Room for Improvement (eBook)

Cross-Country SkiingBefore I'd ever seen a cross-country ski I used to have a recurring dream. I was on some other planet. I slipped out of a dark city, through a gap in the force field, and into a meadow. My body was changing mysteriously. It was dawn. The sky was apple-green, the air felt like a silk shirt. I had to go somewhere far away. My body was changing so that I would be able to. It grew longer and lighter. I began to run, easily but with an astonishingly powerful spring. Air came into my lungs not only through my mouth but directly through the skin of my chest. It was like slaking a deep thirst. I came to a hill. I feared that would be the end of the magic, but the new power just coiled up tighter. It made me laugh. I breasted the hill and kept on, absorbing the silver air and discharging energy downward through my calves and forward from my brow and eyes. I was acutely conscious of the trees and rocks and the air and light, and how my motion was in rhythm with them. The purpose of the journey and what lay beyond the next hill changed from dream to dream, but the original sense of my body in motion was constant and recurring.

When I finally learned how to cross-country ski, I realized these dreams had been a foretaste of sensations obtainable here and now. It wasn't like that at first, of course, nor is it like that every day now. But every so often I'm shot through with everything the dream foretold.

If you've ever had an affection for a canoe or a slender rowboat, taken pleasure in the elegance of the lines, the neat slice of the bow, the clean tuck of the stern, and felt a seed of superstition that a boat like that is sensate and likes moving through the water, then you may find a particular joy in cross-country skiing: once you begin to get the motion right, the kicking and gliding and riding the driving ski with your body weight floating over it, you may find that you have swallowed your boat whole, that you are your boat moving across a lake of still air and snow.

But even the first awkward runs can have grace. The first cross-country skis I got were sturdy wide clodhoppers, not the fragile and elegant ones I have now. I was living in Iowa, where there are still strips of virgin forest by rivers and among the few hard-to-till hills and gullies. I used to bundle up and shuffle along through an oak forest, innocent of technique and wax but happy to wander alone, puffing up clouds in the motionless subzero air. The third time I went out in this forest there was a foot of snow and more falling. I jogged and poled my way along an old logging road. I reached the top of a rise and started sliding down the other side, making no more noise than a sailboat slipping through flat water.

A red fox, beautifully furred, was sitting on a stump beside the road. His tail was wrapped around his hip and across his forepaws. I could see the particular hairs of his coat. He looked at me curiously as I drifted toward him. He wasn't alarmed, I think because I wasn't making any of the moves I should have been to be advancing on him. I slid closer, and he hopped down like a cat from a sofa. About ten yards in front of me. He loped down the road--fairly casually, considering he sank in the snow up to his shoulders at each bound. I tagged along, sliding downhill after him. After a hundred yards the fox glanced around. He looked concerned that I was still with him. He upped the pace. I poled a bit and scrunched down. He glanced around again, more puzzled than alarmed. He stepped to the side of the road and let me pass by. Our eyes met. The fox pricked his ears, but there was no noise. I ghosted on down the rest of the hill, my head turned back to watch...