the current legal snares involved with attempting to preserve the internet for future generations, I worry for the fact that there will be so few trail markers and blazes left for the intrepid few in the future who choose to go spelunking to find lost media. The silver lining at least, is that preservation of digital endeavors can be done rather easily compared to the past. You don’t need a massive bookshelf for that collection of obscure books, nor do you need a room for an entire record collection anymore. Comparatively, a hard drive can fit an entire house worth of books or songs.

I suppose to cap off this winding post: Preservation matters. If something matters to you, if something has enriched your life in an indelible way – the least you can do is preserve it in some way. If not for someone else, at least for yourself.