EAST MONTPELIER – I once had a student who collected inspirational quotes, aphorisms and sage-sounding advice. He’d become a leader of groups of young boys in a program that borrowed extensively from the Outward Bound model that posed challenges designed to stimulate personal growth and self-reliance, and made good use of all the little chestnuts he’d gleaned over the years. They originated with Goethe, Einstein, Buzz Aldrin, Walt Disney, Sir Francis Chichester, Beyond the Fringe. It didn’t matter. What mattered was what they said. Each morning, at the post-breakfast meeting. (It had started out as a pre-breakfast meeting, but a wise old mentor had suggested that those kids would learn nothing with their stomachs growling and the smell of bacon in the air.) This was in direct contradiction of my own grandfather’s technique. He ran a 19th-century-style Settlement House; and before the homeless bums he took in could get their free meal and clothes, they had to sing hymns and listen to a sermon. I’ve always doubted that gramps saved many souls that way.
But to return to the subject. My old student at length possessed an entire volume of inspirational tidbits and often could turn right to one appropriate to any situation. He clearly found them relevant to his own challenges, and I don’t doubt his charges did as well.
If the group faced a problem representing some difficulty, like portaging their canoes and gear over a long, foot-tangling carry, they responded with silence in response to the raised index finger of the leader, and then shouted out in unison the second half of the expression, “When the going gets tough…”
I needed a stock of inspirational and referential quotes this past weekend. As some of you may know, my sweetheart and I live about three and a half hours apart by automobile. This may be a logistical pain in the neck, but it’s providential for our relationship. Many people in middle or old age will know why I say that. She’s still teaching full-time, so we especially enjoy three-day holiday weekends or school vacations. Presidents’ Day is one of those banner occasions.
Unfortunately, it occurs right at midwinter, which puts a premium on fair weather, which in turn depends upon the whims of the god of thunder, lightning and wind, who, it is very clear, hates us. If he gets a chance to foul up our plans, he jumps at it. Last week was no exception.
All week long, leading up to our Friday-noon departure (Kiki was going with me), the media were crackling with descriptions of major winter storms rampaging across the country and due to start dumping on us Thursday. Oh, brother! But with no need to arrive in Massachusetts by any particular time, and sporting all-wheel drive and new snow treads, I wasn’t too worried. I’d just put my head down and plug on south like an old-fashioned mail carrier. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night shall stay this courier from the swift completion of his appointed round.”
The first storm was apparently a glancing blow. It was cleaned up, and the roads dry by Friday afternoon. Bea and I dined in, fiddled around, and made a hardware store run for a GFI receptacle, with which I managed to replace a dead one with tools not my own. Then the phone rang. “Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” All vehicles off the town streets for about 24 hours. Uh-oh.
This was no glancing blow. Our cars in the driveway were deep in snow. And then it rained. Kiki set records for visiting the yard. And then it froze. I still can’t believe I didn’t take a tumble on porches, steps and walks glazed with ice.
Now and then we checked the weather and conditions back in Vermont. They sounded apocalyptic; and this time I did have to be back fairly early. But it sounded as though it was going to be a bad trip. Here Ulysses saved me with his fatalistic attitude toward calamity: “It may be that the gulfs will wash us down.”
The last straw was my son-in-law and faithful plow guy calling to warn me of drifting snow, invisible roads and 35 mile-per-hour top speeds up north. I could believe it; when I dropped my glasses on the snow, the wind blew them away. I turned up Route I-93 with great trepidation – but came all the way home amid traffic traveling at eighty miles an hour. I needn’t have worried so. C.P. Kavafy reminds me: “Laestrygonians, Cyclops, wild Poseidon – you won’t encounter them…unless your soul sets them up in front of you.”
