Magic

We believe magic is everywhere because it is everywhere – the soil, the stars, the bugs we dig up in the dirt, the winged things we see in the sky. But then it all begins to feel so normal because we see it every day and busy our lives with looking for other magical things like cancer miraculously disappearing. -Lisa Gungor, The Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Seen 

This morning, I recorded a podcast about the first season of Stranger Things, a show I hadn’t watched until recently – and then rewatched all over again because I enjoyed it so much. And when I was preparing what I wanted to talk about on the podcast, I realized that one of the things I love about the show is the fact that a group of young kids are the heroes of this story.

If you haven’t watched the show, I won’t spoil it for you but I do have to tell you a little about it. The plot centers on a group of friends, Mike, Dustin and Lucas, and the mysterious disappearance of their friend, Will Byers. They come to find out, through a friendship they form with a mysterious and powerful girl named Eleven, that Will is trapped in another world. It’s kind of like ours but a much darker version of our world – it’s our world but “Upside Down” Eleven explains as she flips over a Dungeons and Dragons game board to show the dark underside. And here, in this dark Upside Down world, there be monsters – a terrifying flesh-eating monster that the kids call, “The Demigorgan.”

It’s in the face of these completely bizarre, inexplicable circumstances and insurmountable odds, this world of magic and monsters and alternate dimensions, that our heroes plunge forward, willing to do anything to save their friend.

As for the adults in the story, they take a little longer. Some catch up to the kids sooner than others but all are hesitant on some level. Their rational minds can’t comprehend this world of magic and so they try their best to solve it on their terms.

And I realized the reason the kids are able to plunge ahead, the reason that the kids – Mike, Dustin and Lucas – are the heroes is because they already live in a world of magic. The world they live in, that they create for themselves, that they see all around them is already a world full of magic. Everything is a battle of good and evil. There are monsters and there are heroes. And the heroes press on and find whatever it is that will destroy the monsters so that evil is destroyed and good prevails.

That’s why I love the kids of Stranger Things. While the adults of stranger things might see a murder mystery to be solved, or a scientific experiment needing to be studied and utilized, or they may flat out refuse to see the magic that is right in front of them, the kids press on because they already live in a world full of magic.

I know that this is just an entertaining show (one that I highly recommend, by the way). We will most likely never encounter a rip between two dimensions and will most likely never have to run for our lives from a giant flesh-eating monster that looks like a terrifying venus fly-trap gone wrong.

But at some point, I think most of us give up a world full of magic. We learn that the world can be explained. We rationalize what we can’t comprehend. We normalize what seems extraordinary.

Saturday night, I had the chance to visit Camp Crooked Creek, a place where I spent many summers as a child going to Boy Scout summer camp. There I spent weeks of my life swimming in the lake, canoeing, hiking, playing basketball, launching homemade space rockets, learning to tie hundreds of knots (not a single one I could tie now if you asked me to), and surviving out in the wilderness by building a shelter out of sticks and leaves.

Crooked Creek was, for me, a world that was full of magic. And in my memory, it was a place so magical that it was somewhere far, far away; a place that you could only access through some magical door – like walking through Platform 9 and 3/4…or walking through a rift to an alternate dimension. I don’t have a single memory of how we got there and I thought it must have been an incredible road trip to get there.

To my surprise, when I got in the car and entered the address for Camp Crooked Creek, I found that it was a mere 23 miles from my apartment. Hop on to the Watterson Expressway, merge onto I-65 South, take the exit after 18 miles, a right turn and then a left and wind your way through a neighborhood and then you find yourself at camp. It would take me less than 30 minutes to get there.

The field, that loomed so large in my memory – where we did flag ceremonies and played softball – well, it was probably smaller than a football field in reality. The paths that I thought spanned for miles – the ones that took you to the archery range or the low ropes course or the dining hall – were probably less than a quarter-mile from our campsite.

With my adult eyes, everything seemed so ordinary and almost unremarkable. A career spent visiting retreat centers and going to camps and doing overnights and places like Crooked Creek quickly become a lot less magical.

At some point, we grow into adults and we trade magic for ordinary. A place that existed for so long in my memory as a whole other world unto itself becomes a place that’s just a short, 23-mile trip down the road. A journey that I thought must’ve taken forever, that probably often, in the pre-GPS world, involved getting lost and taking detours, can now easily be plotted with pinpoint accuracy on a cellphone app.

While we may never be able to go back to the world full of magic that we lived in when we were younger, we do trade it for the magic of another kind. The magic of watching a child come into this world and then watching that same child stand up on their own two legs and then watching as he or she begins to form words. Inexplicable. Unbelievable. Magic.

Or we behold the magic of two people finding love, keeping it well and then joining their lives together as one to face insurmountable odds to make a life together. The magic of journeying through hardships as life does not pan out the way they thought it would. The magic of friends surrounding them with love and support and casseroles so that the pain they experience might feel a little less daunting. Don’t forget – here, there be monsters as well: a terrifying diagnosis, a loss of a job, or the ultimate mystery of death. Heroes press on.

And it may not always feel like it, but I believe – if we love each other hard enough and we never give up, Good prevails. Magic.

And if we’re lucky, we may still get a spark of the old magic every now and then. As I arrived at Camp Crooked Creep the sun was setting over the lake and I noticed the soft hues of orange and blue melting together. After the sun had fully hidden itself on the other side of the earth, I looked up to see a sky lit up with a thousand stars. I pulled out my cellphone to shine a light on the path so I could see where I was going and then I thought better of it when I noticed the soft luminance of the half-moon, enough for my eyes to adjust and see clearly in the dark.

And I remembered the time when a gang of six of us hopped in a canoe and nearly sunk it to the bottom of the lake because you’re not supposed to stick six people in a canoe. I remembered the time I nearly got thrown out of my fishing merit badge class because I had taken it and failed the summer before so I was bored and decided to smart off to the merit badge instructor. I remembered Paul, the Scoutmaster, happily chugging a sugary slushee as part of a competition so that we could have a chance to win.

Most of all, I remembered being with my brother and his bunch of friends in the troop. How they welcomed me into the troop my first summer by dragging my cot out into the middle of the camp site in the cool of morning to try to wake me up. How, even though I was a weird and awkward and smart-mouthed and rebellious kid, they all let me play and learn and grow right alongside them like I was one of them. I took a deep breathe as I walked back to my car and I felt the air of that place, so wide and free – and I felt the magic again.