Most Improved

At the front of the room, Ed (our fearless leader, multi-tasker extraordinaire, crazy-man of the back-country, and peerless interpretive dancer) advances to the next slide.

Most Improved: Nancy Fresco

What?  Oh.  Yikes.  I grin awkwardly, as if I expect people to boo. 

They don’t, of course. The applause is cheerful.  In fact, the crowd at the White Mountains 100 post-race party is almost impossibly cheerful.  About everything.  Folks are happily nibbling on veggies and hummus while comparing second-degree frostbite.  They are slurping down soup while discussing the hallucinations they experienced after forty-plus sleepless hours on the trail.  Nonetheless, I feel the need to demur in the face of their congratulations. 

“But… I cheated!  I switched from skis to a bike!” 

Given that more than half the 65 participants rode snow bikes on the hundred-miles of backcountry trails that make up the race course, “cheating” is perhaps not exactly the most politic term.  Still, I can’t shake the feeling that it is the right term. 

I take part in a fair number of long-distance races, but I’m definitely not a racer.  In 2011 and 2012, I was a skier in the White Mountains 100.  A classic skier.  A slow classic skier. Ok, fine, I was an outright shuffler.  This year, for a change, I rode my shiny new fat-tired bike – but for all its lovely purpleness and high-tech panache, I didn’t really expect it to make me anything more than modestly speedier.

Theoretically, any competitor – whether on wheels, on skis, or on their own two hoofs – can triumph in the 100. In reality, in the four years that the race has existed, the snow bikers have always won – albeit not by much.  In 2010, bikers took the top six slots, but skiers nabbed ten of the top twenty.  In 2011, a skier took fifth, less than an hour behind the lightning-fast top biker.  In 2012, skiers took fourth, seventh, eighth, and ninth.

This year’s race, however, was indubitably the most one-sided to date.  Due to bitterly cold conditions at the start and considerable snow accumulation later in the event, the advantage fell squarely to those who rolled rather than those who swished or tromped.  For the same reasons, it was a race even richer than usual in grisly tales of fortitude and exhaustion.  It was also, for me, a race full of peculiar surprises that left me feeling – well, feeling as if I really had somehow cheated.

Sunday, 8 a.m. 

Sixty-five crazy individuals crowd the trailhead at Mile 28 of the Eliot Highway, stomping, chattering, and lining up to enjoy the questionable joys of the port-a-potty.  It’s twenty below zero (Fahrenheit).  I may be just a trace too caffeinated.  Just… a… trace.  A quart of Cheerios are bouncing in my innards.  The snow is packed like white pavement.  I decide not to reduce my tire pressure at all.

Sunday, 10:09 a.m. 

Rolling, rolling… I haven’t taken out my audiobook, or even my snacks, for that matter.  Can I really be at Checkpoint #1 already?  But yes, there are my neighbors, in their new guise as volunteers: Mark, bundled up like a camera-wielding yeti, and Trusten, proffering the cocoa and Fritos.  Second breakfast of champions -- or hobbits.  I’m pretty sure I have more similarities to the latter, but so what?  I’m feeling as happy-go-lucky as Peregrine Took.

Sunday, 1:30 p.m. 

Wait… have I already completed the section of trail that was billed as being badly drifted, soft, a potential slog-fest of push-a-bike?  I did have to let out quite a lot of air in order to float my less-than-ladylike weight on my squishy tires.  I took a few remarkable headers into snowbanks when I hit soft spots in the flat, flat light, as clouds came in.  But I chalked that up to my monocularity and general klutziness.  Clambering out from under the huge purple bike and shaking the snow from my hair, my ears, and my pogies is par for the course when Nancy goes biking.  The key fact was, I was still riding. And now I am just outside Checkpoint #2, and…

…and…“Kevin?!”

I see Kevin plenty when I amble the hundred yards from my workplace to his, in order to buy more inner tubes or blinky lights and gossip about snow conditions and suchlike -- but he is not someone I am supposed to see during the White Mountains 100.  That is, I wasn’t supposed to see him after we all shouted, “three… two… one…go!”  For a turtle such as myself, Kevin is supposed to be nothing but a memory of fast-moving snowdust.  But here he is at mile 39.  And he is biking in the wrong direction.

Quickly, sadly – but with impressively upbeat resolve – he explains his dilemma:  a burst water system, drenched clothes that he’s spent the past two hours drying out at Checkpoint #2, and to top it off, a frostbitten stomach.  For (arguably) the fastest racer in Fairbanks, the race is already over.  There’s nothing I can do but remind him of what a great season he’s had, and wish him well as I head into Cache Mountain Cabin.

Sunday, 1:50 p.m.

One ultra-cheese-laden baked potato later, I have my second shock of the day. 

Joel. 

Forty-five miles of crazy-fast riding with the lead pack, a bad knee, and here he is, another amazing athlete, limping in to scratch from the race.  And here am I, slowpoke Nancy, with nothing to offer but a couple of heartfelt hugs and a handful of cookies.  It’s not fair, I think.  He helped me sort, crate, and transport all those cookies, and everything else, besides…

It’s at this point that I began to feel as if there’s something amiss.  How could I be going strong when these two are not?  I hit the trails again, potato-powered, yet still thrown off by my speedy friends’ misfortune. 

On.  And on. And up. And up.

Sunday, circa 5 p.m. 

This year, I get to actually see the Cache Mountain Divide.  In daylight.

Just as I summit, pushing my bike through the soft, steep snow, I hear a sound behind me: an even whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.  The sound of a skate-skier.  It is, of course, the super-human Mike Kramer.  That Mike should pass me is a given.  That it should take until mile 50 for him to do so is unthinkable.

In previous races, I plodded over the Divide near the back of the pack, and crossed the notorious ice lakes in pitch darkness.  Checkpoint #3 -- Windy Gap Cabin -- was a refuge I reached at about one in the morning. The cabin was always a glowing beacon signaling the first stage of exhaustion.  The forty miles of race that lay beyond it were the miles covered in a semi-somnolent and aching blur.

Sunday, 7:02 p.m.

This time, I arrive at a respectable suppertime, even if the supper I eat is not terribly respectable. 

“Number thirteen, checking out.”  I might have sounded kinda official, were my mouth not stuffed full of chocolate.

“Already?”  Teresa, an ever-smiling volunteer (not to mention a strong skier and darned talented research ecologist) has already given me the second-hand hug that Jay left for me, as well as the message that went with it: “Have fun!”  She’s seen me mixing the Gatorade double strength and chugging Coke (sugar and caffeine, gurgling down with a belch).  Still, she seems surprised that I am ready to take off. 

And so, in truth, am I.

My haste is certainly not attributable to competitiveness.  Although I ask after Jay, I don’t check the sign-in sheet to see how many people are ahead of me. My previous finishes placed me 54^th and 53^rd out of an annual field of 65.  For me, it’s always been about (as Jay wants me to be reminded) having fun.  And finishing.  And maintaining a standard-issue numbers of fingers and toes.  So far, so good.

Sunday, 7:17 p.m. 

I leave Windy Gap full of junk food and energy.  I leave because there is daylight still to burn; even in a mist of softly falling snow, I have some chance of witnessing the long and mountain-hedged valley that glides on down toward Borealis.  Or, in this case, rolls on down.  Bikes, I discover, are pretty darned swift in this section. 

There’s a skier ahead of me.  But… wait… I cannot possibly be passing Mike Kramer – can I?  My brief hello sounds apologetic.  He disappears behind me in the snowy twilight.  Still skating.

Sunday, 10:20 p.m.

Hello, Borealis Cabin.  I remember when you used to seem like an ambitious destination, a whole twenty miles from the trailhead.  When did twenty miles become the “home stretch”?   There is clearly something wrong with my life choices.  Hey, can I have one of those brownies with my ramen?  Or in my ramen.  Or, really, whatever. 

I’ve been plugged into my epic audiobook for quite some time now, and I’m at a dramatic point.  Actually, all of George R.R. Martin’s points are dramatic, or bloody, or licentious, or all of the above.  I need to find out what happens next, so I’d best be going. 

Wait… you there… relaxing in the upper bunk… you’re not… you can’t possibly be Janice Tower, can you?  Because, even though I don’t know you, I certainly know that I’m several orders of magnitude slower than you are.

Um… feel better, ok? This can’t be right.

Sunday, 10:40 p.m.

The kind and patient Borealis crew herd me upstream to cross Beaver Creek, avoiding the section that, earlier in the day, half-swallowed Ariana’s snowmachine in slushy overflow.  On the ensuing uphill I pass a fellow biker who wants to know how long the hill is.  “At least a mile,” I tell him, with ebullience that he does not seem to share.  I think I drank some more Coke at that last stop.  Did I?  Dunno.  Boy, this fresh snow sure is pretty.  The beam of my headlamp glitters on each flake.

Just after midnight, Monday morning

I need to stop at the trail shelter because Mark and Trusten are there.  Except that Trusten is asleep, and Mark takes a photo of me without actually noticing that it’s me.  What, are my frosty outerwear and androgynous-bundled shape not distinctive enough?  But Jim is there, and he is all good cheer.  When is he not?  He seems perplexed that I don’t want to ingest anything.  How could anyone resist that same Sam’s Club sack of corn nuts that came across from Checkpoint #1? 

“I just wanted to say hi!”  

Wickersham Wall is waiting for me, after all.

Some time after 1 a.m., Monday morning

At the Wall, I find Amy and Cody.  This isn’t right.  Amy, who generally inhabits an office just down the hall from mine, is probably faster than me at all things climate-change-ecology-related – but she and Cody are definitely faster than I am at all things bike-related.  But really, right now, “faster” is not an operative word, and logic is a bit foggy.  I turn off the pseudo-medieval clash of dynasties that has been pouring into my ears, and focus on putting one foot in front of the other.  Push.  Push.  Bicycle.  Snow.  Mountain.  Up.  Push.  We are not conversing.  We are pushing.  But somewhere along the way, I extract a promise of a ride home from the finish line from my overly-kind compatriots.  Asking favors of exhausted people in the wee hours is not exactly Kosher, it occurs to me.  But I ask anyhow.

I assume they will pull away from me after the wall, but somehow, the opposite is true.  In the Land of the Wobbly, the least wobbly takes the lead through the darkness – and that, peculiarly, is me.  I know these last six miles of trail so well that I feel them rather than seeing them.  Slow downhill, short steep up, long down, slow up, and… yes.  The last downhill.  Finally – and yet… already?

2:35 (ish) Monday morning

Ann, Ed’s counterpoint and tireless mastermind of Endurance North, is in the trailer – race headquarters – so I bang on the door to get my hug and my sort-of-official finish time.  We chat and laugh.  Andrew, who skied the course in the Nancy-speed league two years ago, comes to give me another hug, and to usher me into the cocoon of the heated tent.  A few other folks are sipping drinks or snuggled on cots.  I don’t ask how many people finished ahead of me – except for Jay.  Jay kicked butt.  I knew that already, though.

4:00 Monday morning

Just.  Keep Talking.  I have no idea what I’m talking about.  Work?  My kids?  Something inappropriately personal and humiliating?  It doesn’t matter, so long as I am keeping Amy awake on these snow-deep roads. 

Back at the wall tent, after many minutes spent staring blankly at one another, unable to fathom how we’d muster the energy and warmth to load all three bikes onto the car’s roof racks, Amy, Cody, and I became the beneficiaries of Andrew’s goodwill.  He made it look so easy, as I fumbled with my wheel and my hex wrench in the snow. Even in my tiredness, though, I knew I wasn’t exhausted.  Not really exhausted.  I know that further zone of Tired.  I’ve visited it in other years.

And so home.  And so to bed, where Jay wakes up enough to congratulate me, and I him, in blurry solidarity.  And so to sleep.

12:00 noon Monday

Oh, the sheer joy of snoring until noon, and then lolling on my window seat in sweats!  I slowly amble through my work emails.  I answer a few.  I’m a bit on the droopy and aching side, but I sigh deeply and contentedly.  Parents don’t get to sleep until noon.  Ever.  But other than approximately one minute of awake-time at 7:30, when the children were permitted to come kiss their comatose Mommy goodbye, I got my slumber. 

I check the race stats.  I discover that there are people still out there.  As in, a lot of people.  I note that, out of 65 competitors, 35 of them on bikes, Jay took sixth place.  This seems about right.  I also note that I took 15^th.  This seems all wrong. 

“Podium!” comments Ned.  Ned is one of the true stars of the event, in my books. While Kristen, Jay and I were on the trails, he took care of three six-year-olds with a joint penchant for naked trampolining.  It takes me a moment to figure out what he was talking about.  But yes, it seems I was the third woman across the (somewhat ambiguous) finish line.  I tend to forget about fine points such as gender.  Besides, this is clearly wrong, too.  I can’t be third, or fifteenth, or anything above thirtieth.  I must have cheated.  Somehow.

11:00 p.m., Monday

I’ve gotten a bit of work done today.  I’ve also picked up the kids from the bus stop, helped them with their homework, and read stories with them.  We’ve done dinnertime and baths and more playing and more stories and bedtime for little people. It’s time for me to go to bed, but just for good measure, I check the race stats, again – just one more time.  There are still people out there.  Thirty-nine hours into the race, longer than even I have ever been out there, they are still slogging.  They have seen not one sunset on the course, but two.  Nine of them.  They are still going.  One of them is Michael.  I’m pretty sure I told him the race was “fun,” in years past, as we chatted while dropping off our kids at preschool.  Another is our perky and optimistic neighbor, Sarah.  Jay and I have given her lots of race advice over supper.  At this point, is either of them coherent enough to hate me?  And why isn’t it me out there?  It ought to be me, shouldn’t it?  Those are my people, struggling on through the deepening snow. 

9:09 a.m. Tuesday

I am at work, being semi-productive.  But I’m also waiting, waiting. 

At last, at last, Sarah, the red lantern, crosses the finish line.  Forty-nine hours.  She has not slept.

8:00 p.m. Wednesday

Finally, here I am at the post-race party.  This, more than the race itself, is my event.  I booked the community center.  I hit Sam’s Club.  I made the ten-gallon pot of sausage-and-bean soup.  I baked the eleven loaves of bread and the four double-size batches of brownies.  I enslaved my husband and children – and the ever-patient Trusten – to arrange all the tables and chair, fruits and vegetables, cheeses and dips, cups and spoons.  Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.  Everyone has tales to tell.

Kevin is here, and so is Joel – both of them good sports to the core.  So is Michael, complete with frostbitten fingers and broad smile.  So is Sarah, although I wonder whether someone should send her home to sleep a bit more.  Tom (classic skier, playwright, Scrabble fanatic, and proud winner of the “Most Grunts and Moans” Award) skied seven hours slower this year than last, and has blisters the size of the Goodyear blimp -- yet cedes the Agony of de-Feet Award to Bob, uncontested.  On that score, no one can ever compete with grinning, imperturbable Bob.  Don’t look at the photos, just trust me on this one.

My own “award” is no more serious than any of the others.  There are no prizes.  In the real world, outside of this steam-and-spices-cozy room, no one -- except for a few stalwart and over-loyal friends and family members -- cares who won, who lost, who was “Racer of the Year” (yes, you, Jay), or who got honors for excessive puking. 

And within this room? 

Ah.  There, I realize, is the beauty of it.  Within this room, we all care.  We shout out stories.  Most of them are funny, in a Type-Two fun-after-the-fact kind of way. All of them have merit.  No one is less deserving of credit, or kudos, or attention, or cheers: not the ultra-fast guy who had to scratch, with red frozen welts on his stomach (yeah, he showed them to me – chicks dig that kinda thing); not the woman who didn’t quite make the 48-hour cutoff; not the winner, Tim, who crossed the line in a breathtaking 10.8 hours; not the indomitable Mike, who skated on until 5 a.m.; not the Carrolls, who finished at the next 5 a.m.; not Laura, who beat everyone else on foot (boys and girls both); not the good-humored medic who flooded her snowmachine; not the “crossing guards” at Beaver Creek. 

The sloggers, the plodders, the zoomers, the blistered and goofy and crazy – it takes all sixty-five, plus a horde of amazing volunteers and two astonishing Race Directors, to make the White Mountains 100 what it is.  It’s not really one race, but sixty-five different races, and then some.

So, yes, I cheated.  I totally, utterly cheated by switching from skis (which would have placed me in the Monday Night of Doom crowd) to a bike (which still placed me almost eight hours behind the winner, because when all is said and done, I’m Just Not Fast).  But, on the other hand, I didn’t cheat at all, because the only person I was racing against was me. (It’s always a tie.)

“Have fun,” Jay told me. 

“Have fun,” Teresa passed on, with a hug. 

“Have fun,” I reminded myself. 

Yes.  Yes, I did have fun.  I wasn’t really “most improved” – but so what?  I wasn’t trying to be “improved” any more than I was trying to cheat.  Snowbike or no snowbike, I had a blast. 

I wonder how I should do the race next year?

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.”

Race from the start

“It takes remarkably little for children to develop in-group preferences. Rebecca Bigler ran an experiment in three preschool classrooms, where 4- and 5-year-olds were lined up and given T shirts. Half the kids were randomly given blue T shirts, half red. The children wore the shirts for three weeks. During that time, the teachers never mentioned their colors and never grouped the kids by shirt color. The kids didn't segregate in their behavior. They played with each other freely at recess. But when asked which color team was better to belong to, or which team might win a race, they chose their own color. They believed they were smarter than the other color. "The Reds never showed hatred for Blues," Bigler observed. "It was more like, 'Blues are fine, but not as good as us.' "When Reds were asked how many Reds were nice, they'd answer, "All of us." Asked how many Blues were nice, they'd answer, "Some." Some of the Blues were mean, and some were dumb—but not the Reds.”

[from Nurtureshock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, 2009]

Nurtureshock was such a good read that it may have persuaded me to stop hiding from self-improving literature.  It was entertaining enough to distract me (via mp3) from my poor snow-biking skills, and scientific enough to satisfy my nerdy skepticism.  It also prodded me directly in my liberal-white-middle-class-parent complacency.  Because, according to the authors – and they had some compelling studies to back them up -- kids are inherently racist.   

Wait, I thought (still pedaling along), not my kids!  Or… were they? 

At some level, I already knew that Bronson and Merryman were right.  Children, like pro-sports-team fans, are obnoxiously zealous in their us-versus-them labeling and loyalties.  It’s not that babies are born with a color preference; it’s just that as soon as the mental neurons start firing, they start categorizing.  Kids are obsessed with “good guys” and “bad guys.” They avidly sort the world into “like me” and “not like me.”   According to a wealth of studies, countering this tendency takes more than vague platitudes about diversity, tiresome Dora stories, and footage of President Obama.  Little white kids whose well-meaning parents Just Don’t Talk About It… end up Just Not Getting It. 

The data were pretty clear.  What wasn’t clear was whether I was one of those lily-livered parents.  Were Molly and Lizzy getting mixed messages about race, I wondered?  Were they getting any messages at all?

Oh, I’d made sporadic efforts, in keeping with the generally distracted and unplanned nature of my parenting. In preschool, my kids met several peers who didn’t look much like their mommies or daddies, and we talked about it a bit, in the context of explaining adoption.  One of their best friends since infancy looks – at least at a glance -- more like her Native Alaskan daddy than like her blonde mommy.  I bumbled my way through some rambling Fairbanks-centric history lessons, struggling with an audience who could not fathom how the “long ago” of the gold miners was different from the “REALLY long ago” of the Bering Land Bridge.  My children were interested in the idea that some people had lived here for generations following a subsistence lifestyle, while others had arrived far more recently, following a lifestyle that included canned Spam, an obsessive interest in shiny or stinky stuff under the earth, and bad politics.  Nonetheless, the kids were confused.  No one in Fred Meyer was wearing cool outfits like the ones on display at the University Museum, and (unlike the New York suburbanites of my own childhood) most of the white people they know pick berries and eat moose, too.  I felt kind of dumb for trying. 

Now I wondered how well my kids had processed all this partial information.  I dredged my memory for clues.

I recalled one summer day when I’d been cajoling my then-four-year-olds to do some actual scrubbing in the bathtub, rather than just playing with their massive fleet of plastic toys. Molly paused in her lack-of-washing and stared down and her small, pinkish self.  She gave herself quite a perusal.  Then she announced, “I wish I was Tim!” 

“Um…”  I could hear Freud snickering at me.  Tim was one of her preschool buddies, a precocious and outgoing little guy. At a recent playdate at his parents’ farm, all the kids had ended up joyfully naked. “Why?” I asked, carefully.

She looked up at me with the ‘you-are-stupid’ look that somehow she’d managed to perfect before hitting kindergarten.  “Because then I wouldn’t have to wear sunscreen,” she explained. 

Well, duh, Mommy.  Tim’s parents had adopted him from Ethiopia.

Ok, so at age four, my white daughter wanted to be a black boy.  An unlikely aspiration, perhaps, but not precisely a racist one.

Fast-forward a year or so. 

Lizzy stood at the cash register at Value Village, counting out three dollars in dimes. And nickels.  And pennies.  Coins accumulated in little heaps.  Occasionally she lost count and had to recount a pile. All the while, she was cradling her intended purchase -- gently but possessively – with its head nestled on her shoulder, amidst Lizzy’s fine pale hair.

It was a doll. Not a baby-doll, but a little-kid doll, perhaps intended to look about Lizzy’s own age – which, at the time, was only five. It had a soft, cuddly body and a plastic face with a sweet smile and wide eyes.  Its thick black hair was tied with ribbons, and its plastic-and-cloth skin was a deep shade of brown. 

Luckily, there was no line behind us at the register.  But still, I fidgeted anxiously, sure that we must be trying the patience of the young cashier.  Even I was getting twitchy.  (Yes, kid, I’m vaguely proud that you can count by fives so well, but can you do it faster?)

To my surprise, though, I found that the cashier wasn’t frowning or tapping her foot.  In fact, a small smile was playing on her lips.  “Is this your own money?” she asked her small customer.

Molly answered for her.  (This happens a lot. Sometimes I try to curtail it, and sometimes I give up; consistent parenting is not my strong suit.) “We saved our allowances,” she announced proudly.  Her purchase, an only-slightly-used-looking teddy, was already safely bagged. 

Lizzy had finally completed her laborious calculations.  Cautiously, she held out the doll so that its price code could be scanned ($2.99).  She used both hands, earnest as a new parent allowing a stranger to admire her infant.  Now, the joy of her purchase overwhelmed her reticence.  With almost palpable ecstasy wreathing her face, she beamed up at the cashier.  “Isn’t she beautiful?” she sighed. 

The cashier smiled back down at her as the scanner beeped.  “So… you got to choose whatever you wanted, with your own money?”  She relinquished the paid-for item back to its new owner.

“Yes,” my daughter breathed.  “I chose her all by myself.”  She clasped the doll to her chicken-ribbed little chest.  “Isn’t she BEAUTIFUL?” she repeated.

The young woman’s smile was large and genuine as she smiled at this tiny little blonde person and her wealth of pennies.   Her own hair was thick and black.  Her own skin was a deep rich shade of chocolate brown. “Yes,” the cashier said.  “Yes, she is beautiful.” 

So far so good.  Such cultural sensitivity!  A happy parenting moment!  Then the doll came home.  I asked Lizzy what name she had chosen.

“Gingersnap,” Lizzy announced with finality.

I winced.  It sounded like some kind of weird condescending southern nickname.  Why ain’t that swee-ut, Aunt Jemima makes pancakes, and her little pickaninny Gingersnap bakes cookies!  I teetered on the brink of trying to explain this to Lizzy, of trying to convince her to name her doll something respectable like Rachel or Susan.  But I knew that to her, the name was mellifluous, delicious, complimentary, and utterly without stereotype or association.  Growing up, I played with dolls named “Bedtime,” “Good Girl,” and “Fat Doll.”  Who was I to talk?  Besides, I couldn’t find the courage or the words to explain hundreds of years of enslavement, oppression, colonialism, and hatred to someone whose concept of bad human  behavior included hair-pulling or sneaking a piece of candy.  Gingersnap it was.  And Gingersnap was beloved.

Soon after the purchase of Gingersnap, Martin Luther King Jr. Day (2012) rolled around.  It occurred to me that I should talk about race, and the shameful underbelly of American history.  I made a feeble attempt to start a discussion.  But my kids beat me to it. 

“Oh, we already learned all about him,” Molly told me, with the kind of confidence of knowledge that is only possible among people who have recently lost their first baby teeth.  She rummaged in her ladybug backpack and extracted a coloring page.  It depicted two boxes of crayons – the kind of simple eight-packs that were the industry standard in her kindergarten class.  She had colored the first box entirely blue.  The box itself was blue.  So was every crayon.  The second box was more standard, a rainbow of hues.  “It’s better if you have all the colors,” Molly explained. 

I have a dream…

“Yes,” I agreed, both pleased and disappointed by this opportunity to duck the uglier side of the subject.  “All colors of crayons, and all colors of people.” 

Both kids nodded, beaming because Mommy understood the lesson.  With a mental nod to Frederick Douglas, Rosa Parks, William Paul, and thousands of others -- the President not the least of them -- I reassured myself that my kids, while possibly deeply confused about the role of Crayola in civil rights, were not racist. And I left it at that. Again.

But that was last year. 

Martin Luther King Day rolled around again in 2013, and now the kids were six – a whole twenty percent more mature.  Now they rode the school bus.  Now they shared recess with second and even third graders.  What had they already overheard?  What might they overhear in the future?

Too clearly, I recalled the divisiveness that gradually encroached throughout my own childhood – not just with regard to race, but with regard to practically everything.  In first grade, I played with Aaron, with Daniel, with Doris (who was Hispanic) and with Yvette (who was black).  But after about age six or seven, social pressure dictated that boys didn’t play with girls, and the Puerto Rican and Haitian kids started socializing mainly amongst their own groups.  I remember telling my mother that Aaron could not come home with me on the bus to play, because other kids would make fun of us; we were eight.  I recall the second graders who had received First Communion surrounding shy Jennifer, who had not, and telling her that she was going to Hell.  Even the arbitrary division of the Reds and the Blues by Coach Mitchell for Field Day resulted in vehement Us and Them cliques on the playground.  I was discomfited. 

Then I read Nurtureshock.

I started talking with my kids.  We talked about the real Martin Luther King Jr., not the crayon version.  We talked about slavery.  We talked about civil rights, and segregation, and Whites Only.  We talked about women’s suffrage, and No Irish Need Apply, and the broad swath of our pock-marked, ugly, struggling history.

A few days ago, I read my children a bedtime story about the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins of 1960.  When the story was over, both kids looked troubled, and thoughtful – especially Molly.  She’s prone to empathy.  At last she said, “I don’t think people will ever be that way again.”

Oh, Molly…

I would have liked to have agreed with her, and left it at that.  But if we’re going to continue changing the world, then pretty soon, my generation is going to need her generation’s help.  So I told my six-year-olds about extant racism, modern-day social injustice, and ongoing efforts to educate away hatred – close to home, and overseas. 

It broke my heart.  But it also felt deeply, wonderfully honest.

I tucked the kids into their little-person-sized bunk beds, top and bottom.  Under her fuzzy blue blanket – the one that used to be Daddy’s when he was little -- Lizzy cuddled up with her doll.  Her beautiful doll.  Her doll with the dark eyes, indubitably tangled black hair, and deep brown skin. 

Sleep tight, Lizzy.  Sleep tight, Gingersnap.

How to be a Zero

Your Overall Performance…

Yes?  Yes?  I wasn’t sure I bought into the idea that this webpage was going to tell me anything non-bogus, let alone insightful, but I was kind of curious.  I mean, who wouldn’t want the scoop on their Overall Performance? 

No, this was not an I.Q. quiz.  Nor did it claim it would tell me what my patronus is, what video game character I am channeling, or how many  minutes I’d survive after the Zombie Apocalypse. The test at hand had been provided by the BBC’s Science and Nature department – not exactly peer-reviewed literature, but dorky enough to seem credible.  The purported goal of the survey was to provide “an indication of where you fall in the male-female brain continuum.”

In truth, the whole concept made me squirm.  What is “brain-sex”, exactly? I’ve always railed against the mindset that brought us Teen-Talk-Barbie (“Math class is tough!”)  I’ve always maintained that beyond the obvious hormonal and physical differences, the two genders aren’t as inscrutably alien to one another as we insist on pretending they are.   Women can change tires!  Men can change diapers!  Come on, people, trendy books notwithstanding, we are not actually from different planets.

Or… are we?  Being of an analytical mindset (how very male of me), I’ve never given much credence to joke-memes about male vs. female shopping habits, communication habits, and showering habits (except to note that I am invariably doing it wrong, and don’t own a loufa).   However, present me with a few salient facts about hemisphere dominance and the relative sizes of the inferior-parietal lobule, the limbic system, and the parietal region, and I start to take notice. 

It seems that researchers have found measurable differences in brain structure and function, which yield significant disparities in performance.  According to the BBC webpage, the average female respondent tipped the scales at 50 points in the “womanly” direction.  The average man leveraged fifty points on the opposite trajectory.  As I worked on the test, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering where I’d fall – and I couldn’t prevent my defensive pre-reaction:   Hey, whose inferior-parietal lobule are you calling “small,” buddy?

I’ve always felt justified in my knee-jerk reaction to gender rules.  After all, many of the cultural trimmings and trapping of male vs. female are so obviously arbitrary.  The color pink is not scientifically linked to estrogen.  George Washington and his compadres wore high heels.  Tailors and seamstresses do exactly the same job.  In some cultures, only women are allowed to go fishing.  And I do like a man in a kilt.  

Besides, I’ve known for a long time – forever, possibly – that I can’t cram myself into the mold of most female stereotypes.  I have no sense of fashion, I am terribly out of practice at crying, I studiously avoid shopping, and I sigh longingly over power tools, science fiction, and higher mathematics. 

Then again, male stereotypes don’t usually do it for me either.   Beer pretty much tastes like sump-water to me, and I don’t give a rat’s fundament what kind of vehicle you drive.  I enjoy reading aloud Shakespeare. I reserve the right to snuggle with cats and small children

I sometimes think I come across as a defensive boor in my all-female writers’ group; I keep trying to inject science and logical theory into other people’s Very Personal Essays, and I want the novelist to know whodunnit before she crafts the first three chapters of the murder mystery.  This group is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a girly bunch of females.  This is a split-your-own wood kind of crowd.  And yet I still feel, sometimes, a bit like an interloper.

On the other hand, not surprisingly, I also feel like an interloper when I’m part of a boys’ club, although (thanks to the good graces of some fantastic male friends) I’ve been there often enough.  Many years ago, I spent three summers working on a trail crew with a daunting gender ratio.  Despite my participation in wrestling matches, Tabasco-drinking dares, and farting contests, I never got male bonding 100% right.  I wrestled without first consuming cheap canned Budweiser, and I drew the line at eating horseflies on a Ritz cracker.

In other words, I screw things up in both directions.  I tend to think that when a woman tells me her problems, it’s because she wants me to solve them, rather than Just Listen.  Note to self: she doesn’t.  But when a good male friend tells me about his softball victories – or lack thereof – I’m not really there for him the way I should be, either. 

Could a BBC brain-quiz explain any of this? I had my doubts.

Whatever was up with my brain, I was pretty sure it was a congenital and permanent condition. As a kid, I adored climbing trees, making up stories, wrestling, giggling, playing checkers, and playing with dolls.  This mostly worked out fine; I made up stories in trees, giggled while wrestling, and played checkers with my dolls (yes, really).  In the years that followed, I didn’t mind being the only girl in the Huntington Public Library Dungeons and Dragons Club, and the only girl on the fifteen-person Metropolitan New York All-Stars Mathlete team… three years running.  (We were bused to Penn State to compete in the national championships.  We played bridge, discussed calculus, and did logic problems en route.  One year the bus caught fire in the middle of the night on the way home.  It was, in a word, awesome.)

On the flip side, I was also happy to attend all-girls sleepover parties and watch LadyHawke and The Princess Bride approximately eleventeen times.  Moreover, there was a goodly portion of my brain that deeply, secretly, shame-facedly, wanted Sweet Wesley to accompany my sorry little teenaged self through the Fire Swamp. I was pretty sure I’d be more use against the ROUS’s than Buttercup, but still… Farm Boy?  Fetch me that linear algebra textbook…

Such daydreams were clearly less-than-obvious to all the people who, over the years, implied -- or flat-out stated -- that I was most definitely a lesbian, or that I ought to be attracted to women.   What’s a butch straight girl to do? [Note: moving to Alaska helps]. Someone out there is probably cursing my flippancy, because being gay in our society – or any society – still is not piece of cake.  I know that.  I also know that it’s not a choice, one way or another, because it was never my piece of cake.

Annoyed at assumptions and generalizations, I tried to compartmentalize.  Gender differences were merely physical, I decided.  Brains were gender-neutral.  Brains were unbiased.  Brains were fair.  But the data was stacking up against me.  And now, here was a test purporting to measure – quantitatively! – mental traits that really do differ, on average, between the XYs and the XXs. 

What traits were they, exactly?

The results are based on the angles, spot the difference, 3D shapes, and words tasks.

Even as I worked my way through the test, I felt the scores slotting into place.  Angles?  That was probably a boy-task, but it didn’t seem too hard.  Words?  Oh, indubitably, I am an unrepentant logophile, girlishly besotted with perspicacious badinage.  Spot the Difference was a different story.  Women are supposed to notice subtleties – in shades of lip gloss, in friends’ hairstyles -- but I am the sort of person who permanently loses a pair of heavy-weight hiking boots in a thousand-square-foot home, and who once failed to notice when her housemate shaved off his full beard.  If asked to determine what items have been removed or rearranged from an arbitrary assortment of line-drawings of teapots, lawn chairs, and hats, my brain sneaks away to hide.  On the other hand, mentally rotating objects… well… don’t tell anyone, but I do it even when not completing online quizzes, just for kicks. 

Of course, life isn’t all rotating objects and missing teapots.  What about other purported differences between men and women?  What about the social, emotional, and communication stuff, the “He just doesn’t understand me!” stuff?  Truth be told, I’m even more leery of this kind of touchy-feely analysis than I am of Spot the Differences.  However, this BBC website wasn’t the only one I’d stumbled upon in my virtual perambulations.  The internet is always a great way to erode your sense of self and waste time, all in one simple step. 

Based on the fairy reputable Baron Cohen indices, I’d already learned that I “empathize” (that is, obsess about other people’s feelings) about as well as the average woman.  I “systematize” (which, as far as I can tell, means act like a cross between a train-spotter and a computer geek) about as well as the average man.   No mention was made of how either of these scores panned out in terms of diaper-changing and tire-changing, but I had my suspicions that whatever the mold was, I wouldn’t fit it.

And now, here was a moment of truth.  Your Overall Performance…

I scrolled down.

Your personal brain score: Zero.

Ah.  Well then. 

In a world of male 50s and female 50s, I was hanging at the fulcrum, in no-brain’s-land.  I was a Zero.  A Nothing.  A Nada.  And I wasn’t one bit surprised

In a way, it was relief to earn scores – scientific results! -- that so tidily matched my suspicions.  Still, the inevitability didn’t help me much in knowing what to do with my new label as the Null Set.  If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, was I out charting my own interplanetary orbit?  Did I simply not belong in anyone’s gravity well?  Was I likely to be evicted from my writers’ group?  Was I recalled with disdain by my trail crew friends?

Or… was there perhaps a role in this world for a Zero, after all?

As I pondered my Zero-ness, it occurred to me that in all-female groups I sometimes play the (annoying, but perhaps balancing) role of devil’s advocate.  What do you want with wilting flowers in the middle of February?  So what if he pees in the shower?  So what if he mentally rotates objects?  C’mon, it’s fine, all guys do it. 

And in male groups?  Well, I may not have gotten things 100% right among the Tabasco-drinkers, but maybe it was sometimes better to be a little bit wrong.  On trail crew, I was useful as a Giver of Backrubs.  Straight boys will not do this for each other, ever, no matter how long a day they have put in with a crowbar and shovel -- but they are so pleadingly grateful for a girl with strong, callused hands.  I also read aloud in the tent at night, like a peculiarly mud-splattered parody of a Cub Scout leader.  All those large, sweaty guys begged for just one more chapter of the Hobbit. 

I now realized another salient fact, too.  The bell-shaped curves of Normal Distributions being what they are, I am not the only Zero out here.  Yes, science shows that male and female brains differ, but they differ on average.  Even the BBC page admitted to the word “continuum”.  Statistics are meaningful at the population level, but they tell you nothing about whether little Susie thinks that Math Class is Tough.   Maybe Susie likes to mentally rotate objects.  Maybe – shocker – she’s a Zero too.  If so, I want to meet her.

When I find myself with other Zeros – suspected or confirmed, male or female – I feel a thrill of camaraderie.  When I encounter someone who mixes math-nerdery and word-nerdy into a single fruity cocktail, who sees no inconsistency in cracking raunchy jokes during a Serious Discussion of Feelings,  who gets wildly distracted by trying to explain an esoteric scientific principle to a small child snuggled on his or her lap… I get it.  We’re the Zeros.  We’re bilingual. We’re interplanetary.  We’re at once both total misfits and missing links.

I still get all edgy when too many “him vs. her” jokes clog my Facebook page.  I still want to eviscerate Teen Talk Barbie.  But I don’t need to deny the existence of Venus.  I don’t have to pout at the mention of Mars.  Even if I don’t inhabit one of those celestial orbs, I’m not adrift in space.  After all, there is a planet between the second and fourth rocks from the Sun… and I hear it has a way better atmosphere.