Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

  “You were good,” Dad says, which brings inexplicable and frustrating tears to my eyes—not even my bitterness can be pure anymore. “I remember you were good at it.”

  IV.

  Despite what its Greek roots suggest, “nostalgia” was actually coined by a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, in 1688. Call it faux Greek, then, an antique reproduction. The experience the word’s meant to define, though, existed previously. And there were words for it. The Germans had their Heimweh, the French their maladie du pays, and the English their “homesickness.” But Hofer was the first person to puzzle over it as a problem for medicine to solve. In his Enlightenment diligence, he recast the experience as an affliction. And in this new guise as a disease, the experience needed another name, something official sounding, decidedly less poetical and wishy-washy. With his neologism, his newly minted diagnosis of “nostalgia,” he planted a seed in Western culture and a sensation was born. Historians talk about the time following its baptism as being filled with “outbreaks” and “epidemics,” as though nostalgia were the plague or a case of crabs on a college campus. It’s worth noting that these were particularly common during or right after revolutions. Periods of political or social upheaval. Great change.

  For a long while doctors believed it could be treated and the cures they suggested read like a list of facepalms. Leeches, opium, stomach purges, and warm hypnotic emulsions. Leave it to a doctor during the French Revolution to venture that the only cure was pain and terror. Torture. As evidence, he cited the intimidating tactics of a Russian officer in 1733 who, as his army moved into Germany, threatened that the next soldier to “fall sick” would be buried alive—a threat, so it goes, he made good on. During the American Civil War, nostalgia was thought to be caused by a deficiency of manliness. The prescription? “The patient can often be laughed out of it by his comrades, or reasoned out of it by appeals to his manhood; but of all potent agents, an active campaign, with attendant marches and more particularly its battles is the best curative.” Daydreaming about the verdant rolling hills of your home? Try some public ridicule. Mooning over a honey pie? Check where you last laid your nads, Mulva. Miss your mama? Help yourself to a serving of war.

  Over time, doctors gave up trying to cure nostalgia—one finally called it a “hypochondria of the heart,” fed by its own symptoms like some Ouroboros of the psyche—and they bequeathed the task of exploring it to poets and philosophers. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that nostalgia fully shed its connotations of pathology, left the realm of psychology, and became a household word. This is due in large part to the fact that nostalgia also began to lose its strict meaning of “aggravated homesickness,” largely thanks to the fact that the word “home” itself lost much of its vitality. And it was after this final instar that nostalgia achieved its broadest expression as a general longing for the past. It now connotes “childhood” and “warmth” and “good old days” more than it does “homesickness,” and it’s far more likely to be considered alongside emotions like love and fear and envy than disorders like depression and OCD, as it had been once, and not long ago.

  Given this history, it’s funny, or at least ironic, that nostalgia has piqued the interest of doctors again. Psychiatrists have been studying it more seriously these days and it seems like new reports are coming out all the time—though the joke among specialists is that nostalgia is always old news. Despite its wistful, bittersweet character, these reports claim that nostalgia is, on the whole, a positive emotion. It acts as a shield, a psychological buffer against the fear and anxiety and discontinuity that occur when one’s identity is threatened by tumultuous changes, things like divorce or the death of a loved one. Sparked by experiences of loss or displacement, nostalgia provides a refuge from instability. One study went so far as to suggest that on a cold day, nostalgia can make you feel literally warmer.

  But if anything, I felt like my nostalgia was deepening my feelings of discontinuity. How in the world could I have been all these other people? Has my life been nothing but a series of failed experiments in identity? And I didn’t need the help of any theorist to figure out that my idea of home was fucked—it was like a crater left behind a pulled tooth that my tongue kept prodding, an absence that was more confounding than it was painful. I was waking from terrifyingly vivid dreams about skateboarding, my muscles still alive with the remnants of dream activity, as though my limbs had been twitching as I slept, like my dog’s sometimes do. (I owned a dog?!) I’d see myself as though through a fish-eye lens, the chosen lens of almost every skate video I’ve ever seen, and I’d be putting together a run at any number of spots around Richmond. This wasn’t memory of any sort I was familiar with. It was recollection with an attitude, that talked back. When things reached a certain pitch, a tinnitus of the soul, I bought a board. And not long after, I signed up for camp.

  V.

  Before dinner, our Adult Host, James, gathers us in the lounge area for intros. He has shoulder-length blond hair and snowboards semiprofessionally, although he’s a little cagey when I ask him what that means. For the summer he’s living in a shed behind the Adult House and his chief responsibilities appear to be waking us up every morning and ensuring we have fun.

  We all follow his lead and go around the room saying our names and what we’re here for. Zach and Ben are brothers and are here to ski. As is Facundo, who also attended Session 1, which ended yesterday. He’s from Buenos Aires and works in the electronic music industry and I like him immediately—he strikes me as a person who’s used to people liking him immediately. Having spent the previous week together, Facundo and James have developed a bro-closeness that I’m menvious of and want in on. Mitch and Garryl and Pat are here to snowboard. So’s Caleb, who’s from San Diego. Deeply tanned with sparse, piratical facial hair, Caleb is attractive in a very specific way, one maybe epitomized by the extras you find in the background of MTV Spring Break programs. He’s wearing big designer sunglasses and an LA Dodgers cap with a level-flat brim and his long, dark hair is gathered into a strategically disheveled ponytail, which pushes his hat up off his head so it’s perched there rather than properly worn. He’s here as a chaperone-coach for one of the younger campers, and he goes on to say that if anybody else needs additional coaching up on the mountain, they can feel free to come to him, too. In the wake of that offer we’re all quiet for a confused beat. Caleb then fills the silence by kindly asking that we all please call him “Sparrow.”

  Listening to all these introductions has gotten me almost giddy with possibility. As I was leaving town, I stopped at a friend’s house to grab the extra T-shirts he’d picked up for me at a thrift store and to roll a few spliffs I thought might help facilitate Operation Buddy Munchies. We sat and talked about my week ahead.

  “Have you decided what you’re going to tell the others?” he asked. “You know. About yourself?” We share a thing for cons, for harmless little deceptions, ones that warp or blur reality if not change it outright. The table was littered with papers and tobacco and shake. I’d just finished an uneven and blimpish spliff that I decided to live with rather than reroll a fourth time. At this point in my life, I’ll probably never be able to roll a remarkable joint and, in the moment, this realization landed with a disproportionate amount of failure.

  “I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet, honestly,” I said.

  We sat there for a while drumming up different stories, inventing alternate histories for myself. I could choose one depending on how I read the audience. Each story had its gestures of credibility and authenticity, small corroborating details that would withstand or discourage cross-examination. Or I could be coy, intriguingly vague about my profession and where I’m from. Cast an aura and let them fill in the blanks.

  “You could be anything you want,” my friend said, excited himself. And it was a dizzying idea, that reinvention could be so easy.

  But when push comes to shove and it’s my turn, I for some reason can’t bring myself to tell them any of the stories we�
��d come up with. I tell them my name and what I really do for work and feel the familiar, mild disappointment in these plain facts of my existence. Do they really convey anything meaningful about my identity? Whatever it is I mean when I say “I”? Having entered early middle age and begun to live down decisions I made long ago, I’ve become increasingly aware of how contingent these things are, how easily they could be otherwise, and then also how little of my past I feel any ownership over. I’ve even started to think that contingency might well be one of our emotional life’s governing forces, like electromagnetism is to physics. Gravity. Only this has served to weaken my connection to roles I play and once trusted to define me, and, worse, to ones I wanted and hoped one day would. Words like “editor” and “writer,” “lover” and “husband,” “son” and “father” cleaved from whatever relief they’d once delivered or promised to, peeled away like a Fruit Roll-Up from its cellophane, leaving only a cloudy square of silence where once there’d been something at least partially nourishing. But I don’t get hung up in the moment and my delivery is as seamless as it is insipid. In fact, the ease with which I can deliver these details is one of the chief reasons I’ve come to distrust them.

  James goes on to explain that we’ll spend the first few nights of the week hanging around the house and skating B.O.B.—pros will probably join us at least one night, an intriguing prospect. Then on Thursday we’ll head into Portland for a sushi dinner, camp’s treat, and maybe follow that with a visit to Casa Diablo, which I know to be a vegan strip club of dubious repute. Facundo repeats the name, “Casa Diablo,” and the grin that comes over his face then can only be described as devilish. He’s printed the week’s schedule of dancers from their website and it appears he’s circled a few names in Thursday’s column. Friday’s the beer pong tourney and Saturday we’ll hit “Disorientation.”

  At the Heshin’ Delicatessen for Taco Night, I find myself sitting across from Mitch. He’s thirty-two and his face is as bright and genially nondescript as one arranged with breakfast victuals. He’s also married—in fact, his wife and some of her family are in town and he plans on heading back to Portland most evenings to be with them. Mitch is chatty and generous with himself and yet I find myself wanting to put some distance between us, almost by instinct. I fear if I’m not careful the other Adult Campers will lump us together, that we’ll become the old, married guys. And so in a misguided effort to hide my wedding ring from view and thus take marriage off the conversational table, I hold my burrito with a contorted three-fingered grip that I believe is known colloquially as the Shocker.

  “Remember when it was cool to have the bill of your hat folded?” Mitch asks.

  And Jesus, while of course I remember, distinctly remember spending hours removing the mesh lining from my hats and working their bills into perfect upside-down parabolas that would, when worn as low as I wore them, give me a partial case of tunnel vision, I pretend I didn’t hear the question. Two tables over I see Facundo and James are trying to put their fingers in each other’s burrito, which I know I could play for an easy double entendre, maybe get a congratulatory dunch or a “Hey-oh!”

  The most basic criticism I can level against Mitch is that he looks his age. And by that I mean to say he looks our age. He has a receding hairline that he’s maturely accepted and his jeans are baggy in a midwestern way and he’s wearing a predistressed polo shirt and business casual shoes. I am acutely aware of all the ways his appearance betrays his age because I’ve gone to pains to avoid outing myself likewise. In advance of camp I let my hair grow shaggier than I typically keep it, hoping some solid wings would extrude from the sides and back of my new trucker hat. I acquired my cache of T-shirts because at some point in time, likely during my frat phase, I’d become a collar guy and all the T-shirts I owned were used pretty much exclusively for running or trips to the gym and their pits were jaundiced and crusted up with precipitate of stank. I picked up two new pairs of shoes, one for skating and the other for an activity that in my head I was referring to as chillin’, though I couldn’t quite bring myself to say that out loud. When I came downstairs to leave for camp, wearing my “Research” shirt and new hunting-orange trucker hat, its brim left unmolested, and my new skating shoes, Alexis looked at me and said, “I don’t even recognize you.” And so proud was I of my transformation—of my resurrection, really—that I didn’t stop to question whether this was indeed a good thing.

  Mitch and I find acceptable common ground when we get on the topic of what we’d like to achieve at camp. In addition to the many waivers we had to sign before arriving, we had to fill out a piece of paper that asked us to list three goals for Session 2. I name a number of tricks that I’d like to get back, ones I used to land all the time. The 360-kickflip in particular—that’d been my favorite growing up.

  “That’s cool. I remember those,” Mitch says. “Or a couple at least. What I’d really like to do is land a backflip.” And just to look at him, I know he might as well have said he’d like to colonize Mars or make love on 1962 Catherine Deneuve. He talks about how he feels his time is running out and how he and his wife plan on having kids soon, at which point sayonara backflips while strapped to a pliable plank of wood. And though I understand this motivation deep in my bones, I don’t offer word one of sympathy. I don’t say that one of the main reasons I’m here is to get some footage of me doing my tricks because I want evidence for a posterity of my own. On a recent trip home, I searched the house my parents moved to after I graduated college, a large idyllic place in the central Virginia countryside with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a house Mom designed and that now bears Dad’s absence like a suppurating wound, looking for tapes I was sure I had of me skating when I was younger. In the upstairs closet, amid other family detritus, much of which I recognized from the hall closet in our old ranch house, I found a handful of familiar-looking VHS-C cartridges, those dwarfish cassettes. As a kid I used them over and over, trying to get the best stuff I could, turning the cartridges into late-modern palimpsests. As I watched them, I was disappointed to find that much of the footage was distorted, likely from overuse. A fuzzy bar played across the top or middle or bottom of the screen. Or odd, blurry boxes corrupted the picture, the inscrutable pixelation of scrambled XXX flicks. Even in the good footage, though, everything seemed to be happening slower than it should’ve been. But you could still get a handle on what was going on. And I was dismayed to find that I’m younger than I was when I was at my best and nowhere near as good as I remember myself being. The footage I was looking for, what I remember having seen and been proud of and ridiculously considered editing into a Sponsor Me video, was most likely shot with a friend’s mom’s camera. I haven’t spoken to that friend in more than a decade and the cartridges I remember were probably cluttering up whatever closet his family used to store crap like that. I tried to convince myself of this, that there was good footage of me, that is, footage of me as good, somewhere, but still the movies I had were disconcerting. I started to doubt myself. Had I been as good as I remember myself being? Or had I embellished my skills? In the absence of ready evidence, and in the more regrettable absence of friends from that time to reminisce with, friends who could confirm or deny my talent, put things in perspective like a form of social autocorrect, had my memory and imagination colluded to make a myth of this part of my past? When I name the tricks I want to get back, do I sound like Mitch? Like I want to make love on 1962 Catherine Deneuve?

  Sitting at the picnic table, I don’t tell Mitch any of this, don’t indulge these anxieties and self-doubt. I nod my head in polite approval of his ambition.

  “But really I just want to have some fun without getting hurt too bad,” he concludes.

  And this is too much for me to hold back my sympathetic laughter. For my third goal on the questionnaire, I wrote “Not get hurt.” Alexis, too, has been vocal about my being extra careful. We have a trip to Europe planned for later in the summer and if I am to break anything, she’s said, it is t
o be an arm or a wrist. She’s been having nightmares that involve me Tiny Timming around Paris or cruising the streets of Copenhagen on one of those knee scooters. After Mitch and I stop laughing and collect ourselves, he nods to my palsied burrito hand and says, “Hey, so how long you been married?”

  VI.

  It’s dark by the time Maureen arrives at the Adult House. We’re all playing pool and putzing around on our computers and half watching Billy Madison on TV. She takes a seat on the couch and introduces herself. Maureen goes by Mo. She has the laid-back good looks of skater and snowboarder chicks the world over. Long, thick auburn hair, a slim but not boyish body, a smile off a real estate bus bench, and a pert nose whose left nostril has a tiny, beacon-like stud in it. She’s driven over ten hours to get here, all the way from Kalispell, Montana.