ZIPLINES WITH GEN Z
Off- Grid in Ethel
ME AND THREE TEENAGE BOYS IN THE WILD, KIND OF Story and photos by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot
“S
hhhhh . . .” was the text I sent my teenage brother late on a recent Friday night. Staying at my parents’ home in Vidrine, I could hear one exaggerated outburst after another from across the hall––“Oh my GOSH did you SEE that?”––each followed by an almost indecipherable flow of syllables delivered at warp speed and volumes ranging between seventy decibels and one hundred. The last of us still living at my parents’ house, Luke now usually enjoys the privilege of having the entire second floor to himself, with the freedom to converse (i.e. shout) with his friends on PlayStation all the live long night. Luke was the reason I had come to town: he and I had a date the next day to visit the Magnolia Ridge Adventure Park, which opened last October in Ethel, Louisiana. Touted as the “largest zipline course in South Louisiana,” Magnolia Ridge is the brainchild of John “Gabe” Ligon, owner of the town’s nearby wildlife sanctuary Barn Hill Preserve, which we’d also be visiting on our excursion to Ethel. These days, it’s rare that Luke and I get to spend much time together apart from bustling family functions. Ten years his senior, I’m still at times surprised to find him almost a foot taller than me, with junior varsity football player muscles and baby-fat-less cheekbones to kill. I thought, what better way to reconnect than by putting us both outside of our comfort zones a bit? Perhaps a couple hundred feet above the ground? Or in the presence of wild animals? At age fourteen (almost fifteen) Luke is the youngest of my parents’ five children and has always been a bit of an enigma to the rest of us. Combine unapologetic self-confidence with high levels of intelligence, a chunk of youngest-child syndrome, then add in puberty, and you’ve got a character of a kid. But perhaps the most significant defining factor separating Luke from the rest of us is his relationship with media. I, being born in the second half of the 1990s, landed right on the generational cusp of millennial and Gen Z. It’s an interesting place to fall, a sort of microgeneration in and of itself. To put it 48
J A N 2 1 // C O U N T R Y R O A D S M A G . C O M
very very simply: we were among the first teenagers to own iPhones, the last to use MySpace. Luke, born in 2006, was already taking selfies on Mom’s phone when he was four. He was part of the “Do you have games on your phone?” crowd and has discovered most everything he understands about the world around him, including his social interactions, via screen. In fact, if I hadn’t torn him away, Luke and his friends would be spending that Saturday, too, in front of their respective screens, shouting at each other through the world of Call of Duty. “It’s the norm for us,” he said. “We ask, ‘You gonna get on today?’ and that’s where we talk.” Given the choice to go on a family vacation or to stay home and hang out with his friends via video games, Luke’s fancy gamer chair tends to win. Over the summer, we all borrowed a family-friend’s party barge at Toledo Bend. Faced with a gorgeous sunset over glimmering waters, his face was glued to Snapchat. I can hardly call this particular behavior a generational thing. Up until the nineties, teenagers hid in their rooms hoarding the landline for hours. I myself once spent a summer upstairs glued to our desktop, engaged in the dramas of AOL Instant Messenger. And the draw of interactive video games is nothing new—teenagers want to be where their friends are. What’s changed is the everywhere-ness, the portability, of screens today, combined with the increased access to, well, everything— information, entertainment, friends— all the time. It’s so easy to choose the screen over what is around you; it holds so much, after all. Which is why, on our little excursion into the East Feliciana forests, I decided to let Luke bring his friends, Colby and Conner. It’s also why the first thing I did upon our arrival to Magnolia Ridge was ask for their phones (“You don’t want these to fall out of your pocket!”). Less an exercise in prosthelytizing on the virtues of “fresh air” and “experience” than a social experiment, I wanted to see if three-dimensional soaring above the trees would, well, be enough for them. Was there still room in the Gen Z algorithm for good old-fashioned adrenaline? Magnolia Ridge’s “High Elements”
