My son had been gone nearly seven days. Occasionally we’d get a text or see a random Snapchat from his journey. A couple of buddies and he had taken off for San Francisco last week to visit a good friend in a Honda Civic. Their path took them through Wyoming and Utah and California. After spending a couple of days in the Bay Area, they started back towards KC.
And that’s when I got the text.
“I think the GoPro camera is toast” the text read. “I want to get it replaced and I’m trying to call the GoPro people. Do you have your proof of purchase?”
My son was sitting in the middle of Zion National Park at the Utah/Arizona border. Earlier that morning, he sent us a photograph of the sun rising over the cliffs and mountains overlooking the campsite. If you’d told me it was a $2,000 photo from a professional photographer, I’d have believed you.
On the trip they also skateboarded down the Las Vegas strip and caught a San Francisco Giants game. (Unfortunately, they were playing the Royals so it wasn’t real baseball. But still.) And, apparently, the day before, the boys had found a waterfall known to cliff-divers and they, naturally, took advantage and dove off.
It seems that the GoPro may have been the casualty of a rush of water into its electronic systems. It would no longer power on.
The text message continued. “I feel bad about the camera, I want to get it replaced.” I purchased the GoPro as part of a planned broadcast project over a year ago. The project never materialized and the camera sat in a box in my closet until a couple of months ago as I was doing a purge. “Hey Brett, do you need a GoPro for anything?”
He was like, “I guess. I’ll play around with it.” Recently he has taken to “boarding” (which is what the kids call skateboarding these days) and has spent the past couple of months recording videos of them boarding the street of Kansas City, Kearney, Platte City, countless parks around the area and now this big trip to San Francisco. It seems that, indeed, he found a use for it.
And now he’s spending the morning calling trying to get it replaced because he thought I’d be mad.
Son, that camera spent 10 months sitting in a drawer. You took it and captured three months of adventures that I couldn’t have imagined, then you DOVE OFF A CLIFF. And you think I’d be mad?
Life is for living. Life is not for being a slave to technology. Technology should be complementing our life and you are out there living your best one.
We’ll get the camera fixed when you get back and I’m quite confident that if we can’t, that the last words of that camera were ‘GERONIMOOOO’. And I’m also quite sure that in 30 years when you’re telling your kids about your trip to San Francisco, there won’t even be a thought of that GoPro camera that ate it. Get home safe. Keep living your best life. I’ve got more toys in the attic that I hope bring you the same amount of joy. Just next time skip the Royals game.
(Get thoughts on more toys in the attic and other things from Chris Kamler on Twitter, where he is known as @TheFakeNed)