Is anyone else as fascinated as I am with The Curse of Oak Island on History Channel???!!
The first I ever heard of Oak Island was when I was a little girl. My dad had been a huge lover of all things history and had told of the island we might one day visit in our family travels. Growing up in our hometown of Thunder Bay we were pretty much situated by nothing but lakes and forests and sat close to midway between the east and west Coasts of Canada. My dad loved driving and family road-trips so we did a lot of exploring in his wanting to sharing all of Canada with us. Everywhere we went he took us to explore museums and forts so we could learn the history of our country which he loved so much. We did make it all the way to the west coast when I was eight years old, my sister was four and my brother thirteen, which couldn't have been an easy feat for my parents in keeping the three of us happy and entertained for an over three thousand kilometer drive (each way) in our lime-yellowish '73 Ford Crew Cab truck and tent trailer; how they survived us through the prairies is still beyond me. We never did make it, as a family, to the east coast before my dad died but I still hold hope of one day getting there, of seeing and exploring the beauty.
I'm not actually too sure of why we never took that trip east, maybe it was merely a timing thing. We had moved to Southern Ontario for a few years before thankfully coming back home to Thunder Bay, but in that time away my dad had taken a new position as a forestry safety consultant and he spent every week 'on the road', travelling from site to site; I guess it just must have become a chore to road-trip rather than the adventure it had always been for him before. In any case, we never did get to visit Oak Island and learn about the history that, even today, is still being discovered there. Still, it is a really special thing to be able to follow along with the program and to be able to actually see how things are happening, how the discoveries are actually being made.
We're fortunate to live in this age of technology - well, in respects such as these, anyhow - there is much about technology that I feel incredibly unfortunate about, but that, I might tackle in a future post. This post is about the good side and for me it means I can see-to-understand the methods being used in the search. Thanks to my parents own love of books and reading, I developed the same revere of the written word along with all of the gifts it offers. I was taught to dream through books I could immerse myself within, reading was how I learned that everything is possible. I have to admit though, that technical reading has always challenged me. I mean, it's not the escape that my brain naturally seems to want to take within a book and I could read one chapter on ground drilling set-up and bits and casings... maybe a thousand times over but I still would be likely to have pictured it in my mind all wrong simply because I don't have the knowledge of what the equipment really looks like or how it really works. That's just one more reason I love this show.
I've seen many comments and message boards that bag on the show for the lengthy and repeated recaps but I am grateful for the flashbacks because I don't feel like I get left behind if I didn't fully understand the first telling. It almost feels as though the questions I had from the first showing are answered when the next telling is told, maybe in just a slightly different wording. What really helps me is the visuals they offer, for my mind, a light dawns with pictured description. Maybe if I had actually been brave enough to ask questions in high school history class and been offered recaps, I might have actually passed the class! It was kind of horrible to do so horribly in history class when I was so fascinated by history in real life.
And then there came this show!
How I managed to even see an ad for the program is somewhat of a mystery since I record everything I ever watch, which truthfully, is generally only Hallmark movies since the Stargate franchise left the airways and I record just so I don't have to sit through the ads... yet somehow, the ad for The Curse of Oak Island premier found me just hours before its first-ever run time. I immediately set the dvr to record and have been hooked into the hopes and the angst, the theories and evidence, the determination and ingenuity and maybe most of all, I've been hooked into the true camaraderie that's clearly been found in the findings of the search.
Reality television is not something that generally interests me and I prefer, instead, to disappear into a make-believe world on the rare occasions I watch television. This is different reality, though... it's not based on celebrities looking for a new fit in the headlines and it's not about non-celebrities trying to become celebrities by turning sex tapes into careers..... it's about real, actual and tangible history.
And I love it!
And I'd love to know more.
I think about it as I watch each week and I wonder, how? How did the Rick and Marty Lagina get themselves from enthralled with reading a Reader's Digest story, all the way to actually becoming an integral part of that very story that captured them so many years ago? How did two young boys keep their dream, their vision of searching to find a long ago lost treasure on a small island far from their home, alive for fifty years? How did they make their place in this enveloping puzzle happen? How did they know what first steps they would need to take to physically claim their spot on the island... and how did they summon the courage those first steps would take? How did they research? How did they know what was reliable in what they did research for so many years? How did they not only trust in their thirst of the quest but how did they not allow themselves to be talked out of their childhood dream by naysayers? Or were there naysayers, at all? Maybe there weren't, maybe their lives have been filled with encouragers, maybe they were taught to believe.
So many hows but the whys, from what I have gathered while watching, are simply that of belief. Rick believes in the in the deeply rich history of the island and Marty believes in his big brother. And the absolute trust they have in one another is glaringly unwavering.
What brought me to begin watching the show was simply the mention of Oak Island and the memory I had of hearing the story from my dad but what has kept me coming back for every episode is the respect for teamwork and fellowship the men of Oak Island seem to share. The brothers, along with their friends, their teammates, really are invested as a single full-on unit. Even though their hopes, expectations and personal desires may differ within their own personal prospects, they trust in one another to move forward together and nothing spoke that fact greater to me than when on the unpopular end of a vote, Marty admitted defeat on a positive note, saying simply, "I will respectfully disagree, but I will wholeheartedly participate." And he did. They really are "one in, all in" and they all stand with that decision.
The sibling dynamics are also something I find to be pretty hysterically familiar. Sometimes I can't help but to giggle at the personality differences between Rick and Marty as they so closely relate to my own sister and I. I am a total dreamer and I truly believe that anything is possible if we just would let ourselves take the chance while my sister sees and focuses only on every single possible obstacle that could ever even remotely possibly occur. I think Rick must just be a much greater skilled charmer than I am in getting the adventure-bug caught. I just think... my sister thinks twice. Rick just thinks... Marty thinks twice, even for something as simple as an ocean dip to swim off the muck of a dirt-filled day; Marty asks, "How cold is this water?" And Rick answers, "Who cares??" It's pretty awesome!
The only one thing that I am not so keen on is the name of their clubhouse, The War Room. I get it, I really do... the word 'clubhouse' probably didn't make the final paring when compared with the heavy-hitting sound of 'war'. I'm just glad that that Rick and Marty, for their part, seem quite honestly to be on the good-guy side of searching and that they really do intend to "do good" with whatever treasures they may find in their incredible quest of bringing the lost once again into the light.
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