Chapter Nine #2
It was a lovely afternoon. Snow coated the trees, the crew of little blue and green and red and yellow skiers followed each other along a pair of tracks, and the sweet sounds of laughter rose from the trail before him.
Miles was proud: Olive and Wesley were quick studies, and even he found the old movements familiar again.
What a charmed way of moving through the world!
he thought. He felt like he was very fast; the only thing suggesting otherwise was that the children were faster, all of them.
But this was okay, his job was sweeper, he was very good at following; the problem was keeping up.
Indeed, the group probably would have abandoned him, were it not for a behavioral peculiarity in the children—a vice, one might call it—namely, that at every turn, every halt, en masse, they threw themselves down on the snow and began to eat it.
This wasn’t a surprise—Olive couldn’t make it down the driveway without scooping up a mouthful—but he’d thought it was because it was so exotic for a Californian child.
Apparently, however, Vermonter children were equally obsessed, and maybe even more so.
In fact, Tom had brought candy to give the kids so that they wouldn’t eat snow, not all of which was fresh, but they preferred the snow to candy.
Miles, who was at first grateful for this habit, since it gave him a chance to catch up with the group, was then disturbed by it, by the ferocity of the little munchers, their indifference to what might lie below the deceptively pure surface.
It seemed to meet some kind of biological need, and reminded him of a documentary he once had seen about pregnant women who secretly craved wall plaster, or parrots who ate clay to detoxify poisonous berries.
Was this what was happening? Were they detoxifying themselves?
Well, Bjorn wasn’t bothered, Bjorn said that in Norway eating snow was part of what made Norwegians such extraordinary skiers.
They skied for another half-hour, the trail twisting this way and that, before it re-emerged where they had started.
All twelve children were still with them.
The parents counted them off like beads on a rosary, and with comparable gravitas.
They hadn’t lost a single one! Dusk was falling; the children spread out into the field to play, bent and dashing in their multicolored jackets, like some vision conjured out of Brueghel.
Even in the falling light, Miles could see the flushed cheeks of his son and daughter as they begged him to stay longer, and—before he could answer—skied off to chase their newfound friends across the snowy fields, as if they had been doing so forever.
—
And so his new life began. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Miles Krzelewski, Parent Coach, gathered with the twelve children beneath the sign of the Snowshoe Hare and skied into the woods with Tom and Herb and Anne and Bjorn.
Together they scooted up the mountain, and together they glided along the trails, and together stopped and ate snow and picked themselves up and glided off again.
He thought at first that the novelty of the first day might wear off, but each day was more beautiful than the one before it.
Sometimes it was clear and bluebird-bright, and sometimes snow fell all around them and the world was wrapped in silence, and then the winter sun would break through the trees and the light—apricot, aquamarine—would appear against the horizon.
Then the cold would bite their cheeks and noses, and, watching his son and daughter, he’d feel tears rising in his eyes.
Certainly, it was from the cold, and from the cold only.
Kate came when she could, though she had never skied before, and felt uneasy on the downhills, and spent much of her time skiing with Miranda, who was Bjorning.
The cold made his wife’s cheeks blush, and, when he saw her across the field, Miles’s heart would lurch a little.
How wonderful was that little lurch! And if some of the blush was due to Bjorn, Miles didn’t begrudge her.
Even he marveled at the lineaments divine, the grace with which Bjorn seemed to ascend even the steepest mountain, the slight asymmetry in his stride that conjured up the image of the heroic rescue.
They left the dog at home. Dogs were banned from the trails, and even Giuseppe, who usually protested his owners’ impending departure by resolutely sitting in front of the door, seemed not to care, having developed an increasing interest in the house, wandering from room to room, sniffing and snorting just like he sniffed and snorted in the nooks of the old stone walls.
Were there changes to the Rumphius abode, fresh Rat-Lines?
At times they caught him scratching at the carpeting, but he stopped when they reprimanded him.
And if he seemed particularly interested in a low spot on the wall near the fireplace, and touched it with his paw and whined forlornly, then what of it?
Perhaps it even gave a warning to the mice.
—
On the sixth practice, Bjorn announced that the children were ready for “skate skiing.”
For there were two forms of skiing, the first, the “classic” style, having been invented by Ullr, and a second, “skating,” which had come into existence around 1985.
This Miles found astonishing—a form of movement through the world younger than Miles!
Given that he had never really devoted much thought to cross-country skiing before their arrival in Vermont, it was possible that he had once seen someone “skate ski,” in the mountains in California, or during a boring hour of the Olympics, but if so, he did not remember it, or did not register that it was any different from the classic technique.
But different it was, as he saw that afternoon, when Bjorn, in the middle of a lecture on the ski rescue of baby Prince Haakon in the year 1206, was alerted to the screaming of a mother whose child, unaffiliated with the program, was zooming down the hill and toward a marginally frozen lake.
It wasn’t exactly clear what happened next: Bjorn’s body made a movement a bit like a cartoon character who touches a wire of high voltage; then he shot across the snow, arms, legs moving in inscrutable coordination, but at extraordinary speed and with very little effort, reaching the speeding child just as she launched off of a berm, caught her mid-flight, set her down, handed her the basket end of his pole, and, with another flick of his leg, shot back across the snow with the child towing behind him.
Across the gathered parents, there was a collective “ah,” and even Miles could not help but find himself a little wobbly.
Visions of Oseberg rose before him.
Paratroopers descending from the winter sky. The fires burning. The terrorists leaping from the platform with cries of agonized defeat, as the dark-gray North Sea waters roared implacably.
Anyway, continued Bjorn, as he was saying…
—
There were three primary techniques to “skate skiing,” known felicitously, in Norwegian, as the “double dance,” the “single dance,” and “paddling.”
Dobbeldans. Enkeldans. Padling. They were all very different…
but they were similar…but different, no, the same, oh no, something was different, in the posture, in the timing.
Back when they’d been skiing in the tracks, Miles had had the sense that he was practicing the same sport as Bjorn, only slower (much slower), but now that the group had stepped out of the tracks and into the swath of soft corduroy that ran next to them, he found the rules of locomotion failing him entirely.
Of course, the children took to it instinctively.
So beautifully they moved! But how? What were they doing with their arms?
Which leg went first? And did they pole before or after gliding?
They couldn’t tell him. He watched, he puzzled; he swallowed his pride and asked Tom and Herb and Anne, and then the Norseman.
But no explaining seemed to do the trick.
He seemed to have grown an extra leg, and tripped over his arms, if that was possible.
At home, “how to” skiing videos filled his YouTube History.
How to Skate Ski. Frustration with Skate Skiing?
Skate Skiing—Why Is It So Difficult? Daily, he sat and scrutinized the clips, his shoulders moving up and down in sync with techno soundtracks, taking in the world of spandex, the perfect English spoken by the Scandinavians, the institutions of higher learning he had never heard of, the Swedish Winter Sports Research Centre, the Nordic Ski University, the Cross-Country Ski Academy.
But it did no good. No matter how many videos he watched.
No matter how fast he mastered Scandinavian orthography.
No matter how many documentaries about Jesper Sjokvist, Per-?yvind Torvik, or Kristina ?migun-V?hi he studied.
No matter how many interviews with beautiful Nordic people sitting cross-legged on their hygge couches, by their fires, drinking their hot chocolates.
On the trails, the children taking flight like flocks of little birds.
And he, behind, watching them disappear into the forest.
Was there a problem with his skis? Were they too slippery? But no, said Bjorn, when Miles asked him; they weren’t too slippery. Slippery was what his skis should be.
Already, it was almost the end of January. Winter, everyone reminded him, was nothing like it used to be; in two months, winter would be over. He decided to ask Olive.
—