Don't Know Much About History

In history books, the world is ordered and analyzed according to Important Events: the reigns of inbred hereditary dictators; tiffs over dead archdukes that result in seventeen million other deaths; and intercontinental invasions euphemized as discoveries.  In our house, however, events tend to be wrangled into a haphazard semblance of context according to whether they happened, say, before Twelfth Night, or soon after A Christmas Carol, or at about the time of James Herriot. 

In the past couple of years, the twins have developed an ardent affection for a whole host of dusty old volumes full of references to shillings, coal scuttles, and doublets.  They have not developed an equal fondness for fourth-grade Social Studies lessons. 

“I hate history,” says Lizzy flatly.  “Learning history is like, ‘Blah, blah, blah, and then in 1982, something happened, blah, blah, blah.’  But I like historical fiction.”

“Nineteen eighty-two,” I point out, “is when I was your age.”

“Oh.”  She contemplates my ancientness for a moment.  She shrugs.

I’ll admit it:  the twins’ knowledge of history is as much of a disorganized disaster as the drawer in which we keep the eggbeater, the potato masher, and eleven chopsticks.  In my responsible-and-educated-grownup role, I worry about this – and feel guilty.  Because, via some sort of genetically-linked penchant for obliviousness, I’m almost certainly to blame. 

Raised in a household entirely comprised of ardent history buffs, I was a defensive contrarian.  Names, dates, dead presidents, blah, blah, blah.  I get it, Lizzy.  I shouldn’t admit it, but I totally get it. Yet, like Lizzy and Molly, despite my hatred of schoolbook history, I fell in love with novels that were not intended to be historical fiction, but which had become so, over time. 

Indeed, the twins’ penchant for reading archaic literature surpasses even that of my own childhood.  For one thing, the passage of more than thirty years between my elementary years and theirs has rendered antique all my “contemporary” recommendations.  Wait… Henry and Ribsy is not historical fiction!  Furthermore, many of the best recent stories aimed at the 8-12 set abound with voracious human-sized rats and parent-murdering wizards.  Such fare is anathema to my kids – especially at bedtime.  Tamer offerings are often written at a reading level that the twins dismiss as babyish.  What they want are 400-page densely written, well-crafted, vocabulary-rich stories in which the level of terror doesn’t go much beyond getting lost in the fog, spraining an ankle, and being rescued by charcoal-burners.

Charcoal-burners? 

Well, yeah.  They’re these old guys who hang out in the woods making charcoal.  Obviously. Also, logs are chopped with axes, wood-carts are pulled by horses, milking is done by hand, torn clothes are darned, and children signal each other between farmhouses with lanterns, using Morse Code, because they have neither electric lights nor telephones.  But, whatever – none of that is the point of the story, which is about this awesome adventure with sailboats and pretending to be pirates and camping and…

Children’s tales from bygone eras were (mostly) not written to be “historical”.  Thus, all the details of the past are skimmed over as understood, as normal, as background.  The setting rarely coincides with an Important Event.  Even if it does, that Important Event often seems utterly incidental.  In Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy novels, the young protagonists collect scrap metal for the war effort, raise money for a War Bond by holding a concert, and try canning the produce from their large Victory Garden -- but the focus is wholly on the joy and drama of the collecting, the performing, and the cooking.  The war itself is never pontificated upon, or even named.

Intentionally-historical fiction tends to focus much more heavily on the designated Important Things – but a truly history-resistant child can overcome this problem.  When I was eight, I read a novel entitled Rebecca’s War, checked out of the library by my big sister.  In order to win that week’s Summer Reading Program prizes, Sarah and I gave, consecutively, brief oral reports.  My mother later told me that the kindly librarian who had to sit through these synopses was deeply amused by the radical discrepancies in our focus.  While Sarah offered up details of the setting and background – it was 1776, and the British were occupying Philadelphia during the American Revolution – I merely noted that there were soldiers and stuff.  Then I got to the good part, which mostly involved a young girl smuggling gold and alcohol. 

My children likewise fail to even feign historical sagacity.  They seem happy to focus on story, character, and action, while brushing aside such details as whether anyone happens to be wearing petticoats and button-boots.  They flit from the “long ago” in which two Prince Edward Islanders are disappointed by the gender of the orphan they are sent, to the “long ago” in which Mario makes friends with a cricket in a New York subway station, to the “long ago” in which a wretched child from Colonial India discovers a garden door under trailing ivy – all without even noting the turbulence.  The Bastable children were invented by E. Nesbit not in the last century, but in the one before that.  Nonetheless, the twins are eager to decide which of these immensely relatable siblings they like best. 

“Oswald”, says Molly with a grin, “I love how he thinks you won’t guess it’s him telling the story, and it’s SO obvious!”  Lizzy leans in favor of Alice, who is tough and reckless and fiercely protective of her laughably poetic twin brother.   

The coal-tenders, farthings, pinafores, and ink-wells all make perfect sense in context, and pose no challenge to the ten-year-olds of 2016.  Even Shakespeare’s bodkins, bavins, and bawcocks don’t throw them off much; kids the twins’ age are learning, on average, about twelve new words every day. 

Yeah, that’s right.  Twelve new words.  On average.  Every day. 

That the brains of children are so sponge-like makes me even more concerned that they are missing out on a prime opportunity to learn history.   Isn’t this their big chance to cram all those names and dates and battles into their tender young skulls?

Or is it?  “I hate history,” says Lizzy.  But she likes stories from long ago.  She like those a lot.  And, although these stories hardly ever feature dates of Important Events, and skim right over the names of dictators and generals, our read-aloud sessions with books from bygone eras do often sidetrack into discussions of substantive societal changes.  Is the invention of plastic – and our entire dependence on oil – really so recent?  Why would someone disapprove of a girl wearing shorts, or going to college? Why are Native Americans referred to in ways that are insulting or just weirdly wrong?  What the heck was going on in Colonial India, anyhow?  Wasn’t school free, back then?   Because Molly and Lizzy care about the fictional Oswald and Alice and all the rest of them, they also care about the characters’ struggles, their choices, the obstacles thrown before them, and the limitations of the worlds in which they live.

I now realize that one of the reasons that school-book history felt so abhorrent to me was that it didn’t feel human.  Even the heroes were not vivid and real.  I was told about Harriet Tubman’s most important exploits, and I thought her brave and admirable, but I was never asked to imagine her sharing a joke with a friend or whispering softly to a child.  Of course, we don’t know what words Tubman might have whispered to what child.  If we make them up, we are falsifying history.  But are there ways in which fiction can actually feel truer to life than a history book does?

The connection between truth and history feels slippery to me.  I’m pretty sure no one learns anything worth remembering if they’re told an over-simplified and prettied-up pile of falsehood.  I like to think that even as a little kid, I could tell how much was being glossed over, and how much of the “history” I was taught was a pack of outright lies.  Columbus.  Yeah.  Him. 

On the flip side, no one can know the Full Truth of History.  For starters, the world is a large place.  If most Americans don’t even know what continent to find Togo on, it’s doubtful that they know everything that has ever happened there.  Second, recorded history covers a fair bit of time.  Do you know all your Chinese dynasties yet?  Good luck.  And, even if we could wrap up all that in a tidy bundle, it would still be the tip of the iceberg.  What we call “archaeology” rather than “history” encompasses more than ninety-five percent of the 200,000 years that modern humans have been busy doing modern-human things with our big, awkward, complicated, modern-human brains.  Finally, even picking from among the scraps of that which is recent and recorded, the veracity of the recorders ranges from “iffy” to “manipulative liar” to “were these monks on ‘shrooms, or what?”

In a young-adult attempt to recover from the history-phobia of my childhood, I read Howard Zinn’s classic, A People’s History of the United States.  It was radically different from almost everything I’d been taught.  It was a heck of a lot more interesting.  It also felt truer – but still not, perhaps, entirely true.  The author, after all, still has a slant, a bias, a perspective that he wants to present – and he is only addressing a very limited space of time, on one part of the globe. He wants to tell a story – or a series of stories.  But, I am gradually coming to realize, labels be damned – stories are precisely what history IS. 

Sure, there are those Important Events that we’re told constitute History, but even when carefully ordered and dated in a textbook, they no more tell the “whole” and “complete” and “true” story of the past than Dickens does.  Or Montgomery.  Or Cleary. 

So, what is it, exactly, that I want my kids to internalize, by learning history?  Blah, blah, blah, and then in 1982, something happened… 

All educated people have a working knowledge of history is no more a meaningful answer than is, I want my offspring not to seem dumb amongst intellectuals at cocktail parties in the 2040’s.  Even the easily-accepted adage that learning about history helps us avoid the mistakes of the past is up for debate – notably, in a new book by David Rieff that I have to admit to not having read yet.

So, no, I don’t need my kids to memorize a pile of heavily edited semi-facts just for the sake of memorizing them.  But I do want them to know that humanity covers a broad swath of time and space, in richly complex diversity.  I want them to know that shit goes wrong a fair bit.  People fight for incredibly dumb reasons.  People are compelled to fight for reasons they don’t understand.  Governments rise and fall and struggle and try to reinvent themselves and try to right injustices and sometimes do so, but much too slowly. 

I want my kids to know that in the context of what the textbooks call “history”, the relatively egalitarian bubble in which they live is new-blown and fragile.  For most of the last few thousand years, being a girl has been a bum deal, and being white has often been way too good a deal.  Conversely, I want them to know that things were probably a lot less unequal during the 95% of our hunter-gatherer human past that we don’t call history.  In this way, perhaps more than any other, history feels like a lie.

But through all this, I also want my children to know that people are people.  Kids are kids.  They might wear pinafores or leaves or rope sandals or body paint.  They might happen to exist at a time when Important Events are occurring.  Regardless, the core of their lives is most likely in the small adventures, the friendships, the daily discoveries, the humor, and the family travails. Children – let’s say, kids just about exactly the twins’ age – have stories to tell.  They have stories about the cake to which they accidentally added liniment instead of vanilla; about Albert-next-door’s uncle who doesn’t get mad when they almost bury Albert while digging for treasure; and about the heart-lifting realization that the gray rosebushes of winter will burst forth in growth and flower, come spring.  They have stories not about history, per se, but about being human.

This is true whether they lived before Twelfth Night, or soon after A Christmas Carol, or at about the time of James Herriot. 

Or in 1982.

Moby Whatever

“I’m reading an interesting book,” Jay told me.  “It’s called Railsea.  I think you’d like it.  It’s hard to describe, exactly, but it’s full of allusions to Moby Dick.”

I looked up from my laptop.  I’d been writing.  Ok, no, I’d been thinking about writing, but mostly dinking around on the internet.  “Oh.  Um…”  I hesitated, my ambivalence practically leaking out my ears.  I ought to be eager, I thought.  Why wasn’t I thrilled?  I’m always looking for book recommendations, and my husband was touting this one as fabulously literary.  And -- I’m a literary-type person… aren’t I? 

Or… not.  Oh, I like to think of myself that way.  It’s part of my self-image as Renaissance Woman and Utter Dork.  Moreover, a lot of people seem to assume that I’m wonderfully well-read, given my fancy-pants predilection for ten-dollar words, not to mention my more generalized cerebral nerdery.  But, faced with the prospect of a whole novel’s worth of references to Herman Melville’s greatest work, I was uncomfortably aware that my biblio-intellectual aspirations were more pretense than reality.  

I’ve never read Moby Dick.

This doesn’t seem like such a terrible admission, I suppose.  Although Melville is extolled in the lit-crit world for his writing talent, plenty of other folks agree that he had an even greater talent for inducing catatonia with his 135 chapters about monomania… and whales… and ships… and some more about whales.  So, yeah, I gave up on him -- so what? 

The problem is, my liter-idiocy regarding Melville is just the tip of the whale’s fluke.  A quick perusal of “The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time” – as selected by The Guardian/Observer -- reveals the depths of my shame.  I have not read Don Quixote, although I can make vague references to tilting at windmills.  I also skipped Robinson Crusoe; while I’d like to think I have some sort of clue about wilderness survival, I doubt my strategies would include naming someone “Friday” and converting him to Christianity.  I never got past the first couple of chapters of The Brothers Karamazov or Wuthering Heights, although both mutely torment me from my bookshelves.  I’d rather wade through ice floes on the Yukon River than make any attempt to wade through Pilgrim’s Progress.

I’ve read a few from the list, but I suspect that titles absorbed under duress don’t count for much.  The Scarlet Letter was dreary, to put it mildly, and The Great Gatsby might have been better if not forced into me, page by dull page, in high school English class.  I did get through Emma semi-voluntarily, based only on maternal urging, but (to put it in properly literary terms) it annoyed the crap out of me.  The same is true of almost every example of the genre that I think of as “Uppercrust Twits Obsessing.” Although Pride and Prejudice and its ilk make me desperately grateful to have been born in a time and place without crinolines, arranged marriages, or a need for me to refer to my husband as “Mr. Cable,” I still don’t want to read them.  (I’ll make an exception for Cold Comfort Farm, which is not only a brilliant parody, but also contains the memorable phrase, “You have a simply smashing set of unmentionables.”)

Jay, undaunted by my hesitation, continued touting Railsea.  It was, he elaborated, kind of sci-fi, and kind of steam-punk, and kind of post-apocalyptic.  It was written, he added, for young adults.

Now, that sounded a lot more tempting – and yet, at the same time, more embarrassing.  I’m forty.  I have a PhD and a career and all that.  Shouldn’t I want to read books that are intended for honest-to-goodness grownups, and that don’t involve wizards, spaceships, androids, or elves?

In the same vein, I’m not sure that the titles that I can wholeheartedly endorse from among the “100 Greatest” offer a more flattering reflection of my acumen than those that I can’t.  The stories I’ve enjoyed seem to be mostly children’s tales, satires, or farces – not a combination that speaks well of my intellectual prowess.  Sure, I loved The Lord of the Rings – who wouldn’t?  It has wizards AND elves!  I also enjoyed Gulliver’s Travels, Tom Jones, The BFG, Charlotte’s Web, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Little Women, Huckleberry Finn, The Wind in the Willows, Catcher in the Rye, and Lord of the Flies.  Some of these I’ve loved more than once, and some I’ve already shared with my six-years-olds – but that doesn’t exactly confer genius status upon me, or qualify me to write novels of my own.

Writing.  Yes.  That.  The reality of my limited reading is all the more undermining because I so desperately want to write, and always have.  These days, I foist page upon page and chapter upon chapter of unpublished dross on the patient members of my writers’ group.  But even at the age of seven, I fancied myself a novelist when I won ten dollars (ten whole nineteen-eighty dollars!) from Huntington Public Library for Freddy Goes to a Baseball Game.  Three years later, I conned my poor mother into copy-typing almost a hundred pages of Summer Search, a tale of mystery, riddles, and adventure enjoyed by a set of not particularly intrepid fraternal twins. (Does that count as real-life foreshadowing?). 

For much of my childhood, books didn’t merely interest me, they consumed me.  I knew all the idiosyncratic rabbit-vocabulary in Watership Down, and I wept for heroic Justin in The Rats of NIMH, even though he was fictional…. and, you know, a rat.  I explored Pern on dragonback.  I visited countless other planets, and at least one neutron star, thanks to Robert Forward. 

I was as omnivorous as I was voracious.  I didn’t stick to “good” books.  Sometimes, I deigned to even touch them.  I tested out Nancy Drew before realizing that every mystery was pretty much the same.  I spent some time with Piers Anthony and Jean Auel before stumbling out, befuddled and chagrinned, on the other side of puberty.  But along the way, I found Jane Yolen.  I dug into Lois Lowry.  I spend days – weeks! – on Wildcat Island, and traveled through time with dangerously liberal Victorian E. Nesbit.  I discovered the ABCs of science fiction -- Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke -- and many more, less well known but equally visionary.  I plunged into the realms of my parents’ bookshelves, and kept myself nightmare-enhanced with Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Lolita.  Although more prone to the fanciful than the factual, I hit the nonfiction shelves long enough to meet Anne Frank and Stephen Hawking, and to educate myself about ancient Sumerian counting systems, edible wild plants, and innovative methods of cryptography. 

“I think you’d like Railsea,” Jay reiterated, then phlegmatically left it at that.

Ok.  Fine.  What was this book all about, anyhow?  I was already wasting time on line; I looked it up.

The novel, it seemed, was about moletrains.  And pirates.  It was about a young man named Sham Yes ap Soorap, and a one-armed woman with a vengeance-quest against a massive ivory-colored moldywarpe, and a discovery that just might turn an intricately imagined world inside-out.  This sounded not in the least bit literary, and immensely appealing – for its sheer weirdness, if nothing else.  

Upon reflection, it occurred to me that I am not actually anti-intellectual in my choices of reading material, but merely just as omnivorous as an adult as I was as a child.  Over the past twenty years, I’ve learned that I truly enjoy Shakespeare and Dickens, and I’ve relished a few others from that darned 100: Frankenstein, David Copperfield Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Call of the Wild, A Passage to India, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and On the Road.  On the other hand, I’ve also learned that I like Dave Barry, Bill Bryson, Dan Savage, George Martin, Terry Pratchett, Suzanne Collins, and a whole host of others who definitely don’t make it onto any highfalutin lists.  Many of them write, ostensibly, for children.  Most of the poetry I’ve read – not just in the first two decades of my life, but in the latter two as well -- was written by Shel Silverstein.

But – maybe that’s ok.  Young adult fiction, I realized, is written by writers who are at least as “real” as Herman Melville, and sometimes a great deal more so.  In the past few months, I’ve dived wholeheartedly into a dark comedy about a boy who goes on an epic quest while dying of mad cow disease; a gritty tale of children in a bleak future who strip vast beached tankers for scrap; a fanciful imagining of a semi-alive genetically engineered flying leviathan; an entire retelling of the Greek myths from the perspective of a teenager who discovers he’s one of Poseidon’s half-human bastards; the tangled adventures of a girl who has the power to read characters into and out of printed pages… oh, and so many more.  Yes, these are kids’ books.  I would love to be able to write half as well as their authors.  

Besides, deep down, I know that sticking to the esteemed ought-to-reads would, for me, destroy the decadent bliss of the sport.  Really, isn’t the joyful immersion what it’s all about?  The edification is only a byproduct.  It’s optional.  It’s the reading itself that spins words from the page, spins my brain, spins my galaxy, and makes me want to write.  And write.  And write.

There are a few classics on the Guardian’s list that I really would like to get to – given world enough, and time.  I will read them one day.  I really will.  In the meantime, though, I read Railsea.

It was quirky, wildly creative, and highly entertaining.  It made me think.  It helped me write.  It did, in fact, fairly wallow in Moby Dick references, allusions, motifs, and themes – but it did not foster in me any particular desire to crack open that classic, ever.  And… I’m just fine with that.

Sorry, Melville, but everything’s copacetic. Now, pardon me while I go looking for a Top 100 list that includes a whole lot of centaurs, quasars, subterranean kingdoms, and something containing the phrase, “You have a simply smashing set of unmentionables.”

You Are Here

NASA image

Last weekend I attended a wedding reception sporting a flying saucer on one bicep.   The groom was wearing a fuzzy cheetah-print fedora, so I wasn’t too worried that a red, green, and yellow temporary tattoo might seem over-flippant.  Nonetheless, when a friend joked that my personal UFO was the latest image from NASA’s rover, my laugh was a trace embarrassed.  

Google image search: Curiosity

Ok, I admit it.  For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been scouring the internet for new info from Mars.  My searching feels both juvenile and illicit, as if I’m clicking on Cosmo’s latest advice (“Ten Hot Tricks He’ll Never Tell You”).  Shouldn’t I be reading the real news?   You know, the stuff about wars and stock prices?   With the presidential election looming, bucketloads of impending environmental disasters, and the usual amount of unrest, bickering, and outright awfulness on our very own planet, and it seems irresponsible to obsess about what is happening on a reddish chunk of rock spinning 230 million kilometers from the sun.  Space exploration is, by definition, not a down-to-earth pursuit. It’s also an egregiously first-world hobby.  How much does it cost to blast a passel of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopes and X-ray spectrometers into the vastness?  Does anyone in Kinshasa or Dhaka know, or care?  

Thus, as I mingled in my sleeveless dress, I let everyone assume that my kids selected my embellishment from the 40 super-awesome options in the Toy Quest kit.  But in fact, the six-year-olds didn’t choose the spaceship.  I did.  .

Of course, I don’t really expect Curiosity to find little green men… or large mauve androgynous beings… or gymnasts who spiraled a bit too energetically on the high bar.   The Mars rover is just taking pictures of rocks, I remind myself.  It’s picking up bits of dirt, and maybe sampling some trace elements.  It’s merely a scientific instrument collecting data – and it’s probably not data that is even remotely connected to my own field of scientific endeavor, which requires atmospheres, oceans, and real-life creatures with cells and chlorophyll and DNA.  The Curiosity is a vastly expensive robot wandering around a frigid and almost airless wasteland.  How interesting could that be, really?

And yet… I can’t help myself.  Curiosity keeps getting the better of me.  I am a Mars voyeur.  No, it’s more pervasive than that.  I am a space-case.  I always have been.  And, as the ink on my arm conjured up memories of my 1970’s self, I began to suspect that my preoccupation hasn’t matured much.

When I was five or six – before space shuttles, and before I’d personally seen Star Wars (even if all the other kindergarteners got to see it when it was released) -- I told my mother that I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up.  She was supportive, but pragmatic.  She informed me that I couldn’t be an astronaut, because I didn’t have adequate eyesight to be a pilot of any kind.  Blind in one eye?  No Mars for you, kid.  

This set me back, but only a little.  I figured that if I couldn’t actually control the rockets, I could at least be a passenger -- in the near future, when trips to the moon became as commonplace as trips to the A&P.  And in the mean time, I could read up on everything out there, just in case someone suddenly needed info on the sulfurous volcanoes of Io. 

I absorbed facts about the solar system – not just the planets’ names, but their relative masses and composition, their moons, their orbits, and their charming idiosyncrasies.  Neptune’s magnetic field is tilted 59 degrees from its orbital axis!  The temperature on Mercury can reach 700 degrees Kelvin!  I was undeterred by the fact that not everyone seemed to find such tidbits riveting.  

At about the same time, I discovered science fiction.  Sarah stared in scorn at R is for Rocket and S is for Space as she checked out hefty volumes set in Civil War America or Victorian England.  I stopped trying to convince her to read my selections, but I didn’t stop bringing them home.  No one had introduced me to just-add-water- tattoos back then, but if they’d been available, I would probably have wanted to cover my whole body with rockets, robots, and amphibious-looking aliens.  I did the next best thing, and stuck glow-in-the-dark stars and planets to my bedroom ceiling.  

 

Voyagers 1 and 2 reached Jupiter when I was six, and Saturn when I was eight.  The known number of moons for each planet leaped dramatically, and Jupiter’s red spot was revealed to be a swirling storm vastly larger than Earth itself.  The fact that all this showed up on the news helped validate it as grown-up and important, even if my big sister rolled her eyes.  And then, in the fall of 1980, Cosmos hit PBS.  For thirteen glorious weeks, Carl Sagan enraptured me with his billions of stars. If the rings of Saturn were cool, then pulsars, nebulae, quasars, and black holes were mind-blowing.  

The real and the unreal sparked a Technicolor hodgepodge in my impressionable young mind.  I caught up on Star Wars and ET, with a little Trek thrown in.  Dad, my occasional astronomical accomplice, whisked me off to catch 2010.  By that far-distant year, I figured I would be pretty old – certainly old enough to travel to Jupiter and fend off robots with personality disorders.  “Open the pod bay doors, Hal…”  

By junior high, I had discovered Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, LeGuin, and other classics.  I dove into the related and sometimes overlapping fantasy genre, too.  Sentient plasma-beings?  Hobbits?  Bring them on!  Trashy sci-fi pulp and Tolkein knock-offs?  Why not?  Given that the other selections on the Young Adult shelves mostly seemed to be about teenagers who were either fashion-obsessed or drug-addicted, I was more than happy to remain in orbit. Science fiction allowed me to believe in entire galaxies in which acne did not exist and alien intelligences surpassed any I saw evidenced in the bowels of middle school.   I was the only girl in the Dungeons and Dragons club at the library, but the surplus of Y chromosomes didn’t stop me from attending.  There was lots of scope for the imagination.  Also, there were free Doritos.

But even as I imagined myself heroically patrolling the skies of Pern astride a golden telepathic dragon, I was even hungrier for truth.  Even the most rudimentary astrophysics granted me a view of reality that turned math and science into an orchestral crescendo of awe. I was both excited and saddened by the vastness of it all.  Sunlight reaching us from the edges of the cosmos, after millions of years of travel, was awe-inspiring.  But was the universe really beyond the scope of our oh-so-limited human reach and lifespans?  Could we really never travel faster than light?  Did our own clammy mass bind us to this time, this place?  I looked for loopholes, and made a valiant but incoherent attempt at a seventh grade Science Fair report about the Theory of Relativity.  I dreamed galactic dreams as I hit puberty.  The former was a lot more fun than the latter.

When I was in high school, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was published.  I was thrilled to receive a copy for Christmas.  Dad grinned.  “I told the guy at Book Review my daughter would like it,” he said.  “He tried to persuade me not to buy it for you.”  Well, how was the clerk to know that I was Sweet Sixteen and nerdy as all get-out?  I read it once quickly, and again, slowly.  

By college, I gained a small number of additional social skills.  I still chose Astronomy as an elective, and enjoyed the occasional literary wizard or troll, but I spent less time completely out of range of Ground Control.  Yes, there was the infamous Star Wars Trilogy in Puppets senior year, but that was more about hanging out with friends, grunting like a Wookie, and wearing the Millenium Falcon on my head than about pondering the space-time continuum.   

In the years that followed, my addiction to outer space became tempered to the level of occasional escapism.  Still, I was never entirely able to kick the habit.  On dark winter nights on the outskirts of Fairbanks, it’s easy to stare up at the Milky Way smeared across the sky until the unfathomable scale of it blurs my brain… or my blood begins to congeal in the -40 temperatures.

Star-gazing and aurora-watching are perfectly acceptable activities, of course.  But really, shouldn’t I have abandoned that little flicker of hope that one day SETI will sift a pattern – a glittering gem of radio waves – from the dissonance?  Shouldn’t I realize by now that space research is just a bunch of dry, dusty physics, not something set to Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra?  It’s 2012 now -- two years past the date by which I should have been able to travel to Jupiter.  Time still refuses to warp, I’m still blind in one eye, and Greyhound’s routes still don’t include Luna.  Even if I still take an academic interest in sub-atomic particles and solar spectra, shouldn’t I be beyond the stage of self-decorating with multicolored UFOs?  

A few days after last weekend’s wedding, I saw that the spaceship tattoo was disappearing from my arm.   Well, that’s good, I told myself.  Of course.  I mean, I should have scraped if off immediately.  Shouldn’t I? 

But just as my flying saucer was fading, a friend – a young-enough-to-be-my-kid friend, which is something everyone needs -- shared a quote.  It was a passage from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. “Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us…”  I was instantly swept back to 1980, and the heart-leaping splendor of Cosmos.  

It’s not childish.  And it’s not unimportant.  Thirty-two years ago, I would have chosen the same spaceship tattoo – which is a lot more than can be said for a lot of people with real tattoos.  And if something is that much a part of who I am, then I’m not going to let go of it -- not the stories, not the dreams, not the astonishing scientific truths pulled from a boggling array of possibilities.  

Yes, space travel is expensive, and complicated, and limited to a tiny scope of what is out there.  No, we aren’t going to discover sentient beings on the dry red soil of our neighbor-planet.  True, there are problems enough on our own world, and we need to invest time, money, and human ingenuity in solving them.  But that doesn’t mean we should forget who and what we are, here on our little blue dot.  “Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe…”

Tonight I’ll take a Brillo pad to what remains of my UFO, even as I scrub the horse off Lizzy and the dolphin off Molly.  Then I’ll pack up the lunch boxes, feed the dogs, check my email.  And after that?  Well, maybe I’ll pull a couple of old paperbacks off the shelves – something by Bradbury or Clarke.  I never did take those to Gulliver’s as trade-ins.  And maybe then I’ll check the news for the latest images from Mars. 

Google image search: Curiosity

Humans made Curiosity.  Curiosity makes us human.

“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”

-- Carl Edward Sagan (9 November 1934 – 20 December 1996)

Under the spell of English

“There can’t be a silent ‘gh’!”  Lizzy looked up from her literary selection, Clifford Goes to the Doctor.  She glared at me accusingly, as if I had personally invented the English language and imbued it with all its peculiar inconsistencies just to confound her.  “That doesn’t make any sense!”

“I know,” I sighed.  She was right.  ‘Light’ should be spelled ‘lite,’ just as it is on the rows of pink-dyed aspartame-sweetened yogurt at Fred Meyers.  I couldn’t uphold the existence of that ‘gh,’ and I wasn’t even trying.  If I was the court-appointed lawyer for my mother-tongue, I was doing a terrible job.  But given the unassailable claims being brought forth by the plaintiff, was a defense even warranted?

Helping two five-year-olds wallow through Puppy Mudge Finds a Friend and painstakingly hand-write their entries for the University Park Elementary School Annual Poetry Contest has reminded me just how agonizing English spelling is – but that’s only the tip of the iceberg.  Last week, Molly asked me why the Three Little Kittens cried when they found their mittens. I had to explain that “cry” means not only “burst into tears” but also “call out in excitement.”  A few days later, one of the twins’ friends looked at Lizzy suspiciously when she claimed to have “several” toy horses, and demanded to know what “several” meant – and, having been given a definition, how it compared to “a few” and “some.”  Our language is so full of superfluous synonyms, irregular verbs, double-meanings, multiple definitions, context-dependent connotations, impenetrable idioms, and maddening silent k’s that I can’t really blame my kids for their peevishness.  Back when I was discovering that ‘weird’ is spelled weirdly and that ‘flammable’ and ‘inflammable’ mean the same thing, I too was pretty sure English had been invented by sadists or lunatics.

I can recall debating with my second grade teacher, Mrs. Monteiro, about whether it was possible to hear the difference between the ‘wh’ sound and plain old ‘w.”  She suggested that it was; I hotly denied -- in my enormous experience as a seven-year-old -- ever having heard anyone speak that way.  She listened to my argument with her usual gravity, and agreed that perhaps the distinction was too subtle to be of much use in ordinary diction.  Mrs. Monteiro took me seriously, and in return, I adulated her.  She was an elegant, sharp-eyed, wry-humored woman who challenged me daily.  She taught me about planets, dinosaurs, and – when I asked what the word “boycott” meant on her lapel pin – labor unions, workers’ rights, and injustice.  On the first day of school, she told the class that her first name was Joan.  “You can call me that when you’re twenty-one,” she deadpanned.  I’m not sure the other kids understood the humor, but I felt teacher-awe wash over me. 

It’s a powerful force.  These days, I see Lizzy’s eyes light up when she tells me that Mrs. Claar showed her a caterpillar, or that Coach Davis is teaching sign language in gym.  I see Molly swell with pride as she holds up her paper maché globe and repeats what Ms Lewis told her about continents.  “Isn’t Eurasia a funny word?” she muses.  Yes, I think – and just wait until you try to spell it.  Both kids are thrilled to report that not only do their teachers and the school librarian read stories to the kindergarteners, but so does Mr. Bob the custodian.

Molly and Lizzy have always been huge fans of stories – as was I.  It might seem odd that I was frustrated with English as a child, given that I wasn’t a victim of academic despair.  On the contrary, I was an inveterate little bookworm. However, I was also fond of logic, and incensed by the lack of it.  I was good at remembering how to write incorrigible words like ‘neighbor’ and ‘necessary,’ but that didn’t mean I liked how they were spelled.  My parents still refer to Grand Union supermarkets as Grand Onions, because that’s what I insisted the sign said when I was four.   I can remember being personally affronted by the fact that ‘doctor’ does not end in ‘er.’ 

Mrs. Monteiro had a fine appreciation for language.  She glanced at the picture books I was selecting from the school library, and scoffed.  I could read much harder stuff, she told me. She was right; at home I worked my way through a lot of Sarah’s books, so I knew I could handle the selections of a precocious ten-year-old.  Still, I was miffed.  I shot back, “What, like War and Peace?”

She granted me the barest flicker of a smile. “Oh, are you watching that on PBS?”  She was too.  Over the following weeks we discussed all 751 minutes of the series, then moved on to the next production: I, Claudius.

As a result of all that PBS, all those books, and parents who peppered the dinner table conversation with words like obfuscate, penultimate, and kerfuffle, I had a vocabulary large enough to earn me blank stares on the playground. Using too many words was a social impediment.  Kids who want to know whether something is ‘cool’ or ‘gross’ or ‘ok’ are suspicious of ‘exceptional,’ ‘repugnant,’ and ‘mediocre.’  Big words were not only impenetrable, they were also snotty.  I learned not to use them at recess. 

I don’t think Molly and Lizzy have yet reached the age of disillusionment, when they will realize that other children may not like them for entering poetry contests, or for saying, as Lizzy did earlier this week, “Look, a mosquito inserted its proboscis into my arm!”  Sometimes I worry that they’ll hate me for telling them that the talking bears in Goldilocks are ‘anthropomorphic.’

On the other hand, I never resented or discarded my vocabulary, even when I hid it.  Although all those words didn’t completely assuage my annoyance over the illogic, flaws, redundancies, and omissions of English, they were gradually seducing me.  There were patterns hidden in their depths – amble, ambulance, perambulator, ambulatory – and poetry in their syllables – mellifluous, susurration, onomatopoeia.  Grown-up words were also a free ticket into the world of adults – or, at least, the adults I most wanted to communicate with.  I played Scrabble with my dad.  I gave my mother whole notebooks full of pencil-scratched stories, and blithely asked her to copy-type them. I was allowed to join my parents and their friends in a game that involved inventing fictional definitions for words so obscure that only the dictionary knew which was correct.  And I chatted with my teachers, not just as authoritarian dictators of spelling quizzes, but as people. 

Mrs. Monteiro talked to me as if I were a grownup, but she also had a knack for connecting with me as a kid.  She noticed that my handwriting was nothing but a hasty scrawl.  She could have forced me to practice writing letters and words by rote.  Instead, she loaned me a book of poems, and gave me a special lined notebook.  I could read whatever poems I liked, she said.  I should copy my favorites into the notebook.  But it was a special notebook, so only the very best handwriting would do.  I glowed with pride.  I was a big kid!  I had a special poetry journal!  I was also a little kid.  I copied Jabberwocky, and a lengthy work by AA Milne: A bear, however hard he tries/ Grows tubby without exercise...

This week, Lizzy’s appreciation for language was bolstered by winning third prize in the school poetry contest – with a masterpiece about wearing underpants on her head.  She came home with a plastic kite and a smile that appeared to be larger than her face.  For a shining moment, when her class applauded, she was a poet, a wordsmith, a writer.  By bedtime, though, she’d remembered that she really doesn’t appreciate that ‘who’ and ‘eight’ are spelled as if someone pulled letters randomly from a hat.

For now, it seems fair enough to commiserate with her that ‘gh’ doesn’t make sense, that ‘knee’ has at least one letter too many, and that ‘knight’ is afflicted with a double dose of insanity.  Falling in love with words takes time and patience. Maybe it wasn’t until second grade, in Mrs. Monteiro’s class, that I first started to view our language in the full light of all its wondrous possibilities.  Maybe it was then that I began to realize that I was angry at English not because I hated it, but because I loved it so much. 

The internet wasn’t at our fingertips in 1979.  But today, thanks to a memorably-offered first name, it yielded the street address of an 81-year-old who donated money to a Political Action Committee called Voice of Teachers for Education.  I could be wrong, of course, but I’m guessing that’s the same sharp-eyed woman who taught me about labor unions and corruption within the Roman Empire while whipping my handwriting into shape with Winnie the Pooh. 

I’m a lot older than twenty-one now.  Maybe – with my fingers crossed, in hopes that I’m not too late -- it’s time I dropped Joan a thank-you note.

What the DIckens?

I

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

“Too bad it costs two hundred dollars to get a snowmachine ride back,” sighed the long-haired young man. 

I didn’t know my fellow racer’s name, but I’d caught glimpses of him as I had of many others, through a day, a night, and a second day on the trail.  He was one of the runners – as opposed to a snow-biker, or a skier like myself -- but now, at mile 83, he was more of a trudger.  His hair looked like a cozy nest for a squirrel, and his eyes seemed to be focused on something a few miles beyond my left ear.  He was ten or fifteen years younger than me, but here at the back of the pack, the Susitna 100 was long enough to make us all look a bit like something past its expiration date. 

I wanted to say something peppy and motivational, but my brain was as foggy as his gaze.  Why had he wanted to take part in a hundred-mile “Race Across Frozen Alaska” in the first place?  Why had I?  Why, for that matter, did anybody?

A few competitors, of course, were impossibly buff and optimally trained: superheroes in snowgear.  They were racing to compete, and to win.  I, on the other hand, was a mom from Fairbanks with scant training and goofy skiing skills.  I was covering a hundred miles at three miles per hour – which, once I’ve worn out my initial energy in the first 25 miles of back-country skiing, is the inelegant pace I can maintain, for hour after hour.  After hour. I knew this from last year’s White Mountains 100.  And yet here I was again.

How far is a hundred miles?  To put things in perspective, it’s almost four marathons, or thirty-two 5k races, or -- for the less ambitious -- 880 laps from one end of Fairbanks Fred Meyer West to the other.   It’s roughly three times the length of the companion “Little Su” – a race that has to cap its roster because lots of people actually want to take part in it.  A hundred miles is also long enough to listen to the Audiobook version of Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities – every gorgeous, rolling, imbued-with-significance paid-by-the-word syllable of it – and still have plenty of time to listen to two other complete novels as well.

It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…

At the race start, on that Saturday morning in February, the atmosphere was bustling, businesslike, foot-stompingly chilly, and slightly anxious.  People muttered about gear and trail conditions, and eyeballed their competition.  But that mood dominated for only a half mile or so, until the horde of zippy fat-tire snow-bikers and the three insanely competitive skate-skiers were out of sight.  Then the ambiance became that of a peculiarly linear social gathering.  “Are you from Anchorage?”  “Have you done the hundred before?” “Here, let me see if I can help you get that sled adjusted.” “Hey, we have the same skis!” 

I met Tom, a cheerful classic skier with a gray beard and two teenagers back at home who apparently were just not into this kind of thing (sigh).  I told him about my own kids and my secret fear that they would one day take up video games and/or cheerleading as their primary hobbies. I met Fiona, a perky young champion skate-skier who wanted to know if I recommended using her bra as a battery-warming holder for her ipod.  I did, of course.  I’m not sure how males overcome their obvious disadvantage in this arena.

The sun came out.  The temperature rose.  Sweating in my longjohns, I kept removing my easier-to-strip upper layers until I was sliding along in a tank top.  “Ooh, I didn’t know there were going to be bikini babes in this race!” teased a skate-skier who had been jealous of my classic skis on the hillocky narrow trails of the first ten miles of the course, but who would soon blast past me on the endless wide-open rivers.  My fish-belly Fairbanks-winter skin set to work producing vitamin D. 

Via my earbuds, I met the inimitable Dickensian cast: a revolutionary who never stops knitting, an alcoholic attorney, a darkly hilarious grave robber.  Their world blended with the world of bright snow and dark spruce around me.

It didn’t seem like long before I was at the first checkpoint, Flathorn Lake, amidst a bustle of skiers and runners.   We were all about efficiency and camaraderie as we filled water bottles and snarfed down homemade brownies.  All the chocolate you want!  This was why we were doing this!

It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…

I left Flathorn with great faith that I’d finish the race – faith that I lost within the hour.  I’m not quite sure how I wrenched my shoulder.  The course was almost entirely flat, nothing like the crazy descents, mountain pass, and ice lakes last year in the Whites 100.  But somehow I caught a pole wrong, and the 25-ish pounds of food, water, and required emergency gear on my back didn’t help.  A ball of muscle wound itself up into a jangly nervy mass.  By the time I made it to the second checkpoint at mile 41 -- and Madame LaFarge was storming the Bastille with her knitting buddies -- every plant of my left ski pole ached and stabbed.  In Luce’s Lodge, I could barely raise my arm high enough to take my hat off.  It was dinnertime.  Many of the bikers had already passed me, whooshing back toward the finish line.  Why was I trying to do this?  I’d never make it.

 “If you don’t mind getting a massage from someone you don’t know…”

Um, was that a trick question?  My only regret is that I still don’t know the name of the woman – the fiancée of another racer, visiting Luce’s Lodge via snowmachine -- who spent a good fifteen minutes working on my sweaty, nasty, shoulder.  She had nothing in the world to gain from this.  I was shoving a grilled cheese sandwich and fries into my face as she worked, and I’m pretty sure my greasy thanks were utterly inadequate payment for her compassion.

It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…

Fortified emotionally, physically, and gustatorially, I headed out into the darkness for the long slog to Alexander Lake and back.   The round trip was 24 miles, and I knew it would take almost all night.  With only the light of my headlamp on the snow, the voice streaming in from my audio-library selection seemed all the more potent.  The tale seemed increasingly likely to end in high-Dickensian pathos, with a woeful widow, a fatherless girl, and a mad – albeit industrious – shoe-maker.  And yet, I couldn’t help but hold out some hope for them.  The stars were out, my blood was burbling with high fructose corn syrup, and this was the section of the race in which I saw all the other racers who were anywhere close to my league. 

First, I encountered those who were outbound while I was still inbound.  “Good work,” they told me.  “Keep it up!”  I saw Fiona, going strong, still smiling, and still presumably warming her ipod.  I saw the “bikini babe” guy, skating through the darkness, cheering me on with jovial conviction.  Tom and two other fellow classic-skiers were sound asleep at Alexander Lake, but others were there to share the cocoa and gird for the return journey.

And then, in the 230 surreal minutes between 1:30 a.m. and 5:20 a.m., after I’d wrenched myself away from the snug, sweet hospitality of the cabin, I saw those who were even slower than I.  “You can do it,” I told them.  “Looking good!” 

Good, of course, is relative.  Under Dickens’ pen, it sometimes neared perfection. The story’s message of bravery, hope, and generosity mingled in my sleepy brain with the world of free massages, all-night volunteers offering soup and sympathy, and tenacious runners smiling in the darkness.  When the Tale surged to its bittersweet closing and Sydney Carton earned his “far, far better rest,” I was semi-ebullient, although there was no rest for me -- not only because there were, thankfully, no guillotines in the middle of the Yentna River, but also because I was only half way through the race.  A hundred miles is really that long.

I moved on to my next literary treat, the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy.  A dystopian tale of guerilla-style murder in the wilderness is a psychologically risky choice, on an isolated trail after midnight.  But no – the theme wasn’t really kill-or-be-killed.  It was a tale of evil governments and a subjugated populace, of risking everything to subvert the oppression, of hope and loss and the triumph of the human spirit.  Not so different from Dickens, after all. 

“Great job,” I told my fellow racers, my fellow humans.

And then, above me, the aurora blossomed.  For hours, it teased the edges of my vision.  Look up for too long, and I’d trip over my own skis – but I looked up anyhow.  The lights danced. 

We had everything before us, we had nothing before us…

Luce’s Lodge, outbound.  There was going to be a shortcut on the return route, so there were only 35 miles to go!  Wait… only?  Not so long ago, 35 miles was further than I’d have been willing to ski in a day, even with a good night’s rest behind me and no wobble in my knees.  Sleep.  Must. Sleep.

And sleep I did, for three hours, in bunkroom number eight.   I have no idea who the other two people were, sacked out with me, although one of them kindly gave me a bunk and took the floor.  I protested, but he seemed to be instantly snoring. 

Rise and shine, creaky self!  Time to half-fall out of your bunk and lurch toward the outhouse!  Around the wooden tables in the lodge, someone was eating spaghetti and meatballs at 8 a.m.  Several people were downing pancakes.  Two were fast asleep with their heads face-down on the table.  My stomach roiled at the thought of the Lodge’s breakfast options.  The rich slabs of chocolate in my pack mocked me.  I sipped warm Gatorade. I went on.

We were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

Between Luce’s and Flathorn, I met the Irondog.  There was something oddly comic about a snowmachine race raging past me at 80mph while I slithered along at 3.  They were, in fact, going the other way.  They were catching air.  They were churning the trail with their powerful paddlewheels.  They probably thought I was a lunatic, especially when they chanced upon me peeing, skis still on, breezy river on all sides.  They gave me a polite berth.  I sipped my Gatorade, but my pee had turned orange and I remained untempted by Nacho Cheese Combos or Nutter Butters.

At Flathorn, the cozy cabin seemed so quiet that for a moment I thought I was the only one there.  Then I saw the six or seven forms, slumped and sprawled on chairs and couches, slack-jawed, half-lidded.  Obviously I’d reached the Zombie Apocalypse section of the race.

“Would you like some jambalaya?” asked the kindly hostess. 

She’d been up for two days and a night, too, and yet she gave me her chair, and mixed me some Tang.  I tried to make my anti-jambalaya groan a polite groan. 

She looked at me appraisingly.  “How about some plain white rice?” 

I ate two bowls, as grateful as I as was incoherent, and washed it down with more warm Tang -- an epicurean’s delight – before staggering out the door.

It was then, as I was setting out on that final 17 miles, that I spoke with the disenchanted young man who was dreaming of a snowmachine ride.  I knew exactly what he meant, and he knew that I would understand.  It doesn’t take much to pare us all down to exposed little husks – certainly not 18 years in the Bastille.  But I also hoped that he would not ask for that ride, or take it if it were offered.  It never occurred to me that I was supposed to be competing against the cabinful of zombies.  In my mind, they were on my team.

“It’s not really the two hundred dollars,” I said.  My smile used up precious energy reserves, but I tried to make it speak volumes.  There was something besides lack of funds that was driving him forward – his pride?  His stubbornness?  His dreams?  Only he knew, exactly.

“Yeah.”  He took another step, and another.  “Yeah.” He sighed, as if damning the demon on his own shoulder.  “I know.”

He was falling behind me, but I knew he’d finish.  I knew we both would.  And I figured Dickens might have understood if I’d said, with no intention of being oxymoronic, that we’re all in this together… and we’re all in this separately.

I started a third novel.  It was the story of a twelve-year-old boy who finds out he’s the son of Poseidon, and has to brave a series of Greco-Roman monsters to save what really matters.   It was a story of compassion, and tenacity, and what it means to be human.  In my addled brain, I imagined that Dickens would have liked that one, too.

Six hours later, I clambered into Jay’s truck, clutching my Finisher’s medallion.  Jay, who had come out onto the course in the darkness and walked the last mile at my side, plunked a quart tub of fresh melon onto my lap.  He told me it had been selected by the kids, who had somehow psychically known that it was about the only food that I’d want to cram into my mouth in juicy handfuls at midnight.

“Did you have a good time?” he asked for the third or fourth time, as if unconvinced by my previous efforts at a positive response.

I thought back on the race – every mile, every face and hand and smile, every flicker of light in the darkness and every word that poured into my head and indelibly mixed with and enriched the experience.  Ninety-five people started the race.  Eighty-two finished it, of which I was the seventy-third.  The last one had yet to stagger in, eight hours behind me, in the early light of Monday morning.

Why would anyone want to bike, run, or ski a hundred miles?  Every one of us had an answer to that “why,” but the only answer I could ever be completely sure of was my own -- and that one was too complicated to explain.  Especially with my mouth full of melon.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

Dickens understood.  And maybe, almost, I did too.  “Yes,” I told Jay with more confidence.  “It was great.”

It was the best of times.