“Altius”

“Higher and Higher”  Jackie Wilson may have the theme song for the Winter Olympics.  You have to get higher to get the snow necessary for most of the events, especially in Sochi, which is actually a subtropical city on the Black Sea and one of warmest places the Winter Games have been held.  Luckily, the Caucasus Mountains are nearby and fill the bill for snowfall.  When the competitors and spectators come off the slopes, they can stroll the palm tree-lined streets of the city!

Just getting altitude travelling to the venues isn’t the real story of winter sports, though.  If you’ve been to the Rockies and spent much time there, you know what it’s like.  Omaha, for instance, is about 1,200 feet above sea level in most places.  My favorite place to ski, Keystone in Dillon, Colorado, is 12,408 feet at the summit.  Being there literally takes your breath away!

Sochi, Russia?  The resort hosting the games is Krasnaya Polyana, about an hour from the city.  The interesting aspect of elevation here is that the base is along the Mzymta River and the lifts start at just 1,840 ft.  The climb is over a mile to the top at 7,610 ft.  That’s about the altitude of the city of Jackson, Wyoming.  As you’ve seen on TV, no doubt, most of the snow on the courses has come from 450 snow making machines, but they’ve actually been storing snow since last winter just to be sure they had enough!!  So it’s going to be cold and there’s plenty of snow even if the venue isn’t above the clouds as much as some other places.  To the competitors, that’s not the elevation they’re after anyway.

Women will be ski jumping competitively for the first time at this Olympics.  The IOC finally figured out that “the fairer sex” is also pretty damned tough.  The ladies will hit the edge of the jump like most jumpers at approximately 60 mph, glide with their skis in the classic “V” shape about 10-15 feet above the snow, and travel well over 300 feet down the slope before landing.  The men’s record is over 800 feet!  Remember the “Citius” part of the slogan?  All of this, from start to finish, only takes a little over ten seconds!

Ski jumping is the most obvious aspect of “Higher” at the Winter Olympics, but remember that the other skiers are starting well up the mountain and traveling over a mile to get to the end of their respective events.  Some of these are sort of like dropping down an elevator shaft….

It takes elevation in some of the other sports, too.  When you’re watching the guilty pleasure that is ice dancing, take a look at how tall that guy is in the pairs.  The young lady he hoists to arm’s length over his head is going to be a good eight feet off the ice when he drops (oops, poor word choice)…throws (that’s better??) her back onto her feet for their next maneuver.  When he’s dizzily spinning around, holding her hands and raising her parallel to the ice, she’s going to be better than three feet up and really moving before she finds a skate again.  Check the jumps against the height of the side paneling.  Those skaters are going to leap a good four feet into the air to do their spins and splits and then come down on one blade to glide backwards before leaping again off that one foot.  Hurdles, anyone?

Those really fancy skiers and boarders doing flips and turns will be getting rad air, dude!  Thirty, forty feet in the air coming off of the lips of those freestyle courses or half pipes…no wonder most of those men and women have more pins and screws than my lawn mower.  I usually try NOT to go end-over-end when I’m skiing!

Yep.  At the Winter Olympics, “getting high in the mountains” isn’t legislated.  It’s effort and skill and daring and practice and practice and practice….  Don’t try this at home.

“Citius”

“Faster! Faster!”

I kept telling myself that the faster I could go down the slope, the better I could control my turns and carve a clean line in the snow.  Over and over I tried to get myself positioned to ride the skis in an exhilarating rush to the bottom.  Over and over I was “ass over appetite” upside down, sliding on my back with my skis in the air before finally stopping and picking myself up out of the snow.  Thighs burning.  Out of breath from exertion.

My grandfather bought me a pair of skis and poles for my thirteenth birthday in December of 1963.  The cable bindings held my laced-up leather boots snuggly to the skis much like cross country skis.  From our set of Funk and Wagnall encyclopedias I learned about crow-footing and side-edge climbing, the basic “snow plow” or “wedge” for controlling speed, parallel skiing and turning.  Luckily for me, it snowed quite often that winter, and no one chased me off the golf course when I was teaching myself these techniques.  Every ignominious slide down meant a long trek back up the hill.  The nearest slope with a ski lift was hundreds of miles away and way out of my budget.

I was out of college, married, and had kids before I ever tried skiing on a mountain.  The self-instruction from so many years ago paid off, though, and the group lesson I took was simply a refresher.  It wasn’t long before I was “whizzing” down those green slopes at Winter Park.  I love to ski.  I think about it almost every day no matter what the season.

Every time the Winter Olympics return to television, I try to watch as much of the ski competitions as possible.  When I combine my own efforts on the slopes with my imagination, I am awed by the abilities of those world-class athletes.  My own abilities eventually enabled me to ski Blues (Intermediate) slopes and some moguls with fair success, and I attempted a few Blacks (Advanced) in my younger years.  I was even able to get to the point that I was going faster and faster and zipping down the slopes with relative ease.  My most recent trip, just before my 63^rd birthday, was twenty-one years after the last one.  I took it easy, believe me.

Citius…this is the first word in the slogan of the Modern Olympics.  It means “faster” in Latin.  For winter athletes this is more than a catch phrase.  Speed is generally the key element in most of the sports (I have no idea what the deal is with curling.).  When you’re watching the Olympics over the next couple of weeks, try to understand the element of speed.

Lindsey Vonn won’t be competing this year because of injury.  She was the USA’s best hope for gold in Women’s Downhill.  She fell.  More than once.  If you’ve ever skied, you’ve fallen down.  What’s the big deal?  Think about this.  The average speed for Alpine racing is around 80 mph.  The average gradient is about 28%.  That’s not far off vertical!  Imagine going 80 mph down the stairs of the Washington Monument…on skis…on icy snow…at 14,000 ft…in the wind…with the air temperature at 20°F or less…then falling down.  How long would it take you to stop?  Speed skiers (a variation on the sport) typically go 125 mph or more (the record is 156 mph—faster than a freefalling skydiver).  The average takeoff speed for a 737 is about 155 mph.

Skiing is just one of the sports in the Winter Olympics, of course, but speed is a part of almost all of them.  Biathletes have to cross country ski as fast as they can and then stop four times to fire a rifle.  Speed skaters go in circles and turn so sharply that those thin blades are carving turns while the skaters’ bodies are almost parallel to the ice.  Bobsled, luge, and skeleton sliders are experiencing the g-forces faced by pilots and astronauts.  Try this one: when you’re watching the ice dancing (come on, you know you do), get up and do three spins across the room from one corner to the other.  When you can do that in a straight line, speed it up, tighten the spins, and after the third one, leap into the air and come down on one foot.  Now imagine doing that on a skate.  To music.  At 20 mph.

Maybe we’d better join Bob Costas and stick with curling because, “you should be able to drink a beer while you’re competing for a gold medal.”  That’s more my speed. 

“Road Trip: Pt. III”

The trip from Athens, GA, to that rainy highway median in east Tennessee was a very long day.  Since I was on my own time and the weather was still good for January in 1972, I decided to do a bit of exploring.  I checked my map—paper then, of course—and headed to the northeast from Athens to Rabun County.  I had read and been a fan of Eliot Wigginton’s Foxfire books.  He was a high school English teacher at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School.  In order to get his students writing, he had them collect oral stories from their relatives and neighbors in the hills and hollows of the Appalachian Mountains where they lived.  This classroom project eventually grew into a dozen books of stories and other pieces—ghost stories, traditional songs, instructions for making all sorts of things.  Great reading.

The school is in the mountains up a winding highway.  I got a ride at some point to within a few miles of it and started walking.  Not many vehicles passed.  No one stopped.  I’d had pretty good luck up to that point, and it was probably mid-morning when I caught sight of the school buildings.  For some reason I didn’t do more than just stand there and look at them and think about the first few volumes I had read.  At the time I think only a couple had been published.  I hiked on up the road.

An hour or so later I crested the rounded top of the mountain and started down.  The sun was west of me then but still high in the sky, and I could see gathering clouds.  I knew I needed to get farther north and west, always west.  No one stopped for quite a while.

Eventually I got the classic hitchhiker’s ride.  A beat up old two-ton truck pulled up in front of me.  If it had ever had paint, it was all simply rust then.  The tires looked like ring baloney skins.  The sideboards were combinations of one-by-sixes and plywood and held a miscellaneous load of five or six kids—two human, the rest goats—a few bales of moldy hay, various pieces of machinery I don’t recall too well, and a dog of dubious heritage that wasn’t sure about me, either. 

The driver was an old woman right out of a Grant Wood painting, bonnet included.  Four more children of various ages occupied the bench seat in the cab; not one looked to be older than about ten, and one held an infant in her arms.  Granny smiled an almost toothless smile and asked me where I was headed.  I explained I was eventually bound for Missouri but would appreciate any help in that direction.  She spit a black stream of tobacco juice over the top of the broken side mirror and told me she’d get me another forty miles or so.  After thanking her profusely, I threw my pack on and jumped in back with the kids.

The dog eventually warmed up to me.  I’ve always had a way with canines.  The goats were tied to the back on short ropes.  The two children, a boy and a girl maybe six years old, were silent in their shyness until I rummaged through my pack for my lunch and gave them a Hershey bar to share.  They quickly devoured the chocolate while I went through a package of peanut butter crackers and an apple.  We watched one another for a while, and then I settled down to take in the scenery.  It was pleasant enough despite the bleating of the goats and the bumpy, springless ride.  I’d put up enough hay and spent enough time in barns that the smells didn’t bother me.  The Smokeys and Appalachians are beautiful.  Much different from the Rockies—they seem older, more settled and maybe more secretive.  I recalled the folktales from the Foxfire books I had read, and remembered that some of my ancestors lived for a time in these hills up in the Carolinas.  Cemeteries back there are full of stones with COX chiseled in the marble.  I wondered who these folk were.

It was a short ride, but it got me down the mountain and into Tennessee.  Since leaving the campus at the University of Georgia in the morning, by the middle of that afternoon I felt as if I had traveled back in time and returned.  I still had miles to go before I could sleep.  The clouds were gathering.

“Hurt”

I just finished reading Johnny Cash, Robert Hilburn’s biography of The Man in Black.  For anyone who is a music fan, I highly recommend this, and I mean fans of any American music genre because Cash’s influence and legacy extends in all directions.  He embraced music, lyrics in particular, that spoke to him, and he recorded the writing of singer/songwriters from old time gospel and blues to U2 and Nine Inch Nails.

His last recordings were done with Rick Rubin, a real surprise to everyone in the industry since Rubin was associated more with rock artists, but they became close friends and Rubin was an incredible advocate for Cash’s final work.  When they were recording the album “The Man Comes Around” in what is known as the American Recordings collection, Rubin wanted to do a music video of Cash’s version of the song “Hurt,” by Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor.  Mark Romanek, who had done videos for the likes of NIN, Michael Jackson, and David Bowie, was all but begging to make it.  It turned out to be what most in the industry consider the best music video ever produced.  I intend to attach a YouTube link to this so you can see and hear the song.

Cash didn’t change much with Reznor’s lyrics, just a word or two.  What is most different is that his version becomes much more universal in its description of a person in great pain and suffering from personal loss.  Reznor had written about the agony of drug use and abuse—this was shortly after Kurt Cobain OD’d—and Cash had lost several family members and close friends simply to age.  When Cash recorded the song, he and June both new their days were numbered.  As I read Hilburn’s account of the recording sessions and the descriptions of what was going on in John’s and June’s lives, and then went back to think about Reznor’s lyrics, I thought about how the song reflects the pain and hurt I often saw sitting in front of me in my classrooms.

In my four decades as a teacher I dealt with losses of several students and colleagues and their family members.  Teachers are human beings.  They have feelings like everyone else, but like many professionals, when the alarm clock goes off on a school day, they suit up, put on a smile, and do their best for their students.  Many times no one knows they’re ill—physically or mentally—or that they’re grieving or just worried, sometimes frantically.  I’ve seen a colleague I knew was in her own tremendous emotional pain drop everything to help a student deal with breaking up with her boyfriend, offering a consoling shoulder and calming advice.  Then I took a box of tissues to my friend and closed the door on her classroom so she could pull herself together in the five minutes left before the next class.

The most difficult part of a teacher’s day, however, is managing the emotional rollercoasters of all of the students she faces.  Not just one carnival ride.  Usually twenty or thirty.  In each class.  Every day.  Teachers prepare academic lessons and plan means for organizing and controlling the learning environment, but being prepared to deal with the trauma students face on a daily basis is probably the single most superhuman feat educators perform.  Every one of those students, from the most likely to be depressed to the one who seems bubble-headed and unaffected by everything, all go through the same kinds of adolescent nightmares.

Think back.   Remember the pain of broken promises and relationships?  The skin eruption twenty minutes before you went out with your biggest crush?  An embarrassing faux pas in the hallway or cafeteria?  Your perceived ineptitude at one thing or another…that was laughingly pointed out by the class bully?  Or maybe the crushing solitude that made you consider the world a better place without you?  How about the physical abuse in some relationships?  I’ve seen sixteen year-old girls in pancaked makeup and long sleeves who were hiding the bruises from their boyfriends.  And I’ve spoken with students about the abuse they’ve received from their parents or family “friends.”  Over and over they come to class, while dealing with illness and death in their families.

I can’t even list all of the possibilities or the examples from my career because I saw them in those seats.  They were seventh graders, freshmen, seniors, college sophomores, even graduate students.  We teach them all.  We try to reach them all and then help them learn whatever subject we’re responsible for delivering.  And these days get them through the state tests.

Watch the video.  Listen to the song.  Watch Johnny.  He would lose June just a few months later.  When he did this shoot, his eyesight was so poor that they had to tell him where the camera was, and the vocals are spliced together bits and pieces of multiple recording sessions because his asthma wouldn’t let him finish a phrase.  He couldn’t walk, either, except to be helped into a wheelchair.  He hurt, but he was Johnny Cash.  He was human, and he got up every time and went on with living.  Remember, too, that he didn’t do it alone.  No one can.

“Hurt”  http://youtu.be/3aF9AJm0RFc

“Road Trip—Pt. II”

My road trip to Georgia in January of 1972 provided me with some very interesting experiences, particularly since I hitchhiked home.  Despite the fact that I was actually only gone from Shenandoah for about a week, I felt like I’d had a graduate course in sociology by the time I got home.

After leaving Millen and the girl with whom I thought I’d get to spend more than twenty minutes, I headed for Athens and the University of Georgia.  I was a college graduate with a degree in English.  UGA had and still does have a noted School of Journalism.  I thought I’d go see what the place was like.

It was a beautiful day as I headed north for Athens, and I enjoyed my time on the road.  I don’t remember any of the rides I had that day, but I evidently didn’t wait long for anyone because I was on campus by lunchtime.  First thing I did was pick up a map of campus and locate the J-School, which just happened to have a cafeteria.

I have a soft spot for the state of Georgia.  The history of the state is interesting for many reasons.  During my junior year in high school I won an essay contest and a trip to Washington, D.C.  The headquarters hotel where we stayed, all 900 of us soon-to-be high school seniors from 27 different states, presented me with the largest gathering of my peers I had ever encountered.  That’s where I had met my friend from Millen, and it was the first time that I had a firsthand encounter with a real “Georgia Peach.”  I can still hear her, and any Southern accent warms the cockles of my heart.

One of the things about the people there is that they’re very friendly.  I’ve never felt badly that the girl only gave me a few minutes to talk after I’d come all that way to see her.  We wrote one another and talked on the phone for almost five years before that trip!  But…she was behind me now, and I was on campus, standing in line at the cafeteria.  A couple of students in line with me immediately struck up a conversation when they saw my pack, and they were really interested when I told them where I was from and what I was doing there.

The three of us had lunch together and continued our acquaintance.  Although they were both still undergrads, they were seniors; the boy was an English major, and his girlfriend was in journalism.  When lunch was over, they offered me a place to stay if I wanted.  They shared a house with some friends, and I was welcome to stick around.  I think it might even have been Thursday or Friday with a weekend ahead.

It turned out that the “house” they shared was an antebellum mansion about five blocks from campus.  Four…FOUR…stories AND a full attic.  I’m not sure I ever saw all the rooms.  Or met everyone who was living there.  I remember somewhere around 18 or 20 people at one point, but I have no idea if they were actual residents of the house or, like me, passing through.

One of the reasons the place was so popular became apparent the third night I was there.  It was a terrific house, well furnished; they had lots of food; I never needed anything they didn’t have.  I’d spent a couple of days exploring the campus and just wandering around Athens.  One guy loaned me his fairly new car to make a trip to the countryside to look around.  The last night before I planned to head back to Missouri there was to be a party.  A couple of hours before dark—start time—I asked one of the girls if I could help with anything to get ready for the party.  You know, carry a keg, set up chairs, and she said, “You’re from farm country, right?”  Strange question, but, yeah.  I’d even worked two summers for a nursery.  She grinned and beckoned me to follow.

I had stood across the street and looked at the house at some point.  You had to get far enough back from it to see to the top of the place.  That’s when I counted floors and realized that the top wasn’t just the roof peak but a full-on attic with even its own porch.  My friend led me up several flights of stairs, and I felt as if I was following Alice back up out of the rabbit hole.

Even in January it’s usually humid in Georgia.  When I’m climbing stairs…a lot of stairs…I tend to sweat, but I realized that the higher up we got, the warmer and wetter the air became.  It also started to smell familiar.  Kind of like some of the out-of-the-way ditches around my hometown, or the laundry room at my college some nights.

Finally we ran out of stairs.  She gave me a curious look and opened a set of double doors (to the attic, remember) and then parted a curtain of clear plastic to reveal about a half acre of lush, green, fertilized, automatically misted, blue lighted rows of marijuana.  Seems a couple of the guys in the house were ag majors.  One was also a business major.  I think there were a chemist and a botanist in the bunch, too.  Nice setup.

My friend needed a hand with some “pruning” and carrying some bags to the basement.  The drying racks, cutters, baggers, and rollers were there.  After cutting plants, bundling them up, carrying the bundles downstairs, hanging them on racks, cutting and bagging some “cured” product, and just breathing, I have to say I don’t remember if I even got to the party.  I do know I had my answers as to how these kids paid for their educations, rented that house, and lived in the manner to which they were apparently accustomed!

It was noon before I left the next day.

[I don’t think my sons read these, do they?]

“Back in the Hills of Home”

One of the things I always liked about growing up in a small town in the 50s and 60s is that I had a great deal of freedom.  From the time I was in about third grade I was able to leave the house in the morning and go just about anywhere as long as I was home for lunch, or whenever I had to be there.  I hiked the Missouri River bluffs for a good ten miles in both directions north and south of Rock Port.  When I was in high school, some Fridays I’d leave after school and not be back until Sunday morning for church.

I explored all sorts of things while wandering around the countryside.  The old abandoned farmhouses were always interesting places to poke around inside.  I’m sure I violated trespassing laws more than once, but it wasn’t really something I thought too much about at the time.  I didn’t destroy anything (OK, I knocked out the remains of a broken window pane now and then), and I don’t remember taking anything.  Of course, there was never much left anyway.  Most of these buildings had been abandoned for twenty years or more.  A couple of the more famous ones in the area dated back to the 1860s.

These were typically small frame houses with only a few rooms.  Now and then I’d find a two story place.  They were all in sorry disrepair with holes in the roof, broken windows, unhinged doors, the ravages of small animals, and dirt.  But each one was always an adventure.

A popular and necessary method of insulating some of the older clapboard houses was to stuff newspapers between the outer and interior walls.  The mice loved this, but the didn’t chew up everything, and I liked to see how far back some of the issues went.  Attics were sometimes treasure troves of yellowed newspapers and magazines, too.  I spent many hours reading articles from the thirties and forties!

My imagination was stirred in so many ways in these places.  Often there would be some furniture, usually broken, but not always.  I remember one place that was still basically furnished.  Wooden tables and chairs, dilapidated, bloated sofas with the stuffing coming out where mice and other vermin had pulled it out for their nests—if the piece wasn’t one big nest itself!  I would find a place to dust off and sit so that I could read through what I had found and think about who might have once lived there and why they had left.  Dressless dolls with vacant eyes and wheel-less toy cars and trucks told of children I might have known in a different time.  I wondered if they went on to become the parents of my classmates, perhaps, or they might have been older still.  What caused them to leave and leave these things behind?  Where were they now?

One of the places that really stirred my imagination had some of that left-behind furniture, but the stories it conjured were really something!  The three-legged table and mismatched chairs in the kitchen were completely smashed.  Broken dishes had been left.  Jagged holes in the walls and doors gave evidence of blows struck by fists of flying objects.  The most intriguing find, however, was what was obviously a bloodstain on the kitchen floor!  It was a good three feet in diameter at one point with streaks disappearing beneath an old gas stove.  A single bloody footprint pointed to the back door!

I’ll bet I spent an entire afternoon in that place just digging around and letting my mind concoct its own private murder mystery.  I was almost later for supper that night, and Mom asked—as usual—what I’d been up to all day.  She was satisfied as she often was by my casual shrug and, “Oh, just hiking around in the bluffs.”  Although she loved a good mystery and could usually be counted on to give me some information on the places I’d found, I never told her or anyone else about the “crime scene” or some of the other special places.  I guess I’m doing that now.  Maybe I was just saving up.  Tag along.  I may take you with me some day.