An Irresponsible Adult

Chapter Eight

And now it is Tuesday afternoon, and there does not now seem to be much question whether I will reach Bermuda. Robin is 368 miles from Newport at 5:21 p.m. That means that St. George’s and the finish line are only 267 miles ahead. I could, at my current rate, cover those miles in two days. Looking back at my log entries, made every six hours, I have been averaging more than 30 nautical miles in each entry. In the last 24 hours, Robin has crossed 121 miles of this incredibly blue water. In the previous 24 hours, she made 131 miles. Actually the last six hours, with the following wind blowing 10 to 12 knots and frequently shifting direction so that I was constantly trimming the sails, was my slowest six-hour run in two days. I covered only 26 miles. Back on the Chesapeake Bay, that would constitute a reasonable day of sailing, about the same as a trip from Cambridge, Maryland, down the Choptank River to Oxford for lunch and then returning home. If nothing else, I am getting a lot of practice on Robin. But of course sailing up to the finish line is the critical thing.
When I selected my three goals in August, 2006, each one seemed achievable. None of the targets represented new ground for me. I have sailed for 28 years, skied since I was five years old and I’ve written three novels, although my only published book was non-fiction. I knew when last Labor Day rolled by that it was time to settle down and begin working on the novel – my working title was Blackout, a word that in the story has three separate meanings. I was already in training for the downhill skiing. In the gym in our basement, I spent time every morning that I was home with weights and the treadmill, building up my legs and my endurance. I felt I had some time before I needed to shift into high gear on the sailing, since the race then was nine months away.
Blackout was a story that formed itself seven or eight years earlier after I began covering the New Jersey State Police for the Philadelphia Inquirer. My assignment was triggered in 1998 by an incident on the New Jersey Turnpike during which two white state troopers fired eleven bullets into a van occupied by four young minority basketball players heading south for a college tryout. As I looked into the culture of the state police, I found an institution created by and for rural white boys. It was an organization that, above all else, protected the prerogatives of its favored members and that viewed minorities – whether civilians or in police uniforms – as sub-human. There was the case of the troopers who required the black occupants of a car they had stopped to tap dance on the roadside before they would let them go. There was the minority trooper who, after he complained loudly of racism with in the agency, was called into a supervisor’s office, made to remove his state police clothing – which included everything but his boxer shorts and socks – was suspended from duty and, nearly naked, was told to find a way home on his own. Over the course of several years, I tried to turn that trooper’s story into a book. I suspected it would never happen, and so I had plotted Blackout as a novel to tell essentially the same tale. The book was already outlined in my mind.
It would take probably three to four weeks of daily, non-stop writing for me to write a rough draft of Blackout. I didn’t have that kind of time. My work for Soundings involved three 12- to 15-hour days each week which accounted for most of my work-week. I was committed to babysitting two of my grandchildren one day a week while their mother, my daughter Joy, worked. That left three days during which I could work on our as-yet-unfinished new home or spend quality time with Monica. It was out of these three days that I hoped to squeeze a few hours each week to get Blackout rolling. Each week, however, there were more urgent matters that needed my attention, and Blackout kept blending into the background like a step child that is trying not to be a nuisance.
But with each week that slipped by, not only was the novel losing its place but the skiing season was drawing closer. I sent in my check to join the organization that sanctions ski races in the United States, and I began scouring the internet, looking for a downhill race to enter. I only needed one, but on the eastern masters’ circuit – where old men and women try to recreate their memories of youth – I was unable to locate a single downhill event any time during the winter.
It had been a long time since my last – in fact, my only – downhill race. I never was any more of a ski racer in my young career than I am an ocean racer in my sailing life. I had always gravitated toward the enjoyment of the sport for its own sake. In looking back at the early years of skiing, I notice that many of my memories have little to do with enjoyment.
My first skis were under the Christmas tree seven weeks before I turned six. I have a surprisingly clear memory of them and of my first ski run. The skis were shorter than I. They had leather straps that laced over the toe of your boot and thick, round rubber bands that stretched behind the boots’ heel to keep your foot in place. The poles were bamboo with big aluminum baskets held to the pole with more leather straps. For boots, I used my galoshes – the black rubber kind with several black metal buckles.
Our house was built on a hillside. In the spring, my mother’s rock garden bloomed there in violet and yellow iris. After Christmas that year, the hill had a thick coating of snow, and one day I went outside and managed, unsupervised, to climb a few feet up the hill and to slide down to the driveway. I suspect that I did this over and over. That would have been my style.
Janet got skis the same Christmas. Her fascination with them seemed to have been outweighed by her recognition that this sport resulted in one’s feet and hands becoming wet and cold.
I have imprecise memories of frozen hands, painfully cold feet, of snow melted and then refrozen like baubles on a bracelet around the cuffs of clothing, of falling face-first into deep powder snow that snuffed up my nostrils, nearly choking me, of little ankles twisted inside galoshes, of socks that slipped down around the heels inside the boots and of sweaty clothes that became suddenly icy when the exertion ceased. Images flit through these recollections of the gray of a winter afternoon when the sun, a silvery yellow, falls behind the trees and of trees suddenly appearing in my path and my two skis tracking to either side as the tree trunk embraces me from crotch to sternum. There is the retained feeling of clothing that is really too bulky for one’s miniature body to bend where needed, of knit hats stretched by perspiration and falling over the eyes, causing instant blindness, and of stinging sleet on the face or a coating of snowflakes on the cheek, the cold skin stretched tight. Above all, there is the recurring sensation of two skis each tracking away from the intended course, pulled in opposite directions by deep snow, the result being another blinding, suffocating face plant.
By the time I turned six, I was addicted to skiing. Within a couple of years, Archie and my mother spent a winter Sunday taking me to a real ski area. They bought me a lift ticket. I didn’t get a lesson. Maybe they knew I was uneducable. I rode the rope tow many times. At the end of the day, I rode the chair lift to the top of the mountain. The only trail down was rated expert. At every turn, I crashed violently. I was thrilled. But when I reached the bottom, the day was over.
With the precision of prognostication bequeathed to high school seniors, those classmates who were in charge of the Hudson High School yearbook in 1960, when writing the part that predicts your future, had me joining the Olympic ski team. It is surprising to me that the only other member of our class who skied – my best friend, Joel Plastridge, with whose family I had spent the last five years skiing – was not given this accolade. He certainly was the better skier. But he had many other talents, and skiing was, at the time the piece was written, my lone distinction.
I chose a college because it had a good ski team, and when the first winter at college arrived, I discovered that I was actually not a very good downhill skier. I persevered in cross country skiing, however, and was to be offered a scholarship based on my small success in that grueling discipline. But at the same time, I set about to resurrect my downhill career, spending every free minute riding a pair of downhill skis from the top of one Vermont mountain to the bottom, non-stop, over and over until I had driven the essentials of good form into my brain and muscle cells.
What was good for skiing was quite bad for academics, and I was forced to withdraw from the school that spring or face flunking grades in most of my courses. Thus I was free the following December to take a job as a ski instructor at a reputable Vermont ski area. Teaching the sport actually taught me to be a better skier. But when I returned to college, I was no longer eligible for the ski team, and my racing career was all but over.
Today, skiing ranks a distant second to sailing among my pursuits. But it retains an equal footing as a passion. There is, for me, a physical element that unites both sailing and skiing. Call it the E factor – for equilibrium. One reaches a point when skiing fast or when sailing singlehanded in a stiff breeze when a balance is achieved between one’s physical self and the forces of nature. Sustaining that balance creates in my soul pure joy. Sexual pleasure, when honestly shared, can duplicate the experience. Riding a good motorcycle at speed comes close, too. I know of no other activities that compare, although I suspect a virtuoso violinist cradling a Stradivarius may understand.
I had allowed skiing to slip into the background of my life for many reasons. Although I attempted to take my kids, Joy, Nancy and Ted, skiing every year when they were young, the fact that we lived near Philadelphia and that I had taken a near-vow of poverty when I became a journalist combined to thwart our immersion in the expensive mountain sport. Once I started sailing, the resources that might have supported serious skiing went into boats. But skiing – particularly high-speed skiing – remained in my heart as might any old love.
And then I spent some hours watching the 2006 Winter Olympics. In particular, I became a fan of Bode Miller. I applauded when he flaunted conventions, on and off the slope. I was thrilled with the way he approached the descent of a mountain. I could feel in my legs and hips and arms and fists what he was feeling as he rocketed over the snow. I wanted to be in his boots. Thus, on that afternoon in Wegman’s supermarket, was the skiing goal created. Nothing less than the premier racing event – the downhill – would suffice.
But I couldn’t find a downhill to race, and even if I did find one, I couldn’t find an inexpensive way to acquire the required equipment. The racing rules spell out what sort of skis are acceptable. They can cost $1,000. The boots to go with them could cost $600 or more. Although I had, three years earlier, rented “performance” equipment in Utah, I could find no one on the east coast who rented racing gear.
Finally, certain that the winter would pass without a downhill event, I adjusted my goal. I would race in a Super-G, an event that is not quite as fast as a downhill but that is very close. I chose a Saturday race in early February on Vermont’s Okemo Mountain, and in the end, I was able to buy some used downhill gear at a ski shop there. We arrived at Okemo on Thursday, and I ran the race trail all day. I had never – even in my youth – skied as well. I was fast, daring and in control.
First thing Friday morning, I was back on the mountain. The race trail was closed, so I decided to practice on the next trail over. I started down, skiing conservatively. Something didn’t seem quite right, but it was a perfect morning and there was almost no one on the trail except a middle-aged couple ahead, skiing slowly.
I was probably cruising at about 35 or 40 miles per hour when the woman turned slowly across the mountain. I made a move to avoid her. My balance was not right, one ski caught an outside edge and in an instant I was flying head-first over the tips of my skis, my right knee twisted severely.
By the next morning – race day – I could barely walk. I put my boots on and rode the chair lift to the top of the mountain. As soon as I got off the chair, I knew I could not race. My right knee could not support my weight. I skied to the bottom of the mountain on one ski, the first of my three goals lost to one mental lapse that I could not retract.
It was February 5. My downhill pursuit would have been over, but while in Vermont I had learned of a genuine downhill race held the end of February up near the Canadian Border. And so I began an intense effort at rehabilitating my torn knee. It was almost healed by the time of the downhill. With my son, Ted, I drove to northern Vermont, hoping my tender knee would support me at 80 miles per hour. The race was scheduled for Saturday, but snow Friday night caused the race to be postponed until the end of March. But now it was time to concentrate on preparing for the Bermuda One-Two. I had not spent one solitary day on the novel, Blackout. There would not be enough spare time in the next four months to begin writing. It was clear that of all my goals, reaching Bermuda now was all that remained possible.

**

As the sun descends toward the horizon today, Tuesday evening, June 12, I am glad that the wind is blowing steadily, if with less velocity than a few hours earlier. I will make it to Bermuda. I am sure I will.