I lost a phone a few years ago (haven’t we all at least once). However, it wasn’t just any phone; it was a full one. It was a digital vault and a time capsule of moments, places, and feelings I didn’t want to forget. And with it, I lost the photos. There were hundreds of pictures of my trips across the American Southwest, little towns in West Virginia and the Carolinas that looked like time had packed up and left. Yes, there were the usual tourist (me) photos of the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, Monument Valley, and Virginia Beach with its god of the sea Neptune statue, among others. However, there were also photos of ghost towns in Arizona, Alberta, Texas, New Mexico, and the eerie calm of the Salton Sea. There were photos of a stretch of Route 66 where the silence was the attraction, and Maryland blue crab just pulled out of the ocean and now on my plate. There were photos of well, you get the idea.
Gone. All of it. No cloud backup. No external storage. Just gone. At first, it felt like someone had erased part of my memory. Not just the pretty pictures—the proof. The evidence that I’d been there. That I’d stood in front of that canyon, eaten in that roadside diner, talked to that man outside the gas station somewhere in South Carolina who told me about the town’s only stoplight and an unsolved murder. I was angry with myself because I was careless and lazy.
But then something happened. Once the panic faded, I realized the memories weren’t actually gone. They were still there—just quieter. I could still see the ridges of Zabriskie Point in my head. I still feel the sense of awe and history I had walking through Tombstone, Kayenta, and other places in Arizona and across the Deep South and west. I could still smell the paint in that El Centro motel I bailed on within five minutes. I bailed because the smell was so strong (it was the last room available) I figured I’d wake up with a pounding headache from the fumes or not at all. I could still hear the gravel crunch under my tires on some back road near Naco, Arizona and the Mexican border and picture the exact shade of red in the dirt along Highway 64 in northern Arizona.
And you know what? Those images in my brain were better than the photos. Because the phone didn’t capture how I felt, it didn’t capture the beautiful exhaustion of a road trip that gave way to wonder as I turned down so many sideroads to satisfy my curiosity. The quiet moments when I sat in a plastic chair with a paper plate of genuine Mexican food, watching the sun go down in a town whose name I can’t remember—but whose peace I’ll never forget. The photos were gone. But the stories? They stuck.
I think that’s what made me start writing about it all. Maybe at first, it was a way to rebuild what I lost. But now, it feels like something more. A kind of second chance. A new way to document everything—not in pixels, but in paragraphs. It turns out that writing forces you to remember differently. Deeper. You can’t scroll through a file for a sunset—you have to recreate it. What did the sky look like? What did the air smell like? Who else was there? And what was I thinking in that exact moment as I stared out at the water in Gulf Shores, Alabama?
And sometimes you remember things you didn’t even realize you’d kept. Like the way the wind sounded at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Or how the desert at dusk makes you feel small in the best possible way. Or the particular quiet that falls over a dying coal town, where even the dogs seem to walk slower.
So, no—I don’t have those photos anymore, and I’ve never been one to post selfies on social media captioned with, “Here I am at … ” But I’ve got the moments in my mind. And now, I’m writing them down. Not just for me, but maybe for someone else out there who thought they needed to capture everything perfectly just to remember it at all. You don’t. You just have to live it fully and be there. Take photos, sure. But be there. The lesson? Back up your damn photos. Yes. Please do that. But more importantly, don’t confuse the photo with the memory. A great shot can remind you of a place, sure. But living it—that’s what stays. I’ll keep taking pictures, but now I back them up like a responsible adult. I’ve learned that even when the tech fails, the mind remembers. The heart remembers. And if you write it all down before it fades, you end up with something more substantial than any camera. You end up with a life you can read and write about, and that is what I am doing now. Oh, boy, do I have a lot of writing to do because many of these adventures are currently in draft form – and yes, they are stored in the cloud and soon to come pouring out in this blog.
John Berkovich Talks 