A Heavy Burden
LL Bean Backpacks, 90s Track Suits, and the Endless Pursuit to Belong
LL Bean sold them in blue, red, green, and black. The coolest kids could pull off a red or green. The super-cool had owned their backpack for a good year or two and so their backpacks showed the wear-and-tear marks which declared, “I got mine before you got yours.” Fair enough. But there was no better time than the present to try and catch up. This particular “present” was December of 1992.
“Mom, I think an LL Bean backpack would be a good gift for Christmas.” Now, before you judge me as a remarkably odd middle schooler whose keenest December interest involved pouring over LL Bean’s Christmas Catalog, we need to be clear about my context: I lived my days on a cannibalistic, desert island called The Sixth Grade, and that backpack was my hunting knife. Procuring the Bean threads was about survival pure and simple.
On Christmas morning, I properly burst with joy about the new Nintendo games and indoor/outdoor basketball. I offered an appropriate nod-smile-and-thanks for the backpack. But as soon as everyone was sitting quietly in the post-Christmas-gift-exchange lull, I went immediately to my room to examine the choice threads from Maine.
It was more beautiful than I anticipated. I mean, I’d seen it many times on the backs of other students. But I had never touched it. And I certainly had never realized how exceptionally large the two main compartments were.
This was no small thing.
In those formative schooling years, it was standard fare to have five or six large, hardback textbooks - one for each subject. Most days, a student would need to carry most or all of those books to and from school. LL Bean alone made a bag large enough and strong enough to carry all of them at once.
Many years later our entire generation would visit physical therapists on multiple occasions complaining of neck and back pain. We’d blame things like long commutes and too many texts. But one cannot help but wonder what eight years living severely hunchbacked under fully-loaded Beans did to us.
Plus, for most of those eight years the only way to wear the backpack was over one shoulder. It was absolutely unheard of to wear a backpack evenly on both shoulders. Two-straps-at-a-time was stiff, formal and made you look like a third-grader. The moment two straps were used, you may as well have raised a large flag post above your head declaring, “Mock me! Bully me! Here I stand - your open target for all of your yet-unrecognized insecurities.”
Now, to be sure, from time to time the backpack would get so heavy and the walk to and from the bus stop so long that the unused, dangling left strap would becoming quite tempting.
You would peer back at it and wonder what it might feel like to have your six texts books weigh half as much upon your body.
You’d smell your armpit and wonder if the left strap-use might ease the sweat pouring through your “And-1” shirt.
At times, it was just too much.
You’d give in. It would happen on those occasions when you sensed nobody could possibly be looking. Then and only then, you would reach for the left strap. You would pull the left strap over your left hand, up your left arm, and then let it fall securely upon the left shoulder, and every muscle in your body joined in a chorus of profound gratitude.
Even so, you did let the chorus sing too long.
It was a badge of honor to have a backpack where the left strap was still “like new” from lack of use while the right strap was pummeled thin and tired from hoisting the burden of cool for years on end. A few minutes of two-strap use was the max lest one risk unalterably softening the left strap.
I arrived back to school after winter break, and I noticed quite a few brand new LL Bean backpacks. It turned out every other kid in the 6th grade who was on the social ‘outs’ had quietly placed “LL Bean backpack” on their Christmas and Hanukkah lists. And apparently LL Bean’s Maine headquarters had the bandwidth to oblige the sweeping phenomenon.
Initially, this was a great relief.
I had not been left behind! My books were securely carried in acceptable fabrics, and my right shoulder rightly adorned with acceptable cushioning.
Relief soon morphed into that wonderful sense of safety-and-belonging which is afforded to people who know they are integrally part of a tribe, a family, a movement. Sure, there were minor variations based on how long one had owned their bag and what color they had, but on the whole there really was nobody “in” and nobody “out.” Our collective unconscious had found a way to join together as one: equally burdened, equally bent, equally cool.
I speak the truth when I say that what I witnessed unfolding on the playground of a southwestern Ohio public middle school in the winter of 1993 was nothing short of a genuine expression of the often-sought and rarely-achieved realm of “we.”
LL Bean for president?
Then, very quickly and without warning, the old anxiety returned. I could feel in my bones the crack in our commune.
I scanned the playground. Red, green, blue, and mainly black bags littered the ground as kids ran free on the recess grounds. No signs of a new fad on the bag front. From whence, then, came this familiar worry?!
And then I heard a sound from the basketball court. It was a swishing sound, but louder than a basketball going through a net. More like the sound when wind catches a tent at the beach or a large, empty trash bag goes tumbling down the middle of a road. And the sound was running.
“Swish, swish, swish!”
I turned around, and there it sailed. Caleb Peters was wearing a Nike windbreaker track suit, the same kind that Michael Jordan and the Dream Team had worn in Barcelona 92. It was billowing, it was baggy, and it appeared to make Caleb float through the other kids as he effortlessly made his way to the basketball hoop for a lay-up.
I’d seen MC Hammer once or twice on TV, but to see an approximation of those silk sails a mere 20 feet from me was breathtaking.
It was a smooth lay-up, too. Or maybe it wasn’t. Truth is, I don’t remember.
But that’s the point.
When you wore a windbreaker track suit, everything looked smooth. Good basketball looked smooth. Bad basketball looked smooth. Taking spelling tests looked smooth. Wearing LL Bean backpacks looked smooth.
Come to think of it, it became readily apparently just how pedestrian the LL Bean backpack looked without wearing it on a windbreaker track suit. I berated myself endlessly for overlooking this plainly obvious fact.
A whole year until the next Christmas list!
I could feel myself alone on the island, and my single knife had just been swallowed by an enormous cool wave I never saw coming.
A few weeks later the entire inner circle of cool had windbreaker track suits. It is hard to underestimate how disheartening this was. How anxiety-inducing this was. And how desperately I now needed to find an outfit that made me sound like a bag thrown to and fro by the whims of the wind.