Issue 54: The Ones Who Knew

When I was in the third grade, my family took a trip to Seagrove. That trip had many memories. There was a hurricane warning in the area. The warning was issued before we took the trip for while we’d be there. My amateur weatherman father said we’d be fine. We drove on an empty highway as we watched the other direction sit bumper to bumper. Cars were full of faces wondering what the suicidal family driving a minivan was doing. Dad was right though, there was no hurricane. There was, however, a stranger walking into our hotel room at 2 AM. We had stopped somewhere in Alabama on our way down. We gave the hotel money. The hotel gave us our very own room for the night. That is how hotels work. Later that night, someone else gave the hotel money. The hotel gave that family our same room. That is not how hotels are supposed to work. The dad of that family, exhausted I’m sure, opened the door to his room to find a family already sleeping there. The situation was resolved peacefully.

There was one memory from that trip, however, that I remember more clearly and it made a bigger impact on me. We were in a bookstore and I grabbed a book simply because the cover looked cool. The book was thick. It was the biggest book I’d ever held, other than the Bible. But unlike the Bible, this book had a shark on it. I didn’t read that book for another year or two. When I did, it sparked what became a lifelong love of reading. The book was “Skeleton Key” by Anthony Horowitz. It is part of the Alex Rider series about a teenage spy. I absolutely loved it. For the next year, I was a pre-teen spy in training as I read the rest of the series. 

I judged a book by its cover and my life changed for the better. 

For years, as far as I could tell, I was the only person who knew about the Alex Rider series. Those books were, in a sense, mine. When I became friends with the kid who would become the best man in my wedding during the eighth grade, I noticed the Alex Rider series on his book shelf. It was one of the many things we immediately bonded over and for years, as far as we could tell, we were the only people who knew about the Alex Rider series. Those books were, in a sense, ours.

I’m sure, even in those earlier days of the internet, I would have been able to google the series and find either a facebook group or series of blog posts and connect with dozens of other people who were also completely captured by the Alex Rider books as a child. On one hand, I would have been able to share in the excitement of moments and storylines with others and not feel like I was keeping this spy-in-training lifestyle alone which is good, of course. That’s what the Internet is for. Information and likeminded people at our instantaneous disposal.

Except if I remember correctly, kids and teenagers secretly like feeling like books or music are, in a sense, theirs and like they are enjoying those things alone. At that age we like hoarding pop culture and cultivating a more and more eccentric and unique collection of knowledge and experiences. We recite lines from cult movies like “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Nacho Libre,” and for a few months at my middle school, “Accepted”. It is as if those quotes were passwords to a speakeasy. Do you remember listing your favorite movies and books and bands on your Facebook page as if they were as essential as name and age and gender?

That proprietary sense that my friend and I had about Alex Rider is why teenagers get so disgusted when everybody else in the world finds out about their favorite band. It’s fun being in the know, but once everyone’s in it, there’s nothing to know anymore. There are two CDs that were on constant rotation in my car in high school that my Dad gave me. Really only my brother Cole, and my buddies Keith and Guha would immediately know the band of truck drivers I’m talking about. I plan to keep it that way. We are still in the know. 

There was a short time in my life, before the internet really became what it is today, when media was still difficult to access. We had video rental stores, but not streaming. I also didn’t have a driver’s license so I had the barrier of convincing my parents to take me to rent a movie I had heard my friends talking about. We had LimeWire and Napster, but it was not as easy as Spotify or Apple music. Downloading a song to your computer family computer was a bit of a roll of the dice. I mentioned “Accepted” earlier. It is a pretty dumb movie about some kids who couldn’t get into college so they start their own. There is a classic moment in the movie where Jonah Hill dresses up as a hotdog and walks around campus yelling, “Ask me about my weiner!” It was on the previews and took our middle school by storm. Access to this movie was very limited. It was in theaters for a while and then, months later, on DVD. However, many southern Christian parents in our school didn’t want to take their middle schoolers to see that movie in theaters and the DVD case said in big letters “From the studio that brought you American Pie” which was definitely a no from the Bible belt.

Rumors of kids with older siblings began to spread. They talked of curse words and hilarious moments and even a scene with hot girls in a pool. For a time, there were the haves and the have nots. Somehow, and to this day I don’t know how, I convinced my dad to take me to see that movie. When I finally saw it, I was almost disappointed. It was fun not being able to see it for a while, not having every last thing a click away. Because what we cannot find inflames the imagination. Once I saw it, I had seen all there was to see. Experience replaced imagination. 

Kurt Cobain once said in an interview that long before he’d heard any actual punk rock music, he studied magazine photos of punk musicians and imagined what the music sounded like. It must have sounded to him, I imagine, something like what would later be called grunge.

Instant accessibility leaves us oddly disappointed, bored, and endlessly craving more. Sometimes I’ll read a science article that finally explains some question I’ve always wondered about, only to find myself getting distracted as soon as I started reading the explanation. Not long ago, we had what appeared to be a version of the Northern lights all the way down here in Tennessee. I was with my in-laws at the time and it was so fun being part of the excitement. This was a once in a lifetime thing. People were sending each other pictures and causing others to rush to their yards to see it for themselves. I’m sure there is a perfectly good explanation for how it happened. Maybe someday I’ll look it up. In the meantime, I just get to wonder.

As last week’s issue on magic discussed, I find the mysterious tantalizing. As soon as I begin reading possible explanations like solar discharge particles reflecting or some other yada yada yada, I start to lose interest. Just knowing that there is an answer is somehow deflating. I used to watch the show “Finding Bigfoot”. There was a guy on there who had a trucker hat that read, “Gone Squatchin’” I really wanted it. They never found Bigfoot, but if they did, if they really found him and captured him and studied him and gave him some Latin name like Magnus Pes, then Bigfoot would just be another animal. An intriguing animal, obviously, but eventually would it really be any more bizarre or improbable than a giraffe or a giant squid?

I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things. Learning how to transform ignorance into mystery and not knowing into wonder, is a skill I will keep advocating for here. Because it turns out that the most important things in this life, why you were born in your small town instead of not, how the people we love really feel about us, or whether or not Uncle Rico could really throw a pigskin a quarter mile, are things we’re never going to know.

In high school, my buddy Brenden (fellow Alex RIder reader and aforementioned best man) would go to a cabin in North Carolina. On our first trip there, we discovered a secret camping spot. It was unlike any secret camping spot you’ve ever seen. We had to canoe for a while, hike up to the edge of a dam, climb down the otherside, and around a bunch of boulders. There we found the most beautiful clearing with a little pond, a hidden waterfall, and plenty of places to explore. On one of our trips, we hiked well beyond where we had been previously. We started seeing some fences we hadn’t previously seen. There were signs on the fences. To most, they would read the signs and think it was some sort of power plant associated with the nearby dam. We knew better. We had read Alex Rider. We had trained to be spies during our childhoods. Something was up. We spent the rest of the day sneaking around the fences and up to different seemingly abandoned structures and peeking in the windows. We investigated, we gathered information, we defended our secret campground against countless nefarious plots the evil shell corporation with signs on fences was up to. Of course we knew there was nothing going on, but until we knew for sure, we didn’t really know at all. For the rest of that trip, we lived in a Schrodinger’s cat reality where there both was and wasn’t some evil plot afoot. We didn’t have our phones with us. We didn’t look up the company when we got back to our phones. No answer would top what our imaginations had led us to all day and why ruin a good story with the truth?