Land of the Elements
by John Bachkosky (6/15/22)
The year was 2005, and us fifth graders had been assigned a project. I wish I could tell you what it was, but my friend John and I went completely off-script and made a fantasy board game because that’s what we wanted to do. We put significant eleven-year-old-quality effort into it, and our teacher liked it—or pitied us and our nerdy ways—enough to give us a B.
We liked our game so much that we decided, “hey, what if we wrote a story to go with it?” (This was before we knew about Dungeons & Dragons, which we surprisingly never really got into.) Thus, Land of the Elements was born. A board game complete with a companion story book, written and illustrated by two eleven year olds who worshiped video games like Legend of Zelda and Pokemon along with board/card games like Catan and Munchkin.
The brilliant authors of the original Land of the Elements.
Unfortunately, the board game and composition notebook we wrote in were lost to time. I do, surprisingly, remember most of what Land of the Elements was about. Not the board game so much—I couldn’t tell you how it was played—but that notebook is vivid in my head. The stick figure drawings that accompanied each chapter. The incredibly complicated love story between the two protagonists that only eleven year olds could so masterfully write. The clear this-is-totally-just-Legend-of-Zelda nature of it all. Our handwriting in blue pen on the front cover. Writing in it in our rooms—John’s painted green and orange for Pokemon LeafGreen and FireRed, mine painted dark blue and orange for the Denver Broncos (who John got me hooked on as I learned about football).
As part of a mural done in elementary school, each student got to do a “self portrait” on a ceramic tile that was then added to the overall project. Needless to say, John and I nailed ours.
We spent days on this project, carefully crafting our own fantasy world. One we could escape into together when we needed it most—on days where the real world was full of bullies we couldn’t stand up to, we traded it for one full of monsters we could slay. With the help of our imaginations, we turned our basements and backyards into temples and dungeons to explore, all while avoiding booby traps and solving puzzles.
When John passed away two years ago, one of the first things that came to my mind was that little book. I tore my room apart looking for it. I searched through boxes in the attic, despite the heat of summer. I scoured my childhood home for some sign of this silly little notebook that represented a core memory.
But it was gone.
Land of the Elements wasn’t the only project John and I worked on together. Our band, DeD Walrus (a brilliant name of John’s creation, inspired by Def Leppard and Led Zeppelin) played around Baltimore, Annapolis, and College Park, Maryland.
I have heard people say that as you get older, memories become faded and details become harder to recall. I like to think that those memories become polished. We are eager to remember the good times and forget the bad, which is why I think we look back fondly on things like our childhoods and people we have lost. I hope that some of that old composition notebook—with Land of the Elements written in a fifth grader’s handwriting on the front—finds its way into this next project. Speaking of which…
I am excited to reveal that my next novel, Land of the Elements, will be the fully realized version of this story started seventeen years ago. This one’s for John, who shared with me not only a name, but a brotherhood. We grew up together, fighting, laughing, exploring, growing, and, above all, supporting each other. Fritz (as he was known to me, even in his own house, given our shared first names) was always there for me, always down for an adventure, and always living his life his way. I’m sad he will never get to read this book, despite helping inspire it all those years ago. But I think he’d be excited that after all this time, Land of the Elements will once again be an escape for those looking for one, just as it was for us back in 2005.
JB6
