Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Perfect Form and Grace

On Sunday night, Monday and Monday night there came a blizzard dropping a little more than a foot of snow, with high winds and consequent drifts here and there--near window height at the back of the house. I had to go out twice with the snow blower, once on Monday and again this morning, to make paths around the house, the barn, and the old store. This afternoon, with the temperature in the low 20s, it was ideal for cross-country skiing; so off I went for a half hour or so, on the same walking paths I take that start with the trail going back from the house to the orchard. One of the advantages of this location is the ease of walking or skiing, just out the door and into the woods.

My father, who died two years ago aged ninety-four, was a skier, a downhill skier. He had learned to ski at Cornell, in college, and did not stop until he was in his late fifties; he continued to play tennis up to his very last few years. As a young married business man, he took his vacations in winter; my mother and I accompanied him to various ski resorts. His favorites were the one at Stowe, Vermont, and another in Quebec, now no longer in operation, called Jasper-in-Quebec. He was, as my mother was fond of repeating, an "expert" skier. He taught us both to ski.

I learned from my mother--my father did not speak about this sort of thing--that an expert skier was not the one who could go the fastest down the hill, the one who could win the slalom or downhill races. The downhill racers jerked themselves around to catch the steepest parts of the slope and did not bother to keep their skis together. No, the expert was the one who could ski the trails with grace and skill, a ballet dancer on skis, always in control of the most difficult terrain, making the hard look easy. He had, as my mother would often say, perfect form.

Perfect form, then, was something for a boy to strive for. As I grew to be a better skier, I tried to shape myself in his form, skiing down the trails. We would go together, sometimes he in the lead, sometimes me. Eventually we skied the expert trails together. I was able to navigate them, but he remained well ahead of me on the grace and form front, try as I might to carve the turns and hold myself as he did.

I realize, now, that I could never have achieved his perfect form merely by trying to shape my body like his, whether skiing or playing tennis (another sport where "form" was evident). I would have gotten closer if I'd felt about skiing (or tennis) as he did; but I was far too young to have had those feelings and to have understood their reasons and histories. Occasionally as a boy I overheard him talking with other adults about the best skiing in the world and where it might be found. On these occasions when it was his turn he would speak about skiing in the French (or was it the Swiss?) Alps, on furlough while in the US Army during the Second World War. He and a few of his army buddies used to spend all morning climbing up a remote mountain glacier. I suppose they must have had their rifles as well; my father was a crack shot, a rifle instructor. Then they would spend an hour gliding down through the fresh fallen snow. There was nothing in the United States like that alpine touring, as it was called. Well, there was one place--Tuckerman Ravine. It was on one of the faces of Mount Washington, in New Hampshire. You had to walk all the way to the top. My father had skied there after the War, but it wasn't the same. The only danger there was from avalanches. Usually the others were silent for a little while after he got done talking about that. I heard his story more than once. I understood what he said but not what it meant to him.

When my father skied, his outward form embodied the motions of his inner ecstasy, circling over the snow with the rush of wind at his face while his two skis moved as one, balanced and "centered over his skis," as the saying goes, curving over the bumps and bending into turns, arcing his improvised path down the steep mountain trails, occasionally--very occasionally--having to compensate for an instant when an icy patch would speed him up or a wrong decision about a mogul would force him into a new direction, a new rhythm. He did not talk to me about it. No nine-year-old boy would have understood why he would choose to spend six or seven hours a day on a mountain, repeatedly going up on the chair lift and then skiing down, while soldiers only ten years older than I was were killing one another in Korea, and while nuclear warheads were being armed and aimed for so-called defense. He did not speculate aloud on which world, the mountainous world of skiing or the dangerous world of mutually assured destruction, was the least absurd, or which was the most human.

A dozen years later when I started graduate school in Minnesota I thought to go skiing there, but there are no ski mountains near Minneapolis and St. Paul. The  only skiing available was cross country skiing, something I'd never done. I tried it a couple of times at nearby ski resorts built for the purpose, trails with lots of skiers walking themselves around. Pushing and gliding along the crowded trails on rented skis was easy enough--all too easy; it wasn't challenging and after a while it became tedious. I stopped. 

But six years later, PhD in hand, living in the town of Reading, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, and teaching at Tufts University, I longed to ski again. I was an adult with a full-time job; by then I had a little history and ski memories. I recalled the thrill of making the early-morning "milk run" after a night that had dropped snow as fine as powder, the first tracks in the new snow.

My house in Reading was not far from the town forest, a tract of land owned by the town that had been set aside for conservation and light recreation. Trails for walking; no snowmobiles allowed. I bought a pair of cross country skis and waited for the first snowfall, when every trail would be a milk run. For the two years I lived in Reading I skied there and also in the Audubon bird sanctuary, not far away. Instinctively I knew that was my kind of skiing, out in the natural world, away from crowded ski resorts with their groomed trails. 

Here on this island off the Maine coast, where for thirty years I have spent most summers and some winters, the trails offer the same possibility. It is not a dangerous mountain climb and drop during wartime, but it is what I am able to do here, right out the door. And so today, only a few hours ago, less than a half mile from my house, skiing contentedly where the trail slopes gently down, passing by deer tracks in the snow, hearing the dee-dee-dee of a chickadee in a spruce tree, and bending to avoid its snow-laden boughs, I was put in mind once more of my father, and perfect form, and grace.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Digging Beets near Winter Solstice

These are the quiet days approaching the Winter Solstice, when the earth and activity on it seems to slow down, waiting for the darkest time of the year. Here on an island, in a far northern latitude, the darkness lasts longer, and can almost be felt. The foot of snow that fell ten days ago was washed away by a tropical storm yesterday and the day before, with winds to 60 mph and nearly 6" of rainfall, accompanied by temperatures in the 50s which unfroze the ground. Today when the sun came out I lifted the row covers and saw the Red Sails lettuce had survived the month's early freeze and then the snow, so I harvested much of what was left of it. I looked over at the chard leaves and the beet greens, still filled with rich color, and decided to harvest the remaining beets--all of the Bull's Blood variety. 

Beets aren't something grown here very often, so I'm not experienced in how late they may remain viable; but seven beets ranging in size from spinning tops to a couple the size of baseballs came out of the ground without a struggle and were washed and their tops taken off except for an inch or so, then put into the refrigerator for storage. I will boil a few tomorrow or the next day and see how they taste. Are they old and tough? Do they have white rings in the interior? Did their taste deteriorate completely in the freeze? The little research I've been able to do on whether beets survive freezing is inconclusive. Frost and light freezes, yes; but after the snow we had a hard freeze for a couple of nights with the temperature down to about ten degrees fahrenheit at the lowest. Tomorrow I'll look more closely at the chard and if it's not too old and tough, take a few leaves to add to the supper. Unlike human beings, these remaining "half hardy" garden plants--the beets, chard, cabbage, parsley, lettuce--do not die all at once. There is no stopping of a beating heart, no precise marking of time, as of a solstice; as the deepening cold enters them, night after night, they fade, they fail, they curl, they draw inward, until they will no longer revive in the warmth of the next morning's sun.

All December thus far, I have been reading drafts of doctoral dissertations submitted to me by my graduate student advisees. I expect to be reading them for another couple of weeks, at least. These book-length works are the result of each student's three years of course work in our PhD program in ethnomusicology, plus several years of original research and writing on a topic of the student's own choosing. Although they have been among the most successful scholars in their fields, writing a work of this nature and length is not easy no matter how well one is equipped; and my responding to them with comments and suggestions for revision takes a good deal of thought and time. But if there is any season that is most favorable for harvesting doctoral dissertations, it is the winter solstice, when everything seems to be coming toward a point of rest, until the earth tilts forward on her axis and the days start to lengthen once more, promising the new year.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Reminder of seasons past

The weather forecast for tomorrow predicts about three to five inches of snow--the first snow of the season. As it's gone below freezing every night for a week or so, I've been harvesting the lettuce under the agribon row cover during the day when the temps warm to around forty degrees and the frozen water melts from the leaves. The Red Sails variety isn't supposed to be this hardy, but it's holding up fine. The arugula is also hardy enough for harvest and very tasty. I've also been getting wood up onto the porch and have about 3/4 cord up there now, waiting for times when it won't be easy to get it off the woodpile. Each year I say it would be nice to build a woodshed. 

As a reminder of seasons past I will post a few pictures that I shot last spring and summer of some more wildflowers on the trails behind the house. On June 8 I showed the white bunchberry flowers in  bloom; by July 23 the flowers had turned to red berries, waiting to dry and turn a more purplish crimson for the birds to eat. The bunchberry is a dwarf dogwood. They inhabit only a few places along the trail-edge, but they are very showy and impossible to miss in season. I've never seen a bird eat one of the berries, but by this time of the year they are gone.

One of the interesting wildflowers hereabouts is the jack-in-the-pulpit, which comes out of the soil in early spring. It appears in the lowground behind the house where it is usually damp, and also on the trail sides in the deep shade where it is dry. I had to wait until just the right moment for a streak of sunlight to strike this one. Some think that the striped spathe (pulpit) is a trap for insects, but although insects crawl in, they also crawl out. By late July, the spathe has fallen off, exposing globed, green, shining berries. In the picture to the right you can see the topmost berry turning red. In September they all are red. I'd meant to take another photo showing this, but did not get around to doing so. It is also called Indian turnip because Native Americans used the corms (roots) for food. Of the taste, the great 19th century naturalist Anna Botsford Comstock wrote: "I think all children test the corm as a food for curiosity, and retire from the field with a new respect for the stoicism of the Indian when enduring torture; but this is an undeserved tribute. When raw, these corms are peppery because they are filled with minute, needle-like crystals which, however, soften with boiling, and the Indians boiled them before eating them."