The LNG Effect

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I have identified to a strangely high degree with Benji in Sag Harbor despite having almost nothing in common with him. However, no chapter in the book have I identified with quite so much as "Tonight We Improvise" where Benji describes a dominating, inaccurate nostalgia he terms "the LNG effect" since he sees it as being caused partly by the radio station LNG.

For me, such hard-hitting nostalgia has been a factor in my life since probably the age of ten. Every once in a while, prompted by one thing or another, I get this agonizing longing for days gone by that actually hurts I miss it so bad. Of course, as Benji pointed out, those days were probably never as perfect as I remember them out to be, but still I miss them. I can feel that nostalgia building up now as I remember things to write this blog. It might be helpful to understand my childhood to understand my nostalgia.

I came across a phrase in a book a read once describing a man as having a "Mark Twain childhood," which meant that he spent his childhood fishing and getting into adventures, similar to Mark Twain's depiction of childhood with Tom Sawyer and to a lesser extent Huckleberry Finn. Well, I had the modern day equivalent of a Mark Twain Childhood. My Dad was the director of a camp and conference center called Bear Trap Ranch in the Rocky Mountains. Imagine whatever summer camp you went to, add more beautiful scenery, and then imagine living at that camp. We had horseback riding, repelling, frisbee golf, campfires, hayrides and hiking in the summer. Ice skating, broomball , a tubing run, and snowshoeing in the winter. The entire year there was great food served in the dining hall. Not only did we get to do everything the campers got to do, we got to go into all the "staff only" places too, since we helped out with camp chores. I used to love doing the camp chores: using the "dragon" that was the industrial dishwasher in the kitchen, ringing the bell to let everyone know it was time for supper, and riding the camp Gator around while collecting trash.

My sister and I had the run of the camp, which was a good 30 acres located in a valley at 9000 feet  above sea level. We would go outside and play in the woods wherever we wanted to, anywhere at all. Often there were other kids our age out there, sometimes for a week, other times for a year. At that age, friends were made easily and it didn't matter that they didn't last for very long. In the summers we tried to fish, played "frontier house" on a hillside, and in general just wandered all over the place. In the winter there were plenty of places to sled or carve tunnels out of the snow drifts that the camp trucks created when they plowed. These drifts would be twelve feet high and just as wide, ideal for carving tunnels. Any of the camp buildings were open to us, and there was always board games and juice or hot chocolate machines in the dining hall. We were homeschooled because the nearest school was a 30 minute drive away and the busses didn't run up by us, but schoolwork was never forced upon us, so I often just skipped what I was supposed to be doing and read a book or played outside. I usually didn't get past the February lessons in the plan for our school year, but it didn't end up hurting me academically.

Then we left. That suddenly. I was nine years old, and my connection with Bear Trap was completely severed. We moved twenty hours away from Colorado to Illinois, where the scenery and weather was different. I didn't keep in contact with anyone from Bear Trap, and in the last eight years I have only visited it once, for a few days in 6th grade. This complete severance has made it the ideal place to nostalgia. I have few bad memories from those years of my life, and I didn't stick around long enough to become disillusioned with it in any way. Bear Trap remains this ideal to me.

When I moved to Illinois, my lifestyle completely changed. We were in the middle of a small town of 5000, not huge, but much more than the 20 staff that were usually at Bear Trap, or even the 150 people that would be there when the camp was full. There was no longer a wilderness that I could play in, or at  least a wilderness my parents could trust me to wander off by myself in. I was reaching the age where I was getting self-conscious around others. And I had more of a reason to be self-conscious. At Bear Trap, I belonged. I was the camp director's kid, and for those seven years I was as much a part of the camp as the horses. When I moved to Illinois, I didn't have that identification anymore.

All of which make the seven years at Bear Trap a time that constantly brings up a huge amount of nostalgia, nostalgia that has plagued me from almost the very time I moved to Illinois. Any number of things can set me off with nostalgia for Bear Trap: songs that were often playing at my house, sledding, wood paneling, Playmobile, walking talkies, the list goes on. Even when I read of kids having their own adventures in nature (like Calvin and Hobbes), it takes me back to that place in time. Sometimes even music that I never heard in those years can put me in the some mood, like Danny describes the songs on WLNG, which will lead me to yearning for Bear Trap.

See how much it effects me? I just rambled on about it much longer than I intended to, since I was trying to tie this back in with Sag Harbor. The way Benji talks about his old childhood house seems exactly the way I think of Bear Trap. The way be can remember everything about it, all the details of how the headlights would travel on the ceiling. The way he associates exclusively happiness and contentment with the place. That's why this chapter resonated so much with me. The "LNG effect" got to both of us.

It's funny. I have had other periods of my life that I can single out by time and place. The year I lived in Lithuania. The year I lived in the blue house by Tolono. Yet none stirs in me nearly as much nostalgia as Bear Trap does. Perhaps it was just because I was younger, which would be a theory supported by Benji's experience of nostalgia for his old house. I don't know. Maybe I'll feel this way about my time at Uni at some point. Or not. I'm still not sure of whether it's good to feel nostalgic and unearth all these pleasant memories, or whether it is better to try and forget and avoid the pain of longing they will cause.