I’VE JUST RETURNED from a school-visit trip to inner California, to a city south of Sacramento. These visits are always glad events on both sides: I get paid, kids get entertained, and some of them will remember a few of the things I’ve said. I do school visits because kids should know that art in writing and images isn’t generated by a computer program, but by real, thinking, wage-earning, involved people.
Candidly, it may be better for me than for them. I’m thrown into direct dialogue with my primary audience. Their questions and comments are navigation tools. I engineer a channel for them to talk to me, and through me to the editors and publishers. The line is, for a brief time, open.
And they have something to say. I hear what interests them and sometimes what bores them. I often ask them what they’d like to read about but this isn’t a fair or a productive question. They like what they know. It would take unusual creativity and perception for anyone to choose a fresh topic. Look at the books we read as adults. Do we know just what we want? No, we’re constantly surprised at the subjects. Kids are even less prepared to select a shelf in the library as their own.
When I’m talking to kids I’m moving constantly, walking among them, singling out this one or that one to answer a question we’re considering, touching a head or shoulder or gently teasing someone who looks like he or she will enjoy it. There’s a kinetic component to the interaction and an intimacy I couldn’t get from a stage. I’ve used a microphone once and I didn’t like it, though at the end of a day my voice is strained.
I have a few theme-sets as PowerPoint programs, usually about art and its important place in life. I insist that the image of art as a lovely creative pastime is ridiculous; art is hard. I ask them to look around them: everything they see was designed, for better or worse. The linoleum under their feet, the acoustic tile overhead, the clothes they wear, the lighting fixtures above and the building around them – all products of an artistic process, a balance of selections. My visit gives them a glimpse of a life in the arts.
I have one program called “How to Rite Gud,” about the importance of the one great art, communication. It underscores the absolute necessity of knowing how to use your own language to get what you want and need. It is, I tell them, their job for the next sixty years, to reach through the glass wall of alienation with the tool of language.
After the set-piece I show them some of my illustrations. I tell them what I was trying to communicate, and I sometimes ask them what they see in the illustration before I address it. I describe some of the illustration tools I used – cutaways, ghostaways, simplification, compressed story-telling, special perspective, &c. After they’re “entertained” by pictures, I throw the last half of my visit open to questions.
The situations aren’t always ideal, the audience isn’t always perfectly quiet (especially little guys – I speak to kindergartens and up through high school). Between the slide show and questions I normally ask them to stand up, raise their hands up, and bounce up and down on their toes for a few seconds, then sit down all at once to make a big noise. It bleeds off some energy and resets their attention. Before the first group of students enter I learn from the teachers what the local “quiet” signal is – usually two fingers held up; one by one kids hold up their two fingers until everyone is quiet. I use it sparingly and it’s seldom needed.
This format has worked well. The questions take up more time than we normally have. One of the teachers usually gives me a five-minute hand sign and I ask for three or four more questions. There are always kids who grouse that they didn’t get to ask their question. It’s a lively interplay. But part of my first day’s visit went badly.
The first of three session was with a cafeteria full of 4th through 6th graders. Delightful: lots of questions, high interest, good humor and attention, eager to be joshed and wowed. Grand. The last session was kindergarten through second grade, antsy but dear, sweet-faced and willing to be pleased. Unblunted happiness. Between these two, however, was an ordeal with 7th & 8th graders, largely black and Hispanic kids. For a time I thought there was an excellent chance of being lynched.
They were armored. Nothing I could throw at them went home, nothing called up a reaction, nothing roused them out of a sullen, show-me torpor. They talked openly and jostled one-another during the first part of my presentation. A few incipient scuffles between jousting boys were suppressed by teachers who often looked at me with hopelessness and raised their hands, “What can I do?” Curiously, there was not a gender break in the rowdy but pouting behavior that I could mine for reaction: the girls were as distant and cold as the boys.
I could not cajole or enlist or pry forth any participation. I can usually get someone wearing a decorated sweatshirt to stand up and point out that the lettering on the shirt, the shirt itself, the color, the fabric was all designed, a production of the arts. I can usually call out someone’s hair style and ask if this was a piece of personal art. Not a single member would venture a question or participate. Falling back on a well-used standby, I picked this one and that one, “What design arts are in your life?” “Do you know any artists?” “Does art touch your life?” Nothing. Nothing beyond “I don’t know.” There was no voltage bridge between my energy and their dark entrenchment. I failed them.
How should I have confronted them? I tried to insist that their lives or at least the quality of their lives depended on learning some of the arts of communication. I offered them a window of opportunity, in this school, at this time, to talk about the barriers they faced. They must, I said, become culturally literate – they must learn the common ground of speech and images the world recognizes as a useful language as their only path to employment and inclusion. I tried to explain that their conscious span of, say, ten years acquaintance with a restricted culture couldn’t help them through the Big Culture of the nation. How could a splinter culture see them through difficulties and disappointments to a good life, a better life than they and their parents knew. Unless they fashioned the tools of their own survival in this school’s classroom workshops they would die . . . if not factually, spiritually; if not now, soon, much too soon. Nothing.
How to reach them? What cipher could decrypt their private redoubt of comfortable boredom?
It set me to wondering how they view life. Do they even see themselves surviving beyond next year? Do they have goals?
Perhaps that’s what I should have asked: What are your goals? What do you want from life? What do you think life might provide for you? How hard will you work for it? Do you feel school prepares you for it? Or do you feel so lost that the effort to succeed is a painful reminder of inevitable failure?
They live in a heavy gang area. Entrances to the neighborhood turfs are marked with graffiti pronouncements that the land belongs to Black Bloods or other gang identities. Would I want to belong to something larger than my family if I lived in this blasted, flat, monotonous, and financially forsaken plain? Bedsheet curtains at grimed windows, lifeless streets, 60% unemployment among the parents of these preternaturally aged, pathologically dispirited, soul-diluted children. Their principal shook her head as she told me that of the 58 students in the 8th grade, 38 are failing in both language and math.
Who can swoop in to save them? A black or Hispanic god-breathing evangelist? A born-again athlete? A boxer with a message? A reformed criminal? A tough hero? But these kids don’t have heroes as I knew them at their age. Heroes have always offered us a handle to lift and guide kids. Buffalo Bill isn’t the kind of role model they buy. A pimp-daddy, wealthy, dark-side rapper with a tough posse and a fly ride might be impressive, but what useful message could he suggest? And what message do they need to stir their energy toward something positive?
It’s important to recognize that these aren’t stupid kids. They represent the normal span of intelligence in any school, whether or not they bother to fill out all the blanks on the intelligence tests. All tests are snares to their suspicious instincts. Don’t expect tabular data to represent them or correlate any theory. Any cure or balm to the situation must be intuitive and inventive. Where are the handles? What are their pressure points? What can their immediate society offer to give or take away that can guide them? The carrot or the stick or both, applied lavishly?
Perhaps I can build a better presentation that will call up some recognition of reality. But I’m a middle-class whitebread writer and carry no persuasive credentials – no wealth, power, sports fame. What can I offer them?
In my last session of the day, the faces of the little guys, kindergarten through 2nd grade, were like delivering angels. They shone with delight and each of them wanted to shake my hand. Driving back to the motel I asked myself if those seraphic smiles would be worn down into the dishwater gray depression I confronted in the morning. I’m afraid for them, K through 12.
Braxinoso speaks:
Certainly an inordinate concern for reaching children marginalized by a short-sighted society smacks of narcissism, as if Adkins, himself, could turn their attention toward productive thoughts. The deadening effects of poverty and the low priority we place on education is systemic. Hundreds of fine teachers and dozens of caring visitors won't undo that Gordian knot, and this particular class of adolescents may be forfeit.
Braxinoso
Monday, February 25, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
Taking the Serum to Nome
The push and the glide, the rhythmic hiss of displaced snow, the push of cold air against your cheeks, the near-supernatural brightness of sunlight on white snow, and the balanced beat of legs and arms, legs and arms. When it’s going well and the day is kind, cross-country skiing can be as uplifting as a Billy Graham Revival with cocktails.
Between the puffing and gasping.
No sport commonly practiced by homo suburbia demands as much sweat and toil, but few offer such gleaming rewards.
It had been a full twenty years since I’d skied on the skinny boards. I’d kept my form (I told myself) by occasionally working out on the NordicTrak, whoosh, whoosh. For years I’d lunged along on the Trak, picturing myself taking the critical serum to afflicted Nome, pursued by the evil Count Kamarov and his Hired Thugs. Whoosh, whoosh. I always made it.
Swan and I presented ourselves at the Tahoe Nordic Track Center, near the Lake. My cherished and carefully preserved cross-country skis and boots were, alas, laid aside at my daughter’s home in Florida. I must remember to pick them up on the way to my next X-country adventure. So the rental desk asked the usual questions: weight, height, age. Normal “senior” status is over sixty-five. For cross-country “senior” is over sixty, and there are murmurs of lowering it to forty. We get a price break. I was asked whether I wished to “stride” or “skate.” This went over my tonsured head.
Apparently there are X-C Jocks who sneer at the antique notion of kick-and-glide, favoring a wide-stance, out-angled skating stroke, like roller-skating with your shoes epoxyed to twin skateboards. This requires the energy normally necessary to push the Sausalito Ferry through the water. I saw some of these showboats pass. No envy.
With only a hint of sneer the bearded athlete-in-bondage at the rental racks gave me a pair of stride skis. Itty-bitty things. About as wide as a table knife and ridiculously short. Worse, they didn’t have the proper elfin turned-up end with the signature point, that baroque mark of the true Nordic skier. These were as blunt as a toenail and curved up about half an inch.
Good news: boot technology caught up with human feet. The lovely cross-country boots issued were snug but comfy, not at all like the tight leather dungeons that made my feet feel as if they had been renditioned to Dubai.
But once attached to the sweet boots, the stride skis looked like toys. It was obvious the ski tops – the decorative lamination with the logo – had lost the real ski bottoms. But I checked: fish-scales firmly on the bottom. Theoretically, they should work. To some extent.
Cross country skiing was the holdout of the traditionalist. It was a minimalist sport for low-tech jocks. Our skis were still made from wood – hickory and ash with harder “lignostone” or even metal edges. The glide and kick of cross-country is an exaggerated Groucho walk, with alternate heel lifting, so boots were flexibly bound to boards with ancient “bear trap” spring-and-cable bindings or with three-pin clamps that fit holes in the lengthened boot toes.
We were all engrossed in wax theory, because an arcane scale of colored waxes made the skis work. Wax made the skis slippery but it also responded to pressure and “gripped” the snow for the brief moment of our “kick,” the propelling lunge down and back that set us gliding on the snow. Different wax consistencies for different temperatures, some for special snow-types. A perfect cross-country day was a Blue Day; it blissfully required only blue wax. Bitter cold called for green, bitterer cold wanted special-green. Warm spring days brought out the hated klisters, unspeakably messy goo in tubes that got on everything. We carried thermometers and tried wax combinations like “blue with a red kicker” under the heel.
I learned to ski on antique wooden skis with a strange mark: each ski was burned with the letters "BAE." I asked my Yankee friend what the letters meant. "Oh, that. It means 'Byrd Antarctic Expedition.' One of my husband's great uncles was with him. They were way too wide for anything but slogging along so we ran them through the table saw to slim them down."
"But these are artifacts, museum pieces!"
"Well, they were just lying around. No one was using them."
That was part of cross-country. It was a practical sport. Scandahoovians and Yankees understood the heart of it.
Quite early, alternates to wax appeared: plastic fish scales and mohair. The back-angled scales and fibers were mechanical methods for gripping the snow. High-tech methods didn't seem right, then.
X-C wasn’t high-tech stuff but a counter-culture sport, shunning Bogner and Bally stretch-fabric downhill fashions, preferring wool and corduroy. We wore knickers with knee-socks. No, really, we did! Some wore Andean or Tibetan knitted caps with earflaps and dangly tassels. It was a fol-der-ri-fol-der-ra crowd for sure.
So there I stood outside the lodge on high-tech, blunt toy skis, holding day-glo poles, wearing my downhill bib-front pants and a baseball cap. Would the magic work?
Whoosh. A hesitant glide. Whoosh, a dare of balance. Whoosh, a kick. Then an unsuccessful slide-back kick, then a series of productive, snow-grabbing propulsions. The rhythm fell into place: left pole-hand and right foot-kick, glide, right pole and left kick, glide, kick-pole, glide, kick-pole, glide. A springy dip with each kick, a striving pause with the glide. Whoosh, whoosh. Now an unfamiliar burr, like the buzzing of a sweat-bee as the fish-scales chattered over the snow. But the rhythm held and I was on my way again, taking the serum to Nome.
It was a lovely feeling.
Until the first downhill path. With the wisdom of a wimp I angled my skis into a snow-plow V, guaranteed to slow the snow. Nope. The miraculously slippery synthetic, even with its fishscales, continued its headlong slide unabated. More aggressive snowplowing. Nope. Gravity prevailed, redwood trunks blurred past. I heard a silly “whoop, whoop” noise and it was me. The last refuge of a cowardly skier is the Italian brake: I sat down. My ass is not synthetic or hydrodynamic. I stopped. Don’t knock it; it works.
The new skis don’t have edges. I asked the athlete-in-bondage about it later. He shrugged and told me that good skis aren’t made to slow you down. I pointed out that tree trunks did that just fine. He only nodded in agreement. Yes, some skis still had edges; you could get them. “But they’re dog-slow compared to good skis.”
By and by I discovered a working “stop me, control me, save me” configuration: a radical knees-together pinch that angled the skis in both the short and the long axis. It wasn’t entirely comfortable as a steering or stopping method but, according to the ski-rental guy, these skis weren’t made to slow down or, presumably, turn aside. I’ll look into this.
No one would have mistaken me for a Norwegian. Knut Haukelid, the resistance leader who helped destroy the German heavy water plant in World War II, skied a hundred miles cross-country to reach his objective. One of his band was pursued for dozens of miles by German ski troops who dropped away, one after the other, as he continued to whoosh, whoosh. He outdistanced all of them but in the dark he skied over a cliff and broke his arm. Then whooshed another 40 miles to a warm room.
I'm not Knut. On her mother’s properly turned-up skis slim, fit Swan glided sedately on like her namesake, past me on my toy skis. I stood periodically immobile, leaning with my poles jammed in my armpits, puffing and wheezing until my heart rate returned to a sensible rhumba beat. Uphill climbs, when I concentrated on weighting my heels for grip and balance, were trials. At one point I realized that I’d left my nitroglycerine vial in my pants at the condo. The idea of mortality in the woods occurred to me. But even my gasping pauses were delights, offering rare interior views of fir and redwood forest in snow and total silence.
It’s not like downhill skiing. No snowboarders, no tumbling stream of adolescent hotshots, no lift-lines, no collisions or flurry wipeouts. No noise.
The following day we set out again, Swan carrying 17 week-old grandson Kent in a front-pack, his mother Jennifer skiing with us. The motion lulled Kent. I caught a glance at his face occasionally under the hood, serene and pleased, and later peacefully asleep. True, as Swan made downhill schusses shouting “Wheeee!” his face was less composed. Terrified, really. But he enjoyed the rhythm and the lilt of motion as much I did.
So Count Kamarov was foiled yet again, and Nome was delivered.
The test of any sport is whether it takes you to the right place at the right time. The cold air and the evergreen scent and the coordination of balance and beat was a tonic. Those pauses on the silent trail were worth the sweat. It was, even on fish scales, a Blue Day.
He recalls antediluvian days with more fondness than reality. He was never really in shape for real skiing, never excelled at it, and never truly enjoyed the cold. Which was sometimes bitter and painful. Moist breath made his mustache freeze, indistinguishable from simple snot. It's possible he's more adapted to it now than he was, and that the synthetic, improved skis work far better than his waxed hickory boards. Still, there are long-ago moments from individual runs, certain afternoons or mornings, that glisten like gems in memory. Perhaps now we can capture more of them. Anything that pushes us out of our deepening rut is commendable, and anything that lures us to the wilder places is a blessing.
Braxinoso
Between the puffing and gasping.
No sport commonly practiced by homo suburbia demands as much sweat and toil, but few offer such gleaming rewards.
It had been a full twenty years since I’d skied on the skinny boards. I’d kept my form (I told myself) by occasionally working out on the NordicTrak, whoosh, whoosh. For years I’d lunged along on the Trak, picturing myself taking the critical serum to afflicted Nome, pursued by the evil Count Kamarov and his Hired Thugs. Whoosh, whoosh. I always made it.
Swan and I presented ourselves at the Tahoe Nordic Track Center, near the Lake. My cherished and carefully preserved cross-country skis and boots were, alas, laid aside at my daughter’s home in Florida. I must remember to pick them up on the way to my next X-country adventure. So the rental desk asked the usual questions: weight, height, age. Normal “senior” status is over sixty-five. For cross-country “senior” is over sixty, and there are murmurs of lowering it to forty. We get a price break. I was asked whether I wished to “stride” or “skate.” This went over my tonsured head.
Apparently there are X-C Jocks who sneer at the antique notion of kick-and-glide, favoring a wide-stance, out-angled skating stroke, like roller-skating with your shoes epoxyed to twin skateboards. This requires the energy normally necessary to push the Sausalito Ferry through the water. I saw some of these showboats pass. No envy.
With only a hint of sneer the bearded athlete-in-bondage at the rental racks gave me a pair of stride skis. Itty-bitty things. About as wide as a table knife and ridiculously short. Worse, they didn’t have the proper elfin turned-up end with the signature point, that baroque mark of the true Nordic skier. These were as blunt as a toenail and curved up about half an inch.
Good news: boot technology caught up with human feet. The lovely cross-country boots issued were snug but comfy, not at all like the tight leather dungeons that made my feet feel as if they had been renditioned to Dubai.
But once attached to the sweet boots, the stride skis looked like toys. It was obvious the ski tops – the decorative lamination with the logo – had lost the real ski bottoms. But I checked: fish-scales firmly on the bottom. Theoretically, they should work. To some extent.
Cross country skiing was the holdout of the traditionalist. It was a minimalist sport for low-tech jocks. Our skis were still made from wood – hickory and ash with harder “lignostone” or even metal edges. The glide and kick of cross-country is an exaggerated Groucho walk, with alternate heel lifting, so boots were flexibly bound to boards with ancient “bear trap” spring-and-cable bindings or with three-pin clamps that fit holes in the lengthened boot toes.
We were all engrossed in wax theory, because an arcane scale of colored waxes made the skis work. Wax made the skis slippery but it also responded to pressure and “gripped” the snow for the brief moment of our “kick,” the propelling lunge down and back that set us gliding on the snow. Different wax consistencies for different temperatures, some for special snow-types. A perfect cross-country day was a Blue Day; it blissfully required only blue wax. Bitter cold called for green, bitterer cold wanted special-green. Warm spring days brought out the hated klisters, unspeakably messy goo in tubes that got on everything. We carried thermometers and tried wax combinations like “blue with a red kicker” under the heel.
I learned to ski on antique wooden skis with a strange mark: each ski was burned with the letters "BAE." I asked my Yankee friend what the letters meant. "Oh, that. It means 'Byrd Antarctic Expedition.' One of my husband's great uncles was with him. They were way too wide for anything but slogging along so we ran them through the table saw to slim them down."
"But these are artifacts, museum pieces!"
"Well, they were just lying around. No one was using them."
That was part of cross-country. It was a practical sport. Scandahoovians and Yankees understood the heart of it.
Quite early, alternates to wax appeared: plastic fish scales and mohair. The back-angled scales and fibers were mechanical methods for gripping the snow. High-tech methods didn't seem right, then.
X-C wasn’t high-tech stuff but a counter-culture sport, shunning Bogner and Bally stretch-fabric downhill fashions, preferring wool and corduroy. We wore knickers with knee-socks. No, really, we did! Some wore Andean or Tibetan knitted caps with earflaps and dangly tassels. It was a fol-der-ri-fol-der-ra crowd for sure.
So there I stood outside the lodge on high-tech, blunt toy skis, holding day-glo poles, wearing my downhill bib-front pants and a baseball cap. Would the magic work?
Whoosh. A hesitant glide. Whoosh, a dare of balance. Whoosh, a kick. Then an unsuccessful slide-back kick, then a series of productive, snow-grabbing propulsions. The rhythm fell into place: left pole-hand and right foot-kick, glide, right pole and left kick, glide, kick-pole, glide, kick-pole, glide. A springy dip with each kick, a striving pause with the glide. Whoosh, whoosh. Now an unfamiliar burr, like the buzzing of a sweat-bee as the fish-scales chattered over the snow. But the rhythm held and I was on my way again, taking the serum to Nome.
It was a lovely feeling.
Until the first downhill path. With the wisdom of a wimp I angled my skis into a snow-plow V, guaranteed to slow the snow. Nope. The miraculously slippery synthetic, even with its fishscales, continued its headlong slide unabated. More aggressive snowplowing. Nope. Gravity prevailed, redwood trunks blurred past. I heard a silly “whoop, whoop” noise and it was me. The last refuge of a cowardly skier is the Italian brake: I sat down. My ass is not synthetic or hydrodynamic. I stopped. Don’t knock it; it works.
The new skis don’t have edges. I asked the athlete-in-bondage about it later. He shrugged and told me that good skis aren’t made to slow you down. I pointed out that tree trunks did that just fine. He only nodded in agreement. Yes, some skis still had edges; you could get them. “But they’re dog-slow compared to good skis.”
By and by I discovered a working “stop me, control me, save me” configuration: a radical knees-together pinch that angled the skis in both the short and the long axis. It wasn’t entirely comfortable as a steering or stopping method but, according to the ski-rental guy, these skis weren’t made to slow down or, presumably, turn aside. I’ll look into this.
No one would have mistaken me for a Norwegian. Knut Haukelid, the resistance leader who helped destroy the German heavy water plant in World War II, skied a hundred miles cross-country to reach his objective. One of his band was pursued for dozens of miles by German ski troops who dropped away, one after the other, as he continued to whoosh, whoosh. He outdistanced all of them but in the dark he skied over a cliff and broke his arm. Then whooshed another 40 miles to a warm room.
I'm not Knut. On her mother’s properly turned-up skis slim, fit Swan glided sedately on like her namesake, past me on my toy skis. I stood periodically immobile, leaning with my poles jammed in my armpits, puffing and wheezing until my heart rate returned to a sensible rhumba beat. Uphill climbs, when I concentrated on weighting my heels for grip and balance, were trials. At one point I realized that I’d left my nitroglycerine vial in my pants at the condo. The idea of mortality in the woods occurred to me. But even my gasping pauses were delights, offering rare interior views of fir and redwood forest in snow and total silence.
It’s not like downhill skiing. No snowboarders, no tumbling stream of adolescent hotshots, no lift-lines, no collisions or flurry wipeouts. No noise.
The following day we set out again, Swan carrying 17 week-old grandson Kent in a front-pack, his mother Jennifer skiing with us. The motion lulled Kent. I caught a glance at his face occasionally under the hood, serene and pleased, and later peacefully asleep. True, as Swan made downhill schusses shouting “Wheeee!” his face was less composed. Terrified, really. But he enjoyed the rhythm and the lilt of motion as much I did.
So Count Kamarov was foiled yet again, and Nome was delivered.
The test of any sport is whether it takes you to the right place at the right time. The cold air and the evergreen scent and the coordination of balance and beat was a tonic. Those pauses on the silent trail were worth the sweat. It was, even on fish scales, a Blue Day.
He recalls antediluvian days with more fondness than reality. He was never really in shape for real skiing, never excelled at it, and never truly enjoyed the cold. Which was sometimes bitter and painful. Moist breath made his mustache freeze, indistinguishable from simple snot. It's possible he's more adapted to it now than he was, and that the synthetic, improved skis work far better than his waxed hickory boards. Still, there are long-ago moments from individual runs, certain afternoons or mornings, that glisten like gems in memory. Perhaps now we can capture more of them. Anything that pushes us out of our deepening rut is commendable, and anything that lures us to the wilder places is a blessing.
Braxinoso
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Boat Night
Tuesday is boat night at the Dolphin Club. The Dolphin is a large frame building rambling along the shoreline below the Ghirardelli Chocolate factory, next to the public beach and it's art deco building, across the cove from the San Francisco Maritime Museum. It's a little outpost of New England on the Bay, woody, genteely distressed and (for San Francisco) old. The first floor shelters the weight room, the kitchen, the boatshop, and a collection of pulling boats [lubber's note: rowboats]. Most are for a single oarsperson but there are longboats for two, four and more rowers. Locker rooms, showers, steam rooms and a spartan but easygoing lounge with a spectacular view occupy the upper floor.
The basic Dolphin Activity is quite mad: swimming in the Bay. There is an annual swim to Alcatraz and back. Ahem. I doubt that I will join them. But every Tuesday John Bielinski, the Dolphin's boatbuilder, organizes the 10 or 15 volunteers that show up to maintain the exquisite smaller boats. Like all wooden boats thoughtlessly dunked in water, they need obsessive attention. Add to this, they are bright-finished – varnished. This requires yearly scraping, sanding, and reapplication. The methods, approaches, brands, brushes and application of varnishes can be a religious observance for waterfolk and has created angry sects. The Dolphin is interdenominational in the canon of marine finishes, so even varnish nights are relatively peaceful.
After the volunteers work three hours or so, we all eat together in the boat house at long tables. Since tonight was Fat Tuesday, one of the members had made jambalaya. The kitchen was already fragrant with sausage and filé when a big crowd of about 20 assembled. Word had gone out that one of the older pulling boats needed five new ribs, an operation requiring teamwork, timing, speed and finesse. This was not merely woodworking but time management and tool quickness. And because why, mate? Because these 'ere boats is clinker-built and as light as eggshells, but tough as a pig's nose.
The pulling boats are Whitehalls. This means that they're rowing boats with a distinct and delicately cupped shaped, a "wineglass" transom [back end]. They're very light for their size, built in the ancient "clinker" construction. "Clinker" is an Old English cognate of "clencher," which indicates that the boat is made up of thin, overlapping planks of a light, flexible wood (in this case, white cedar) "clenched" to tough ribs with copper rivets. Rivets are very old usage that binds more tightly than nails and more securely than screws. To fit the locust wood ribs to the inside of the boat's pronounced curves, they must be milled thin (a little thicker than 1/4" and about 5/8" wide) and softened in a steam box for about half an hour. They're taken out with heavy gloves and pressed immediately into the boat. While the ribs are still whippy and hot they're clamped into place and immediately drilled through. The drilled hole passes through a rib, the lower part of an overlapping strake [long hull plank] and the upper part of the next strake below it.
As soon as the holes are drilled a copper riveting nail is hammered through them. The "nail" is square in section to grip the wood more tightly. A round copper washer – called a "burr" – is forced over the square nail with a special riveting tool. The tool is like a chisel with a flat end and a hole for the nail, so that whacking the burr down onto the nail forces the rib and strakes together. The nail is then snipped off just above the burr and, while one partner "bucks" (holds a heavy iron on the nailhead end to prevent it from being driven away), the other shapes the soft copper over the burr with a small ball-peen hammer (the kind with one flat head and one round head, made especially for work like this). The copper is so malleable that it mushrooms easily and each stroke of the shaping ball-peen hammer tightens the assembly.
Is this is more than you want to know? But it's historic stuff, ancient methodology, very cool to watch and do.
The trick is that everyone must work fast and in close concert, because the wood stays flexible from the steam box only a few minutes. Whisked out of the pressure and heat, slammed into the boat against the inside of the strakes and under some of the longitudinal structure, immediately drilled, nails hammered home, burrs forced down against the inside of the rib, the nails cut off at just the right length above the burr, and tap, tap, tap, tap until the rivet is shaped.
Jay and I worked as a team. Half the time I was above the boat, tapping the rivets home, shaping the mushroomed-over heads in the soft copper. Half the time I was under the boat, lying on the shop floor, holding the heavy bucking iron against the nail head. The peening (shaping] was a more focused task. Holding the bucking iron was heavier work. The compensation for that heavy work was lying beneath the boat's lyric curves, each strake describing a separate curved plane with a step separating it from the next plane, the graceful strake lines paralleling and harmonizing, the color of the varnished white cedar glowing golden and varying with the glare from every work light, shading from dark umber in the shadows to chrome yellow in the light. Beautiful. The locust wood ribs emerging from the steam box smelled bitter and damp. The drilled cedar smelled like incense. The tapping and the calling between three sets of partners – two sets riveting, one set placing new ribs – was a cacophony with a subtly discernible rhythm and order.
The work had a sensible urgency and a splendid, strong outcome. What do we do in our lives that gives us much of that? These boats are old fashioned, outmoded in everything but their intrinsic utility: one person using oars to skim the water quickly and with assurance. Some of the boats themselves are old, relics, cockleshells rowed by the oldest members when they were young. We make them live over and over, replacing ribs, strakes, fittings, finish. We have a stake in the heritage. Boats like this are lent to us by dead oarsmen to keep for unborn oarsmen. It's a privilege we share.
Jan Adkins
Braxinoso speaks:
My attention is usually wasted on reminding Himself of tradition and continuity. Occasionally, however, he gets the bit between his teeth and waxes eloquent about the oldness of things. He's quite right to underscore our maritime heritage, of course, but he leaves out the real reason he attends boat night: it's just fun fooling around with boats. As the rat said, there's nothing like it.
Braxinoso
The basic Dolphin Activity is quite mad: swimming in the Bay. There is an annual swim to Alcatraz and back. Ahem. I doubt that I will join them. But every Tuesday John Bielinski, the Dolphin's boatbuilder, organizes the 10 or 15 volunteers that show up to maintain the exquisite smaller boats. Like all wooden boats thoughtlessly dunked in water, they need obsessive attention. Add to this, they are bright-finished – varnished. This requires yearly scraping, sanding, and reapplication. The methods, approaches, brands, brushes and application of varnishes can be a religious observance for waterfolk and has created angry sects. The Dolphin is interdenominational in the canon of marine finishes, so even varnish nights are relatively peaceful.
After the volunteers work three hours or so, we all eat together in the boat house at long tables. Since tonight was Fat Tuesday, one of the members had made jambalaya. The kitchen was already fragrant with sausage and filé when a big crowd of about 20 assembled. Word had gone out that one of the older pulling boats needed five new ribs, an operation requiring teamwork, timing, speed and finesse. This was not merely woodworking but time management and tool quickness. And because why, mate? Because these 'ere boats is clinker-built and as light as eggshells, but tough as a pig's nose.
The pulling boats are Whitehalls. This means that they're rowing boats with a distinct and delicately cupped shaped, a "wineglass" transom [back end]. They're very light for their size, built in the ancient "clinker" construction. "Clinker" is an Old English cognate of "clencher," which indicates that the boat is made up of thin, overlapping planks of a light, flexible wood (in this case, white cedar) "clenched" to tough ribs with copper rivets. Rivets are very old usage that binds more tightly than nails and more securely than screws. To fit the locust wood ribs to the inside of the boat's pronounced curves, they must be milled thin (a little thicker than 1/4" and about 5/8" wide) and softened in a steam box for about half an hour. They're taken out with heavy gloves and pressed immediately into the boat. While the ribs are still whippy and hot they're clamped into place and immediately drilled through. The drilled hole passes through a rib, the lower part of an overlapping strake [long hull plank] and the upper part of the next strake below it.
As soon as the holes are drilled a copper riveting nail is hammered through them. The "nail" is square in section to grip the wood more tightly. A round copper washer – called a "burr" – is forced over the square nail with a special riveting tool. The tool is like a chisel with a flat end and a hole for the nail, so that whacking the burr down onto the nail forces the rib and strakes together. The nail is then snipped off just above the burr and, while one partner "bucks" (holds a heavy iron on the nailhead end to prevent it from being driven away), the other shapes the soft copper over the burr with a small ball-peen hammer (the kind with one flat head and one round head, made especially for work like this). The copper is so malleable that it mushrooms easily and each stroke of the shaping ball-peen hammer tightens the assembly.
Is this is more than you want to know? But it's historic stuff, ancient methodology, very cool to watch and do.
The trick is that everyone must work fast and in close concert, because the wood stays flexible from the steam box only a few minutes. Whisked out of the pressure and heat, slammed into the boat against the inside of the strakes and under some of the longitudinal structure, immediately drilled, nails hammered home, burrs forced down against the inside of the rib, the nails cut off at just the right length above the burr, and tap, tap, tap, tap until the rivet is shaped.
Jay and I worked as a team. Half the time I was above the boat, tapping the rivets home, shaping the mushroomed-over heads in the soft copper. Half the time I was under the boat, lying on the shop floor, holding the heavy bucking iron against the nail head. The peening (shaping] was a more focused task. Holding the bucking iron was heavier work. The compensation for that heavy work was lying beneath the boat's lyric curves, each strake describing a separate curved plane with a step separating it from the next plane, the graceful strake lines paralleling and harmonizing, the color of the varnished white cedar glowing golden and varying with the glare from every work light, shading from dark umber in the shadows to chrome yellow in the light. Beautiful. The locust wood ribs emerging from the steam box smelled bitter and damp. The drilled cedar smelled like incense. The tapping and the calling between three sets of partners – two sets riveting, one set placing new ribs – was a cacophony with a subtly discernible rhythm and order.
The work had a sensible urgency and a splendid, strong outcome. What do we do in our lives that gives us much of that? These boats are old fashioned, outmoded in everything but their intrinsic utility: one person using oars to skim the water quickly and with assurance. Some of the boats themselves are old, relics, cockleshells rowed by the oldest members when they were young. We make them live over and over, replacing ribs, strakes, fittings, finish. We have a stake in the heritage. Boats like this are lent to us by dead oarsmen to keep for unborn oarsmen. It's a privilege we share.
Jan Adkins
Braxinoso speaks:
My attention is usually wasted on reminding Himself of tradition and continuity. Occasionally, however, he gets the bit between his teeth and waxes eloquent about the oldness of things. He's quite right to underscore our maritime heritage, of course, but he leaves out the real reason he attends boat night: it's just fun fooling around with boats. As the rat said, there's nothing like it.
Braxinoso
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
We Begin
Writing for young people can be a dangerous business.
An author of mystery novels is customarily pictured with a cigarette and a bottle of scotch. It's easy to visualize a writer of history in a tweed jacket with a cup of rapidly cooling tea rattling to the pounding of his keyboard. Investigative journalists are pictured knocking out their hot stories in rolled-up shirtsleeves with battered fedoras still clamped on their beans, periodically shouting "Copy!"
Children's authors are easily seen wearing red rubber clown noses, surrounded by bubbles.
Like prostitution, the business of children's literature has been compromised by amateurs. Every grandmother on this spinning blue orb believes she can and should create a cute story about fur-bearing animals with alliterative names, colorful little teapots, talkative Chihuahuas, or magic garden decorations that spring into horrifying, Day-of-the-Dead life. Otherwise sober authors seize on the money-making notion of writing a kiddie book and pursue this hollow illusion of wealth into embarrassing doggerel, cherishing the odd belief that children appreciate rhymes more than sense.
The truth of the medium is that writing for children is much more difficult than writing for adults. I can attest honestly because I've written on both sides of the catalogue. Children demand sense and clarity more than antic cuteness. They haven't had the numbing experience of reading college textbooks, so their attention spans will turn on their size 3 heels before Peter Panda can blurt out more than a few sappy truisms.
Writing for children is wooing an intelligent, judgmental and uncompromising audience. The great skill of it is not in dumbing down or using small words (kids are remarkably multisyllabic), but in creating a Shaker simplicity of construction and form. It's not the vocabulary that restricts, it's the sentence structure and the creation of logical concepts.
The saddest thing about most children's literature is the lack of respect for children's intellects. A commonly-held belief among grandmothers and hacks is that writing a kid's story is an easier approach to literature than novels, because children don't require much in the way of detail, fact, historic accuracy or research. That is: children are weak and stupid and will be grateful for anything set before them.
Fact: reading children are as bright as they'll ever be; they lack only experience. Their logical faculties are well-developed and they can spot a phony sooner than most adults. They also have a sensitive awareness of being manipulated.
Fact: making a bicycle pink doesn't make it a girl's bicycle, and abandoning reality doesn't make a story suitable for children.
Fact: Alice In Wonderland is vastly overrated as literature and most children find it confusing and scary. Like much "beloved" children's literature, it is more appreciated by jaded adults than by kids.
Fact: Writing for children demands the same care in description, rhythm, style and the balance of language that the best writing for adults displays. Except that the children's writer must work on a smaller and more restrictive canvas, and speak to a more distractable audience, and compete with Sesame Street in the background. Grace, lyricism, just-so wordplay and careful observation of the human condition are necessary parts of all literature . . . and are critically important in serious (that is, successful) work for children.
I've written for children and adults in more than thirty-eight books, innumerable articles, narrations, texts and scripts. My particular oeuvre is non-fiction for children. You can see a list of my books and a brief bio at www.janadkins.com. Much of this blog will be discussion and controversy about writing for kids. I'll be contending that good writing is good writing, and that writing well in one field doesn't necessarily translate to success in another. I've been lucky: most of my life's work has been explaining things – tab A and slot B. I've explained things in text and image, for kids, adults, National Geographic, museums, film and corporate reports. I've had a chance to train up to the task of writing plainly for young people. I'm opinionated and passionate about this tiny part of the publishing spectrum.
The purpose of this blog is to invite discussion and argument, welcome dissent, bring in examples, and encourage a more detailed look at what we do. Beyond children's literature we'll also deal with other favorite topics: food, cultural phenomena, maritime heritage, hiking, sailing, tools, pens, and illustration. We begin.
Jan Adkins
Braxinoso speaks:
Adkins can be tiresomely stuffy about his hobby horses. He can lose perspective as easily as a cocker spaniel can lose a tennis ball in the weeds. When he gets on a rant he waxes wordy, even florid, and can sound like a passed-over assistant professor. In my small way I'll try to keep him on-track and restrain his grander tendencies. But one doubts it will do much good.
Braxinoso
An author of mystery novels is customarily pictured with a cigarette and a bottle of scotch. It's easy to visualize a writer of history in a tweed jacket with a cup of rapidly cooling tea rattling to the pounding of his keyboard. Investigative journalists are pictured knocking out their hot stories in rolled-up shirtsleeves with battered fedoras still clamped on their beans, periodically shouting "Copy!"
Children's authors are easily seen wearing red rubber clown noses, surrounded by bubbles.
Like prostitution, the business of children's literature has been compromised by amateurs. Every grandmother on this spinning blue orb believes she can and should create a cute story about fur-bearing animals with alliterative names, colorful little teapots, talkative Chihuahuas, or magic garden decorations that spring into horrifying, Day-of-the-Dead life. Otherwise sober authors seize on the money-making notion of writing a kiddie book and pursue this hollow illusion of wealth into embarrassing doggerel, cherishing the odd belief that children appreciate rhymes more than sense.
The truth of the medium is that writing for children is much more difficult than writing for adults. I can attest honestly because I've written on both sides of the catalogue. Children demand sense and clarity more than antic cuteness. They haven't had the numbing experience of reading college textbooks, so their attention spans will turn on their size 3 heels before Peter Panda can blurt out more than a few sappy truisms.
Writing for children is wooing an intelligent, judgmental and uncompromising audience. The great skill of it is not in dumbing down or using small words (kids are remarkably multisyllabic), but in creating a Shaker simplicity of construction and form. It's not the vocabulary that restricts, it's the sentence structure and the creation of logical concepts.
The saddest thing about most children's literature is the lack of respect for children's intellects. A commonly-held belief among grandmothers and hacks is that writing a kid's story is an easier approach to literature than novels, because children don't require much in the way of detail, fact, historic accuracy or research. That is: children are weak and stupid and will be grateful for anything set before them.
Fact: reading children are as bright as they'll ever be; they lack only experience. Their logical faculties are well-developed and they can spot a phony sooner than most adults. They also have a sensitive awareness of being manipulated.
Fact: making a bicycle pink doesn't make it a girl's bicycle, and abandoning reality doesn't make a story suitable for children.
Fact: Alice In Wonderland is vastly overrated as literature and most children find it confusing and scary. Like much "beloved" children's literature, it is more appreciated by jaded adults than by kids.
Fact: Writing for children demands the same care in description, rhythm, style and the balance of language that the best writing for adults displays. Except that the children's writer must work on a smaller and more restrictive canvas, and speak to a more distractable audience, and compete with Sesame Street in the background. Grace, lyricism, just-so wordplay and careful observation of the human condition are necessary parts of all literature . . . and are critically important in serious (that is, successful) work for children.
I've written for children and adults in more than thirty-eight books, innumerable articles, narrations, texts and scripts. My particular oeuvre is non-fiction for children. You can see a list of my books and a brief bio at www.janadkins.com. Much of this blog will be discussion and controversy about writing for kids. I'll be contending that good writing is good writing, and that writing well in one field doesn't necessarily translate to success in another. I've been lucky: most of my life's work has been explaining things – tab A and slot B. I've explained things in text and image, for kids, adults, National Geographic, museums, film and corporate reports. I've had a chance to train up to the task of writing plainly for young people. I'm opinionated and passionate about this tiny part of the publishing spectrum.
The purpose of this blog is to invite discussion and argument, welcome dissent, bring in examples, and encourage a more detailed look at what we do. Beyond children's literature we'll also deal with other favorite topics: food, cultural phenomena, maritime heritage, hiking, sailing, tools, pens, and illustration. We begin.
Jan Adkins
Braxinoso speaks:
Adkins can be tiresomely stuffy about his hobby horses. He can lose perspective as easily as a cocker spaniel can lose a tennis ball in the weeds. When he gets on a rant he waxes wordy, even florid, and can sound like a passed-over assistant professor. In my small way I'll try to keep him on-track and restrain his grander tendencies. But one doubts it will do much good.
Braxinoso
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