Off-Grid in Ethel
Me and three teenage boys in the wild, kind of
“Shhhhh . . .” 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.
[Read about Chris Turner-Neal's experience at a Shreveport animal and zipline park here.]
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 micro-generation in and of itself. To put it 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” course consists of eight hundred feet of ziplines and bridge-crossings. Once we were each securely strapped into our intricate body basket of sorts and attached to the hundreds-of-feet-long cable that would lead us through the forest, we climbed our way up to the first tower. About halfway up, Colby said out loud what most of us were thinking: “So if we fell off of this thing …” I responded: “Yeah, we’d just be hanging there, dangling like a rag doll.”
Since this was all my idea, I had been designated leader. Putting on a brave, somewhat bored face for my teenage audience, I gingerly—if not gracefully—loped my way across the first bridge. Our guides––there was one stationed at the landing pads ahead, behind, and with us––encouraged us with quips like “Oh no! Your strap’s come undone!” and “The line can smell your fear.”
When it came time to take the first leap, they promised “The first one is always the worst.” From my landing perch, I turned around to watch my partners take flight. Poor Luke, whose first experience with ziplines six years ago ended in tears and hysterics and a nine-year-old stuck dangling high above the ground, had no room for fear in his now-teenage body, with his friends watching no less. After a few minutes, he swallowed whatever residual panic lived inside him and jumped, long legs dangling all the way to the end. “How was it?” I asked. He took a deep breath and looked at me sheepishly, “Not bad. And they said that one was the worst, right?”
Our trust in that little line and our spiderweb of body straps more firmly established, we spent the next two hours gliding over the magnolias, oaks, and elms. It’s no Belize, but the natural flora and fauna of our Louisiana backwoods gain magnitude when viewed from above. Even against the scream of a zipper (or a fellow zipliner), in those few seconds of flight above it all, there is a snapshot of solitude above a landscape you never realized was quite so vast.
Meditating on all of this, I turned to listen in to my partners’ commentary on our next line: “They said this one will give you a wedgie if you stand up too soon,” said Luke. “So y’all should try that out.”
After completing our final flight over the Comite River, the longest one at eight hundred fifty feet, we hiked our way back through the woods. A few yards behind my crew, I watched them guffaw and giggle, recounting their favorite lines, the ones that freaked them out the most. They never once asked for their phones.
I did return them, though, for the Wildlife Refuge. The service was terrible anyway, and even I couldn’t resist the Instagram-ability of baby animals. And by baby animals, I mean baby kangaroos. And baby sloths. And a baby giraffe named T’challa.
Since 2012, Barn Hill Preserve has operated as the seven-acre home to over fifty species of exotic animals, and is best known for its “Encounter Tours,” which offer remarkable opportunities for hands-on interaction with some of the animals. After leading us on a tour of the grounds, introducing us to four beautiful African servals, Bandit and Bindi the Binturongs (bearish, catlike creatures that smell like buttered popcorn!), and Patches the sloth, our guide Marisa pointed to the dressing rooms. We were going swimming—with otters!
When I was small, I once totally ruined a family trip to SeaWorld because Mom wouldn’t let me take the otters home. Barn Hill is one of the few place in the United States to offer this unique experience, letting its Asian small-clawed otters out into the heated swimming pool for playtime, and allowing us guests to join them.
“We often have a hard time getting them out of the water,” said Marisa of the otters. “This really is their favorite time of the day.” By offering limited otter swims, trading out otter pairs, and laying down rules that keep guests from restraining the animals under any circumstances, Barn Hill works to ensure that it is as positive an experience for the otters as it is for the guests.
Before we even entered the water, Gidget and Jewels had already escaped their small cat carrier and were running in circles around the circumference of the pool. As we stepped in, Jewels came and nibbled at our toes before slinking away, fast as lightning, to the other side of the pool.
“Keep your shirts on,” Marisa advised the boys. “They love to get inside.” But of course, teenage boys can’t resist the chance to take off their shirts. They didn’t partake, but we all giggled as the two water pups squirmed into Marisa’s t-shirt, Gidget poking his head up through the neck.
Holding a pebble in my hand as Marisa directed, I squatted in the water. In seconds, the two were, one after the other, climbing over my shoulder to grab it, then under my arm and back over it, chasing one another, and every now and then using my body to hold themselves up with their tiny paws. They were remarkable.
I looked up from my awe to find Luke and his friends watching, sheepish grins and all, from the corner. “You guys get closer, see if they’ll play with you!” They all three looked back and forth at each other before slowly edging their way over. When Gidget swept Conner’s back, he let out a yelp and jumped away. “Are you guys scared of them?”
“They’re weird!” laughed Luke. But he bent down in the water and grabbed a rope toy, half-heartedly coaxing Jewels to come over. She did, hopped onto the pool steps, and grabbed the rope with both hands and her teeth and pulled, puppy tug-of-war style. Luke grinned.
Dried off and back in the car for a two-hour drive home, I asked the boys if it had been a good day. “Yep,” said Colby. “Yeah,” said Conner. “I had a great time,” said Luke. “My favorite part was the ziplining though,” he said. “We were going so fast.” Within thirty minutes, they all had their headphones in, re-engulfed in their worlds of Spotify and YouTube and Snapchat. But today, for a while at least, the wide, real, screenless world had something to offer, too.