Skiing

“No, you have to plant a pole when you turn!”

My father’s words are adamant and sound easy, but I know better than to fall for such simplicity. He has just watched me fly down a steep slope off of the highest chair lift at Mount Baker Ski Area, arms and poles flailing like wings as I weave drunkenly between moguls and steer away from the precious powder that will surely swallow me whole. I am not a great skier, and the infrequency of days like this one has made for little progress between seventh grade and now.

Plant a pole. I could respond that I am going too fast for a pole to stick into the snow for any useful amount of time, or that I have tried planting poles before and it has betrayed me as a turning technique, led to despairing crashes in forgotten corners of ski runs, tangled messes of skis, poles, and limbs. I have plenty of arguments, but I know it will not matter. The conversation will end, like so many others, with my asking “How?” and his responding “You just, you know, do it!” We speak different languages. His, the sparse words of the athletically gifted, who can see and do in one smooth motion. Mine, the careful expository steps of the uncoordinated, who must watch and listen and explain and practice and, yes, crash again and again.

I think about this athletic coaching—hours of trying to throw, shoot, or hit balls in the backyard, hours of frustration followed by long sabbaticals from sports—as I teach literature to high school students. “But how do you make yourself finish a book? How do you write something that you love?” they ask me every day, though never so directly, and I struggle for an answer. Who am I to teach them that? I read to experience another world and time, not bothered by the unfamiliar and bizarre encounters in literature. I have spent spare evenings reading Shakespeare and Donne aloud, around fireplaces or beside lakes, and I have burned away hours writing for the pleasure of arranging words into poems and stories. Reading and writing are, for me, as natural as skiing is for my father, an extension of self that is, to a point, unteachable.

As a teacher who pursued literature because I have always loved it, I can never fully relate to the challenges facing some of my students. I began this career hoping to make my students love literature as I do, but am beginning to realize that some of them may never pick up a novel after they graduate from high school. Passion for a subject is a nice treat to a teacher, but perhaps it is not a fair goal. How discouraging for all of the brilliant math teachers I have had over the years, if they were trying to lure me into an engineering career! No amount of explanation could make the numbers line up for me the way they did for those math-loving teachers.

I have instead begun to respect the moments that I catch students listening to the words we read, whether or not they enjoy the reading that gets them there. Students from North Seattle consider the dangers of the Salem witch trials, trying to apply the concepts of a small Puritan society the societies of family, school, city, and nation with which they are familiar. American students consider what life is like for Cuban immigrants in Florida, or twenty-first century students realize that the quarrel between the Montagues and the Capulets mirrors the Israeli-Palestinian feud. They learn empathy in these books; they are beginning to draw analogies between themselves and the fictional worlds we enter together. They may never read for pleasure, but if they can recognize the relationship between past and present, between art and the life it mirrors, then they have learned a more important skill. These students will become educated actors in a complex play that requires of them critical minds and wise decisions.

I pause as my father speeds down the slope ahead of me. The Cascades are shining to my right, smooth hills broken by black trees, branches weighed down with new snow. The grey sky promises more snow tonight, though the sun glows steadily behind the farthest hill. This is what I have learned from my mountain-obsessed dad, not a passion for skiing or hiking or climbing, but a love for the beautiful places they take me. I could stand here all day, watching this sky and these mountains. But my fingers are growing cold inside snowy fleece gloves, my toes freezing in plastic boots, and I know the view will be better from the swinging benches of Chair 8. With a shrug I push off down the slope, scratching the surface of the snow with my downhill pole in a vague attempt to turn left.