New Orleans Hipsters to Herzliya Arabs - Breaking onto new Pitches

There was a moment in the game that Monday where a player on the other team stood at little past the mid line with the ball. Though it was a football (i.e. soccer - I'm going to use football the whole article, for consistency's sake) game, not necessarily conducive to man-to-man marking ala basketball, we were only playing 4 on 5 and I was ready to cover him. He stood there, however, with nary an eye towards me, nor towards advancing the ball towards our net. Instead, he looked at his teammate and cussed him out. This opponent of mine, the one with the ball, didn't look all that different than me; he berated his teammate in a language I don't speak, one that isn't too different from a language I do speak, but that to the uninitiated ear has a harshness to its beauty, a harshness that lends itself naturally to ripping into friends.

This yelling, back and forth, went on for about 20 seconds. Were this a true competitive endeavor, I would have had no trouble stealing the ball, sprinting to a breakaway against the distracted keeper, and misfiring on an easy shot. This a friendly outing, at least for me, I sat there and watched the conversation. I, the only non-Arabic speaker in the crowd, may have forgotten to keep my lower jaw from slackening. So when the man with the ball finally stopped his venting and turned his head back to the field of play, the nine of us, aware of the absurdity that featured me in the middle, watching all of this, burst into laughter. The laughter lasted another ten seconds, and then we resumed the game.

All the potential fruits of sports and travel, wherein we cross boundaries, realize anew how differences remain, and play on anyway, those fruits spilled out of those ten seconds.

***

For someone who never played formal football, I've had quite a career with the sport, as it were. There was high school cluster (i.e. intramural) football, where I gained rep as a fearless and athletic if not necessarily good goalie, the type of "intense competitor" who stayed on the field after the finals game senior year, one in which I gave up 5 goals, two of which I still don't hear the end about from a friend on the other team. Then there was fall workouts for wrestling in college, where we'd alternate between ultimate frisbee and football as conditioning games; I was notorious for playing hard and for a zero shooting percentage, my misses worthy of an hour-long blooper reel. For my two full years in Israel, I was improbably the assistant high school football coach, specializing on working with the keepers and the reserves; one of this year's captains still calls my motivational speeches "the best", though I should also point out that the team finished 5th this year in the final tournament without me after 7th and 10th (out of 10) with me.

The football career at the center of this post, however, is even less formal. I refer to the pickup games and local gatherings I've taken part of in various places. The excitement of the World Cup 2006 leading me into a regular game during my one summer in Durham, NC. The games I played that fall in the neighborhood rubber court with the boy from the family I lived with in Moscow, notable for the teenagers, two of them, who would smoke cigarettes during the "halftime" break. The game Ben brought me to in Madrid over Thanksgiving 2008, where the best player on the pitch was a girl who played at Oregon St. The game played in the sunset last fall in Rwanda with genocide orphans.

Here is where I could insert the cliches about the commonality of sports, the shared experience inherent in a game, the way boundaries can be bridged and friendships made over a meeting ground of rules and end lines and balls, all the stuff included in that "potential fruits" sentence that ended the section above, and then remind that there is no larger, more common meeting ground than football. Cliches are nice to lean on every now and then, as Paul Simon said in a recent piece on inspiration and "genius". As such, I allow you the space to lean on that cliche as much as you'd like.





That taken care of, I'd like to avoid the cliche by going into the particularities of these two recent settings, my last two games, one in New Orleans, the other in Raanana, Israel.

***

I lucked into the New Orleans game. One lucks into all of the soccer games they might play. One also creates their own luck. Seek a game and it can be found, as long as one is open to luck.

I lived in a "communal house", as the owner called it, a five minute walk from City Park in the Mid-City area of New Orleans. The house was freezing; the unadvertised downside of living in a warm-weather area is that all the houses are designed to be cool. This makes sense, is a logical approach even, a pleasing example of the convergence of architectural necessity and environmental efficiency. It also means that if the warm-weather area gets cold, due to a natural cycle, a climate change twisted world, or the impending apocalypse, one's abode is miserable to be in. In Israel, this was a problem of tile floors and windows facing North-South to limit sunlight; in New Orleans, big open wood floored rooms with no heating system made nights cold and rainy afternoons more pleasant outside than in. Add in the inevitable disappointment over the false bill of goods that a warm weather area has peddled to the visitor or transplant in winter, and time spent in the house, even for a homebody like me, takes on a significantly lower quality.

Anyway, in this communal house lived four other people. Two were the owner and her husband, she a New Orleans native who had taken on the hijab, presumably upon marriage, and he a Palestinian-American with a heavy Jersey accent, only slightly ground up by his Arabic tongue. Another was a New Zealand gal traveling around the world, paying her way by working as a waitress (on Bourbon Street here; her next stop was Nashville). The last was a Louisiana native of about my age, a nice guy named Bryant who happened to be on a kickball team and, even more pertinently, to organize a weekly football game. Such was my in.

A weekly game on a highly visible if officially private field opposite City Park (we were kicked off this field once or twice in the three games I played there) is bound to attract four different groups to its games:

1. The originals, meaning the founder(s) of the game and then their initial circle of friends who want to play. Keeping it to just this group will ensure a cohesive vision of what the game is meant to be about and what the level of the players will be; the drawback is that unless the founders are really popular, there won't be very big games. In the Israel game to be covered below, for example, I felt that all the players were of this group, with the exception of me of course. Cohesive, but also only enough for 4 v 4 without me.

2. A group of hardcore players, hardcore in the sense that they will show up come rain or shine, Saturday or Sunday, hard week of work or not. In our case, this group did not consist solely of the original members; Bryant invited one or two of them, who then invited the rest of their group, who then decided they needed to take the intensity UP a notch, leading to some friction between the original members who just wanted to play a nice game of footie and those who wanted to play some fucking football, brah!! This friction was resolved before I got there.

3. The semi-regular friends of the hardcore and originals, those who will play once or twice a month, who view it as either an occasional workout to get back to their athletic roots or a social outing (worth noting here I think that, fair or not, about 95% of the athletes at the NO games were male, and 100% for the one game in Israel). Essential to have a regular rotating cast of this group to have a fun, relatively good level game week in and week out. Conveniently enough, until I move to a place for more than a month or two, I fall into this category.

4. Passers-by and other strangers who happen to stumble upon the game via word of mouth or voracious search of a city's fields for a possible game. The biggest wild-card of the four groups, as the strangers can either add a joyous synergy to the game of unexpected quality or drag on the overall group's harmony or level of play. A tough thing to predict, but one can't turn away strangers.


The first time I played was within a week of moving into the house. I hardly knew Bryant, am not the most outgoing person among strangers, and so stuck to my lane. For pickup football, I interpret that to mean three things: volunteering to do the menial tasks that help the game along (playing goalie, fetching the ball when it goes astray in warmups or game time), playing hard but fairly, and keeping my mouth shut except to respond to people talking to me or making jokes in my direction (a smile and a polite laugh is all I need in those situations). Not integrated into the game and not a dominant player (or personality), I carved out the niche of running hard along the outside, occasionally getting the ball on breaks and creating opportunities for my team. I also leveraged my big advantage, besides hustling: physicality. At one point, I bumped into Bryant, who was playing on the opposing team, and threw some muscle into my efforts to take the ball from him. "Oh, hey roomie," he said in mild surprise as we tussled. I made sure to say sorry and put my hands up after I passed the ball away. In my unofficial stat keeping of the number of positive plays I made versus the number of times I messed up, I think I came out in the black, if ever so slightly.

I have long mulled over the words of T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets - "For us there is only the trying/the rest is not our business," though perhaps denuding the statement of its fatalistic/catholic meaning. I consider that to stand as a general prescription for how to lead one's life when existing in the blessed world of the western middle class, where we can expect effort, meaningful effort, to afford us continued opportunities and at least a reasonable subsistence. In pickup football, where no one can really expect anything of a player except effort, this trying becomes all the more singularly essential.

Why I wrapped myself in the protective shell of hard work and amiability, I observed group #2 in action, exhibiting their New Orleans particularity. A group of young fellows more or less my age, apparently NO natives who used to play together in high school or youth leagues, they offered both the upper crust of talent in the game and the majority of the talking, stamping their personality onto the spirit of the game.

Their personality, collectively, was loud and rowdy, reminiscent of, well, young men who like to play sports. Constant slurs and taunts flew between them as they played on opposite sides. I learned, for example, that "Jamook" is a taunt against people of Italian heritage. Also, I saw the plight of the athletic but not exceptionally talented female when playing in this crowd; every time one of the three girls who showed up over the three weeks would make a solid play, the bullhorn of this group would cheer for her: the intention was good, the result a little patronizing.

That said, this group, especially the louder fellows, consisted of mostly nice people. By my third (final) game, they knew who I was and were happy to see me. There was rarely if ever malice in their voices or taunts, just that constant veneer of shit-talking and easy joking that defines behavior and relationships among young males, in America at the very least.

What football, or any group activity, can provide to the traveler, the visitor, the new implant in a city, is a chance to tap into a new network, to find a way to connect to a new population in a new place, through doing something familiar, old. A friend of mine always said that the best way to meet people (I think she and I were talking about potential romantic partners at the time) is by doing the things you like to do in ways that allow you to meet other people. Fortunately, I stumbled on a romantic partner through a job, saving me from the dating scene. But when it comes to the occasional need that I feel, a need most people probably feel more often, to spend time with fellow humans, to interact, to laugh at dumb jokes about one another's physical incompetence, this strategy becomes valuable. Football as a way to make friends, I'm saying.

***

I didn't join the game in Israel because I wanted to make friends. I'm only in Israel for a total of 9 weeks this time around, and have plenty of friends who are still here. I'm a short-timer through and through, and don't need very many friends anyway. No, that didn't interest me very much. I was just seeking a way to workout, a way to run, to expend physical energy in a way not allowed by standing in front of children for 3+ hours a day.

Shortly after my return in late March, I met with my friend Yehuda, and my exercising desire came up. He, no football player, mentioned that he had a group of friends that played at the Sportek in Herzliya every Monday night. The group was a set of Israeli Arabs, at least a few of them students at the university Yehuda and I had just earned our M.A. from. This certainly intrigued me further, and a couple Mondays later, I was on my way to meet with the gang.

Political discourse in Israel finds itself in an interesting, if troubling place in 2011. On the one hand, the distance between politics and life is much narrower here than anywhere else I've been, closer than the occasionally energized U.S.A. in the last decade, closer than the easy benevolence of Western Europe, the unapproachable abyss sundering citizens from their leaders in Rwanda or Guatemala, or the laughable remove at which Putin and co. operate in Russia. The country is small, meaning that people are more likely to know their leaders or meet with their leaders, but more significantly, the issues are more important, matters not of just getting a job or paying an excessive amount of taxes, but of what the country is to become, of peace and war, of, in a reductive phrasing, life and death.

At the same time, Israelis that I encounter appear to be worn out from caring, eager to submerge political discourse underneath the easy calm of everyday life, an everyday life that, when removed from the question of the territories, the fact that most young people serve in the army, and so on, is pretty nice. The weather is great, the economy has done as well as almost any western economy in the post-crisis climate, and cultural life here is unique, a mix of European heights and Middle Eastern zest. Why bother with the difficult issues that affect the country, especially when they're not going to be solved either way?

I don't mean to simplify the situation, nor to judge, at least not as harshly as the above question might appear to do. Humans do not have the capacity to take on constant complexity and moral ambiguity over a period of 10 years, 20 years, 63 years, thousands of years, depending on how you define the situation. Politics are still talked about, still essential, but there's also less reason to talk; most citizens have made up their minds one way or the other, and either the status quo will hold on for the coming years or the logjam will break and the floods of change will reach Israel as well, for better or worse.

That digression takes me away from the story though, and I apologize. I meant to say all this as an introduction to the fact, unfamiliar to many who haven't visited Israel, that there is a large Arab population within the country itself. About 20-25% of the citizens of Israel are Arabs. They vote, they live in mixed communities as well as their own, and they are a part of the daily fabric of life here (for some obvious examples, often Arabs work as gas station attendants, and not coincidentally many gas stations feature good Arab restaurants). Definitely, there is discrimination for the minority, but from what I can tell over my time here, the best historical analogy of the Arab situation in Israel itself would be to African-Americans' place in the U.S. before the Civil Rights movement. Arabs in Israel have more rights, I would say, but there is more intensity to the feelings between majority and minority.

That further digression is to explain that while I had no intention to bring up politics with these Arabs in either an explicit or implicit sense, I thought it would be very interesting to spend some time with the group. I knew Israeli Arabs, either through school or through frequent encounters, but I wouldn't number any as acquaintances even. This was an opportunity to open a window on a different part of Israel. And to run around and kick a ball.


***

I ran to the Sportek just after 9:00pm on that Monday night. The main organizer, Nabil, had mentioned the possibility that the courts would be full in Herzliya (we would play on a basketball court, basically), and that we might have to drive to the next town over, Raanana. For that reason I couldn't bike over either. I ran to make sure I wasn't late.

I got there, didn't see anybody, and called. Nabil and co. had made the decision to drive over to Raanana and somebody would take me in a car. I gave the description of what I was wearing and where I was, and after a while, a cat named Weill (that's how the name sounded, anyway) found me. He called the driver, who brought the car over, full of passengers already. The driver had a long black beard, the type we associate with religious Muslims named Omar (his name). Another car pulled up with Nabil, who shook my hand happily and said we were going to Raanana, so pile in. I squeezed into the first car, a compact, Weill sat next to me, and we drove with 5 passengers over to the next town, I trying to quiet my inner alarm bells.

As cultured and well-traveled and unfazed as I claim to be as a modern liberal citizen of the world, those bells persisted. My concerns numbered as follows:

1. I have just gotten into a car with five young Arab guys I don't know. The one friend who told me about them is a great guy but who knows if his judgment is always the sharpest? Again, for purposes of analogy, think about getting into a car with 5 locals in, say, East St. Louis.

2. Never mind what they might do to me, that's ridiculous - I had already brought very little money with me, I'm unimportant, they came recommended, that's fine. But what if the cops happen to see a heavily bearded Arab driving a car and notice that he is driving a car with five passengers for 4 seats? Wouldn't it figure that there would be trouble? That might not be good for my job security.

3. Did I remember to put on my Tom's of Maine brand woodspice-scented deodorant that night, or just in the morning, and if not, had that morning application worn off?

As usual, these fears were exaggerated and unrealized (well, except for #3, but then, we were men about to run around: bad smells were typical). Weill and I had a pleasant if mildly uncomfortable talk about our university, uncomfortable not only for the clown car conditions but because he wondered why an American would ever bother to study in Israel. I explained that I came to work here and then just studied while I stayed an extra year, but avoided the subject of the Jewish right of return and the identity Jews around the world feel with Israel, sensing that could get us into a drawn-out political conversation that while likely to be perfectly reasonable, would have perhaps been a little premature in our relationship.

We arrived at the court safely and found a couple guys shooting at a hoop on an otherwise vacant court; the adjacent court had a full football game with Israeli kids going, and so we would have to find a way to convince these guys to let us play. These two players, like many of the kids on the other court, wore kippas, denoting their religious beliefs as Jews: if Herzliya is one of the most liberal and secular places in the country, Raanana is a little bit more conservative and certainly more religious: I remember driving through their once and seeing an ad campaign for women's underwear, a series of ads on the median of the main road, crossed out with big white stripes.

This was the other big inner tension I felt during the game; the possibility of friction between our group and any other groups at the park. Again, any fear was unfounded, but as a dovish, grovelling, peace-loving American from a land where everything works (more or less), as a middle brother in all senses, I was eager to see no further tensions emerge. I imagined how Jewish Israelis might perceive the harsh foreign sounds of Arabic or the accent my fellow football players had when they spoke Hebrew (which they did better than me, of course), I imagined them (the Raanana Jews) finding them (the Herzliya Arabs) aggressive, pushy, rude, and them (the HAs) feeling the same way about them (the RJs), and me stuck in the middle, powerless and in between.

Again, nothing really happened. When balls were kicked from one court to the other, each group helped the other get the ball back, as marks typical football behavior. There was no anger spilled over from one group to the other, no signs of serious tension. Well, except for the anger and tension between the two guys on the other team of my game. And that is all well and good on the court in some measure.

The game then, was like many other football games, for me most reminiscent of the ones I played in Russia on a similar rubber court. 4 on 5 made it hard to play truly evenly, and there wasn't quite as much running as I'd like, but the energy was expended ne'ertheless. I was again about a mid-level player, good at running and hustling, not so great with my touch or shot, better than average when playing in net. The other players were in general better with the ball but not as quick or aggressive. It was just a football game, not much different from the one in New Orleans, and mostly different because of the numbers and the ground we played on.

The difference was all in the details. Like how every call or word the others spoke was in Arabic except when they spoke to me (in either Hebrew or English) and then maybe for a phrase or two afterward as they repeated what they said to me or stayed in the foreign tongue unconsciously. Like how Arabic became slowly more comprehensible to me, or at least the sounds became more distinguishable, rising from an initial bouillabaisse of, "ha-ra-wa-la-err-yuu-fa-ras" to words I could grasp, words I could ask about, like himsa ("five", if I remember right) and erjaa ("get back," yelled all too often for the team of four). Like the yelling I started this piece with.

There is little other profundity or humor that came out of that night. We had a good time, the guys dropped me off at my apartment after the game (only four in the car that time), I said I'd come and play after Passover break, I talked with Yehuda about the guys last night. We didn't achieve peace, we didn't become great friends, we didn't get into any fights. We just had a good game, and plan to do it again.

When moving from place to place, a traveler, me or any other, has to devise a balance between experiencing the new place and keeping a sense of self intact. That sense, that balance, is thrown off at times, which is one of the jarring effects of travel, opportunities to change for better or worse. But one cannot always be jarred, and so there emerges a need to straddle the divide between the world, new and foreign, between being with other people and being alone.

Just as doing things you like to do is a good way to meet people, so is it a way to find that balance abroad. The activity remains familiar, the people different, and the time spent more meaningful and amenable at the same time. And when it comes to finding common activities to do with strangers, there's little better than kicking a ball around and running after it.

One Ski to the Sky - Fallen on the Trail in Small Town Michigan

(Note: I guess my New Orleans writing really fizzled out, huh? Ah well, on to more fertile plains...)

The temperature hung just above freezing. The sun lit up the woods in a blessed winter scene, a still snow globe of trees and untouched white ground and silence. Little could disturb the Currier & Ives setting, a state park full of deer and American Beech trees and less so of intruding humans, of skiers like me. There was nothing that could disturb the cozy feeling of walking through, of skiing through a Robert Frost poem. Nothing that could ruin a first winter in three years, a first winter month spent in the solitude of a small town on the shore of Lake Michigan, one so pristine, so idyllic.

Nothing except me lying on my right side, left knee pulsing with pain, voice uncontrollably emitting curses. Nothing except my hubris and surety regarding the safety of cross country skiing and my growing skills on the long sticks. Nothing except the forever fear of the uninsured, the fear of a serious injury with nothing to pay for it. For a few seconds, a minute, it appeared that somehow this beauty would receive its first major blemish, one wholly my fault and, let's be fair, apparent only to me, beauty being in the eye of the beholder.

And even then, rendered horizontal from my point of view and somehow responsible for my woes, the picture remained pretty.

***

A Trail Sometimes Taken, Though Unclear If More or Less Often

When I tell people that I'm spending a month in Michigan cat-sitting my girlfriend Amy's cat while she is not here, people, after laughing at me for a few seconds and trying out their lamest jokes about cats, pussies, being whipped, and so on, ask me, "What the hell do you do there?"

Wait, let me rephrase. Were I to actually talk to people, I imagine that the conversation above is close to what we'd have. What with phone connections and bad internet and cold weather and snow and my anti-social inclinations and all, I don't talk to many people out here.

But if I were to answer that question, the what the hell do I do here, in Ludington, Michigan, a small town on the coast of Lake Michigan known for being a summer vacation spot and for having a ferry that runs over to Wisconsin (the venerable S.S. Badger, bringing you into Manitowoc, about an hour south of Green Bay! That's Baahadger, with the flat Midwestern "a". And no, it doesn't sail in winter), I would say: "Oh, you know, about the same thing I do anywhere - use the computer, cook myself food, read a lot, write a bit, look for work, work out every now and then, listen to music, play guitar, and so on." Such is the glory of the Internet age, after all. It doesn't matter where you live, because there you are, wired and well-connected! And I'm a pretty self-contained person besides, easily lured into the labyrinth of infinite information available online that makes me know way more about way too many things than I need to know about.

I might add, "The only difference between being here and anywhere else is that I here spend time feeding, petting, playing with, and catering to a fat pussy. A fat pussy cat." I tell lame jokes too, sometimes.

The pussy cat in question.

I could, however come up with a list of a few things I'm doing here that I don't normally do. For example:

- Cooking soups. Hearty hot winter soups. Like french onion soup, sweet potato soup, or borscht, the famed Eastern European beet soup.

- Eating those soups. And when I eat the borscht especially, I take off my shirt, so as to not stain my shirt, which would only lead to Amy buying more shirts, offending my anti-materialistic sensibilities. Beets, as I discover when cooking them, are very messy. They easily mess up the counter, the sink, the dishwasher, the floor, the wall, and, eventually, the toilet. The beet tinge washes out of all of those places, but who knows if it washes out of clothes. So shirtless borscht eating.

- Studying French. Though that has nothing to do with Michigan, really, unless I decide to dig up Pere Jacques Marquette's diary and study it for good tips on where the best hot springs and cherry trees are in Michigan. But still.

- Cross-country skiing. Which brings me to this story.

***

Cross-country skiing is a very low-key, quotidian sort of activity. Best done in a relatively flat area with short hills to climb and, one always hopes, slightly longer ones to ride down, XC skiing is a lower thrilled, higher energy workout than downhill skiing. I believe the better one gets at XC skiing, the more of a workout it probably is; my level involved a lot of huffing and puffing, but felt more like hiking than running, say.

Including these past two days of skiing, I have strapped skis on 3 times since I was 14. Up until the winter I turned 14, skiing was an annual activity, mostly of the downhill variety. Some of my earliest memories involve family vacations in the Catskill Mountains - for whatever reason, the steam room they had at the resort remains embedded in my mind as some holy room of warmth and comfort. I could downhill satisfactorily from the age of, say, 8 or so, and enjoyed trying to keep up with my younger brother who was inevitably a faster, more reckless, and better skier than I. Good thing he switched to snowboarding before too long.

When I was 14 and a freshman in high school, I went with my family on a ski trip to the North Conway area in New Hampshire. Between Attitash and Bear Mountain, I had some of the best, most challenging skiing of my young life. We also went cross-country skiing at some trails nearby, my first time on the flatter trails. I remember my mother being fond of it from her Moscow childhood, I remember it being hard, and I remember liking it. That could be a false memory, the last bit, but it stuck with me.

After that winter, I didn't ski again for 8 years. The intersection between skiing season and wrestling season prevented me from skiing for two reasons - more legitimately, that I had no time to go skiing; more spoken though less importantly, the risk of injury from skiing. Not that there's no risk of injury when skiing (I'm pretty sure the Michael Kennedy death happened around the time I was 13 or 14, as an exaggerated and morbid example), but I never really had any good chances to go skiing in the winter, so why bother with the threat? And, as I thought of it last week, cross-country skiing probably would have been a good way to cut weight and a low injury risk anyway. You can't get hurt if you're not going very fast or very much downhill, I figured.

This abstinence ended in a rather ironic way, then: my college coach Clar insisted the team go skiing on our trip to Reno my last season at Duke. My last being, as the final one, my most important season, and this trip marking my return to competition after my time in Russia. As Clar always says, good athletes don't get injured, so I guess I was to prove my athleticism.

Even then, ever cautious, I suggested that maybe I go XC skiing instead of downhill. This didn't fly with the relentless abandon we were supposed to display, and I headed out for the downhill slopes. After a bunny run or two, I realized the enormous intelligence of the body (and believe you me, my body is dumb as rocks as far as bodies go): my muscles remembered how to make it down a mountain upright, even if I had no idea what they were doing. Naturally, I quickly advanced from blue square intermediate hills to following a teammate, who had spent some time as a kid in the Swiss Alps, weaving down off-trail paths and past short trees, rocks, and other natural obstacles. I came out of this with a few falls, at least one instance of splitting a tree (i.e. straddling it with my skis; I'm not sure if there's a technical term for it, but splitting it makes sense - fortunately, the tree was not waist height, or rather, not slightly less than waist height), and a new appreciation for the process of finding a path, of going fast for two seconds downhill and then stopping to consider the next turn, and of earning a route. Blitzing downhill for a sustained time is fun once or twice, but the rush gets old; this sort of bit-by-bit downhill skiing really appealed to me. I hope to do it again.

In the meantime, there was at last the option of XC skiing again. Michigan, and the Midwest in general, is not known for its hills or mountains. Stranded here by the water in the middle of winter, with little to do and time on my hands as ever, I was free to try this old hobby out and see if it still suits.

After a day where I didn't leave the house or dress in anything sturdier than pajamas, I took the long walk of three blocks through Ludington's downtown and dropped in on the local sports equipment shop. I inquired as to whether one could rent cross country skis, and if so, how much it would cost. "You certainly can," the woman working there told me. The price was reasonable. I left the store and trudged another giant block to the local fresh foods store (this was the day I cooked my borscht).The next day, I saved my energy and drove to the ol' sports shop. The same woman helped me along in picking out my skis, my boots, and my poles (all for one low price), and within ten minutes I was back in my car and on my way out to the park.

Ludington State Park, home of sand dunes and ranked #1 state park in the Midwest, lies near the Lake Michigan shore, in between the great lake and a more local one, Lake Hamlin. Driving there, an 8-mile trip or so from the center of town, involves taking Lakeshore Drive, a.k.a. Michigan Route 116. The first half mile the driver can see the lake, then the shore juts out and the road runs over a bridge traversing Lincoln Lake, a lake now frozen; looking to the left, the driver will see a beautiful home perched upon a hill overlooking the bridge, and on the left just past that is a golf course, suggesting this is the more affluent part of town. Past the golf course, one takes a left as Rt. 116 splits off from Lakeshore Drive and goes more coastal again, and this is where things get interesting.

Lake Michigan's Wintry Shore.

On the right, dunes of eight to ten-feet height vary with a little outpost home and flat territory. On the left, an eight-foot tall or so sand dune covered with snow and patches of sand sticking out like missed shaving spots stands as the only barrier between the eye and the lake. Dunes of course undulate, and so the careful eye can spot Lake Michigan in all its glory. Its winter glory is an interesting brand, with a six to ten foot layer of ice stretching from the coast outwards; six to ten feet from the coast I mean, a width measurement, the length stretching as far as the coastline goes, and I can't tell you the depth. Then there's the steady water, clean and chilly even in summer's peak, when the savvier beachgoers get out of town and drive these extra ten minutes for relative seclusion compared to the downtown beach, surely hypothermia-inducing at the end of February. But the shoreline is beautiful, and one looks out due west to watch any number of technicolor sunsets, with a bluff sticking out to the south to add to the picture.

I visited Ludington State Park to ski four times in the past two weekends; rentals go for 24 hours at said local shop, convenient enough to ski immediately after taking the skis and immediately before returning them. My first trip involved a lot of blundering around to find the trail and, in the end, about an hour and a half of skiing. The next day I lasted about 3 hours, skiing on the trail, getting lost and losing track of the trail, and then finding it again at the mystical #6 checkpoint that I had sought so desperately while being lost. A week later, after a new, light snowfall, I went back out to the same trail, the LSP South Ski Trail, and blazed my own ski tracks on the trail, mostly without getting lost.

The accursed signpost #6.

By the end of three days, I learned not to follow cloven hoof footprints in lieu of the trail; not to expect deer to stand still long enough for me to reach into my backpack, pull out my camera, and take a picture of them; and not to discount the reliability of the following survival pack: the aforementioned camera, notebook, two stubby pencils, two Reese's peanut butter eggs, an apple, and a bottle of water - that can keep the energy going and the body safe and sound for a while. I fell every which way possible - dramatic one ski to the sky losses of balance, mundane stumbles forward while going uphill, self-induced crumples for safety when concerned about veering off trail on the occasional downhill, falls where my ski got caught in a low-hanging branch or stump, and laughable series of falls from getting up the wrong way after falling one of the other ways previously, climaxing in a four-falls-in-two-minutes stretch. I also witnessed a large family barbecue (i.e. 50-60 folks grilling in the snow on a Sunday afternoon); the utter silence of the woods on two of the days especially, with no sound except for broken branches creaking, wind blowing, and my clumsy tromping through the snow; that silence observed and disturbed by a woman who walked along the trail and talked to herself, saying, "You're a crazy woman, you're a real trailblazer," moments she lifted her head and noticed me approaching from the opposite direction - the red in her face, I imagine, was equal parts embarrassment and physical exertion in the cold; and, of course, the beauty of my surroundings when sprawled flat on my back after many of those falls.

A Split Stump Fall, the Aftermath Of.

My skiing had improved too, despite the falls. I progressed from arrhythmic strides, terrible downhill-to-straightaway transitions, and overall slow movement that was more akin to hiking with really long shoes (the ski coming off the ground much to often as I tromped through the snow) to occasionally on rhythm strides, the ability to maintain downhill momentum some of the time, and more frequent ski to ground coverage. In other words, a slight improvement; by my fourth day, I knew just enough to be dangerous to myself.

On a fine Sunday, cold enough to preserve the snow but with a surplus of sun and a surfeit of wind that makes for ideal winter sports conditions, I trekked out for the fourth day. I decided to seek out the North Ski Trails, employing the unfailing logic that if the trails I took the first three times were known as the LSP "South Ski Trails", there must be a North Ski Trails set (I learned this from Encyclopedia Brown books). After an initial trip along the roads, I found my hypothesis to be correct and landed upon those North Ski Trails.

The North trails were simpler, a little shorter, and less exciting to observe on a map. Where the South Ski Trails had three or four loops over 11 checkpoints, the North Ski Trails featured a straight shot from checkpoints 1-4, then a loop around a 5th checkpoint, #9; hiking trails intertwined with the ski trails, adding many checkpoints for paths not groomed for skiers.

Despite its limits, the trail offered plenty of its own beauty, with a wooded forest that felt both more dense and more open, somehow, maybe due to the presence of the sun falling on my head. In addition, my legs' energy and general enthusiasm both ebbed a bit; I had skied about three hours the day before and didn't feel much of a need to repeat that feat as I cruised along, again alone and surrounded by nature's low volume. The trail ran at least an hour and a half without interruptions, especially at my slower than usual pace. There was no need, I'm saying, for me to branch off trail.

And yet, there I broke off from #3 to try the Lighthouse trail, plenty long and most certainly a hikers' trail and not a skiers' one. I figured that out when the trail led me to the top of a dune, and then gave no indication where to go on the other side of the dune. Later, after backtracking, backtrack being one of the most defeatist verbs there is for the masculine mind, I saw on the map that I was indeed meant to continue across the dunes to get to the Lighthouse. I conceded that my backtracking was not only practical but the only realistic option.

I skied around the trail dutifully, musing about creating sports blogs and European rail systems. The trail was unspectacular only in comparison to the South Ski Trails - the North held even more of the understated, low-frill thrills that make up XC skiing; easy downhill glides, a laid out path to follow, and less than too difficult climbs, with the woods all around. All I seek, all I sought from my skiing is the space to think, to sink into a reality divorced from my computer and the technological needs of the modern world, to allow my body's natural desires for movement and exercise to express themselves, and I sought for all of this in a palatable, entertaining, and occasionally challenging setting. So far on that day, I had received all of this. I had had enough.

And yet again, when I got back to checkpoint #3, I decided to go a different way back to my car. I decided to take a hiking trail again, the "Coast Guard" trail, thinking it wouldn't be much longer, and would offer fresh territory. I noticed that somebody had skied there before me, as there were grooves to follow. I presumed that I would be fine.

The trail ran fairly narrow; wide enough for one person, but hardly a lot of room for error. Scattered trees lined the trail. I began going up, and anybody knows that what goes up must come down. I came to a bluff as it were, a peak in the trail before a short downhill, a little left-breaking curve of about twenty meters. Nothing special about this curve except perhaps the combination of the elements mentioned in this paragraph, combined with my dangerous knowledge and my wearied attention.

In any case, I started down the short slope, hesitated as I didn't have great control, feared hitting a tree, leaned to my right either to fall or to stabilize myself, fell, and left my left ski behind, catching either snow, ground, or a root and wrenching my knee and ankle. Which brought me to the cursing.

My first thought as the pain shot through my knee was that a ligament had gone. My second was that I needed to take off the skis and straighten my legs to assess. I poked the buttons on the skis off and began feeling around the damaged area. I found all three ligaments known to me to be in place. Relief washed over my uninsured joints. I had dodged a bullet, considering.

The next step was to get up, test the knee, and get moving. I stood and found that I could bear weight. My initial reaction turned out to be my most overdramatic response to pain since I thought I needed arthroscopic surgery on my knee in 5th grade when I woke up and couldn't bend it; I had been reading about Mary Lou Retton and her similar injury, which explains my fears over missing out the LA Olympics (the solution to this "injury" was to take a few pills and wait a few days; it's something of a mystery to me when I think about it). All in all, it looked like I would live without need of helicopter rescue.

After a more mundane fall, the only pain to the ego.

There was still the matter of finding my way back, and how to do it. On the one hand, walking was probably hardly easier on my knee than skiing, and slower for sure. On the other hand, another hesitant ride on a narrow turn might not be so good. The head said walk back to the previous trail and then ski on known paths. The ego said get back on the skis, tough it out, don't hesitate, and get home. Naturally, after walking through that first bit where I had fallen, it was on with the ego's decision.

I plunged forward, first on boots, then on skis slowly down a stupidly placed downhill trail (seriously nature, what gives?), and then trudging along through the hiking trail. The trail dragged on. I wondered why it was so much longer than it looked like on the map. I wondered whether eating an apple instead of candy helped or hurt my energy levels as the trail kept going. I wondered how I ended up in the campground cabin area and whether that man walking out of his truck was going to follow me and abduct me for reasons unknown and best not speculated about. At last, much to my wonder, I came back to the initial, roadside trail that would lead to my car, the trail where earlier I had seen someone riding on a sled pulled by three dogs. Ahh, Michigan. I limped on in.

So ends my overdrawn, not quite as dramatic as 127 Hours story about skiing. A week later, I still ice my knee and ankle and take aspirins and wait to see if the weather and my body will cooperate for me to go out on the trails for one more two-day stretch. I promise to myself that I'll stay on the trails. Or at least, I won't hesitate when I veer off.

At least, if I don't get any more skiing this winter, I hear Luxembourg has a few trails, so it won't have to be a 12-year wait till next time around.