“Country Roooaaaads . . . Take Me Hooooooome . . .”

I bought a John Denver CD because it makes me feel brave. Really.

I have no real interest in music. In high school, I tried to up my coolness quotient by memorizing what bands played what songs. Cool people knew what bands played what songs. It didn’t work. Putting songs with bands was like trying to memorize baseball statistics. My brain knew I just didn’t care about music and refused to cooperate. I was doomed to uncoolness. (On the other hand, random Star Trek facts stuck effortlessly. Did you know the name of Vulcan’s moon is T’Kuht? Do you see why I needed to work on my coolness quotient?)

So when I got a job cooking for a Boy Scout camp in the Grand Tetons the summer after high school, I had no music to take with me. Fortunately, as a cool person, my co-cook had a battery-operated radio and lots of tapes (yes, this was before CDs). She offered to share air time with my music, but I didn’t have any. We listened to her music all day every day. She liked the 60s folk singers – John Denver, James Taylor, Jim Croce.

We cooked in dutch ovens without charcoal. Instead, we torched a six-foot pile of wood every single day to get enough embers to cook all the dutch ovens we filled for the scouts. (Starting more than 40 bonfires in one summer surely qualifies me as a Willden.) We bought biodegradable shampoo so we could wash our hair in the Snake River because that was our only running water. We slept next to the campfire every night, and spent every day outdoors under the peaks of the Grand Tetons.

On my weekends off, I joined the scouts in canoeing through the rapids on a 30 mile stretch of the Snake River. I canoed more than 200 miles that summer. I jumped off a cliff into the river just to prove that I could.

I was brave! Really, truly, physically brave for probably the first time in my life. (Well, except for that time I had to rappel down a cliff when I was 14 years old. I cried though, so that didn’t really count as brave.) John Denver sang in the background through all those adventures. I can’t link song titles and bands, but I link songs and emotions. I was brave that summer, even though I still wasn’t cool. (Did you know that Hikaru Sulu’s first name translates as “Shining One”? Did you even know Sulu’s first name?) I hear John Denver’s raspy voice singing about eagles and aspens, and I remember setting things on fire, living in a tent and jumping in a river.

So I bought his CD to remind myself that once upon a time I did things like that because right now, eating a PBJ at the park seems pretty adventurous.

What music makes you nostalgic?