The year is 2001 and my parents and I are staying in our family’s commodious little cabin on a quiet street of a sedated lakeside town. The exterior is beige, the windows are a worn red with paint chipping from the sills, and the humble little structure stands in a sparse forest composed almost completely of spruces and pines.
Nuangola is a drab, lifeless, and inert Pennsylvania town whose cultural epicenter consists of little more than upper middle class men on posh boats wearing Polos and women in bathing suits and sundresses. The gray skies poking through the unvariegated trees above us seem to subside for only hours at a time during our dragging stays in this slow-moving nowhere.
“Can we go home yet?” I ask on our third day at the lake’s sandless beach for roughly the seventeenth time. The land is infertile grounds for sculpting sand castles and the gentle lapping of water renders moats useless, anyway. Whatever I can erect from the stones and pebbles lining the shore will be real estate unworthy of proper guard. Motorboats command a tide that’s as careless and unhurried as the town around it. In Hawaii this sort of leisure would feel welcome, but in this backwoods borough, it’s unmistakably macabre. More than a tropical retreat, the area feels decidedly like the baseboard of a murder mystery.
The interior of our cabin might be charming to someone more than quintuple my age, but at a spry five years old, it’s just about the furthest thing I can envision from cozy. Furniture is an eerie immaculate and the hardwood floors between carpets creak with a grating regularity. The kitchen is small and the bathroom smaller.
An oppressive sterility dominates the atmosphere. The very air that wafts in through its screened-in porch is swampy, stagnant, and interspersed with swarming bodies of gnats and straggling, marauding mosquitos. My memory of the town is forever intertwined with the heinous repellant I’m reluctantly smattered with each time my parents head lakeward. It coats my body with a sticky sheen as we walk down the wooden, lily-laden, bleating, croaking walkway toward the opaquened brown waters.
We can all agree that the home — and town around it — leaves a little warmth to be desired, but neither my mother nor father have the fortittude to challenge her parents over their bygone tastes in interior design. The sporadically placed, mid-century dolls whose faces all but scream “possession” are something that just needs to be tolerated in a Heller home. Enduring the disconcerting gaze of a prior generation’s childrens’ toys is the modest price of entry here if we’re to be a family that co-owns what can be nearly called “a lake home.” It is my grandparents’, after all. If they want to be haunted by 20th century porcelain, it’s their prerogative.
To them, it’s the Hummels, dolls, antiques, and furniture (more for looking at than sitting on) that makes this place a home — or at least a temporary summer getaway. But I’m a flower child born to two hippies who know far better than to adorn their walls with decor from the tasteless days of yore. Our home contains such a wild assortment of culture and art that it leaves each wall covered and the space between the partitions brimming to near-overflow.
The placid lake is stocked with bass and sunnies and pretentious homes with private docks embroidering almost its entire circumference. Our cabin isn’t lake-front property, but lake-front-property-adjacent. The murky lagoon is only a short trek down that rickety boardwalk from our back porch.
In another decade or two this quaint sort of escape might grow a certain appeal, but right now I’m a child trapped in a cultural vacuum with little more than a bunch of adults and my Gameboy to save me from an all-enveloping scourge of ennui. But iPods haven’t yet caught on, my first cellphone is a faraway dream, and my family still finds value in lugging our clunky blue radio and a selection of CDs along with them on our family vacations. And amidst the smorgasbord of albums sits “Help!” by the Beatles, lying in portentous wait.
Released in 1965 and written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Help!” strikes a poignant middle ground between the psychedelic sounds and experimentation that would color their later music, and the more pop-driven sound of their earlier days. For a five year old, it’s not introspective enough to alienate, nor is it lascivious enough to give a kickball-playing kid the cooties.
But it’s only the album’s titular and opening song I need to hear before my love for the iconic band is forever cemented. By the end of the first play through, I’m hopelessly enthralled by my first ever earworm.
“How do I play that song again?” I ask.
“It’s that button,” my mom informs me, not yet realizing the gravity of this new knowledge she’s imparted. But by the song’s fifth play through, she begins to. By the tenth, the idea of moving onto the album’s second song hardly even enters into my thinking and a subtle hint of concern surfaces on my parents’ faces.
By the twentieth play, I’m instilled not only with an unceasing love for The Fab Four — and for music as a whole — but a lifelong habit of listening to new songs ad near nauseum each and every time I glean a new great.
When the opening notes sound, the song sends me circling the patterned quilt carpet that covers the living room from sofa to sofa. I trace the patterns with my tiny feet and watch the monotonous walls around me fill with color. Its lyrics speak to me in an unfamiliar way. I’d heard music before, but it had never elicited much of… anything. But on this fateful day, why exactly the words:
“When I was younger so much younger than today
I never needed anybody’s help in any way
But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured
Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors”
resonate with a five year old me is anyone’s best guess. But by the end of the day, I’m practically belting out the words:
“my independence seems to vanish in the haze!”
What these poetic musings might mean to a five year old is difficult to fathom. But all the same, the lyrics and fast-paced melody of the early Beatles song fill me with something I’ve never felt.
“Help me! Help me-oooo,” John, Paul and George sing as I continue erratically encircling the kitschy old kaleidoscope of pre-psychedelic fabric lain symmetrically across the hardwood floor.
Each time the song nears the same conclusion, I make an anticipatory dash back toward the radio and click the clackety plastic back button once more. And each time the song begins anew, I restart my cyclical journey with a Sisyphean, carpet-bound commitment.
I spend the entire afternoon circumnavigating the aged old moth magnet like a trigger happy protractor. Each time the song ends, it’s reborn like a phoenix from its static decrescendo with a bombastic intensity.
“(Help!) I need somebody
(Help!) Not just anybody
(Help!) You know I need someone
(Hee-elp!)”
It’s only once the summer sun begins setting and the CD’s completed its one millionth revolution confined to the same melody that my enthusiasm begins to ever-so-slightly wane.
My parents watch without interruption as my overflowing energy banks begin to gradually deplete. I’m three days of pent up boredom practically bursting at the seams, and The Beatles song sends it raining to the floor like a slow-rolling cannonade of confetti.