Looking Forward, Listening Back

This is a blog principally about skiing and the experiences, exposures and opportunities it provides me. In the end, however, it is just skiing and sometimes more important events require, really demand my attention. This evening, as I follow the television coverage of our election and its results become clear, I am incredibly moved and I struggle to articulate what it means to me personally or to our nation. The best I can offer is to remember the words of President Lyndon Johnson. LBJ may seem an odd choice, but his vision for America sounds as fresh and a propos on this historic evening as it did in May of 1964 to the students of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. For now, I would like a glass of scotch, a good cigar, and the promise of a great winter to come.

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I have come today from the turmoil of your Capital to the tranquility of your campus to speak about the future of your country.

The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.

For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people.

The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.

Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the “Great Society”.

The “Great Society” rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in out time. But that is just the beginning.

The “Great Society” is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the “Great Society” is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the “Great Society” - in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.

Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans - four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must re-build the entire urban United States.

Aristotle said: “Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life.” It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today.

The catalog of ills is long: there is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated.

Worst of all expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.

Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders.

New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your generation to make the American city a place where future generations will come, not only to live but to live the good life.

I understand that if I stayed here tonight I would see that Michigan students are really doing their best to live the good life.

This is the place where the Peace Corps was started. It is inspiring to see how all of you, while you are in this country, are trying so hard to live at the level of the people.

A second place where we begin to build the “Great Society” is in our countryside. We have always prided ourselves on being not only America the strong and America the free, but America the beautiful. Today that beauty is in danger. The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded, our seashores overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.

A few years ago we were greatly concerned about the “Ugly American.” Today we must act to prevent an ugly America.

For once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.

A third place to build the “Great Society” is in the classrooms of America. There your children's lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.

Today, 8 million adult Americans, more than the entire population of Michigan, have not finished 5 years of school. Nearly 20 million have not finished 8 years of school. Nearly 54 million - more than one quarter of all America - have not even finished high school.

Each year more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proved ability, do not enter college because they cannot afford it. And if we cannot educate today's youth, what will we do in 1970 when elementary school enrollment will be 5 million greater than 1960? And high school enrollment will rise by 5 million. College enrollment will increase by more than 3 million.

In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. Most of our qualified teachers are underpaid, and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. So we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.

These are three of the central issues of the “Great Society”. While our Government has many programs directed at those issues, I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems.

But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings -- on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the “Great Society”.

The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local authority. They require us to create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities.

Woodrow Wilson once wrote: “Every man sent out from his university should be a man of his Nation as well as a man of his time.”

Within your lifetime powerful forces, already loosed, will take us toward a way of life beyond the realm of our experience, almost beyond the bounds of our imagination.

For better or for worse, your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.

So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?

Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?

Will you join in the battle to make it possible for all nations to live in enduring peace -- as neighbors and not as mortal enemies?

Will you join in the battle to build the “Great Society”, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?

There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.

Those who came to this land sought to build more than just a new country. They sought a new world. So I have come here today to your campus to say that you can make their vision our reality. So let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say: It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.

Thank you. Good-bye.

American Fantasy

My hometown occupies the very northwestern corner of Connecticut, with Massachusetts to our immediate north and New York to our immediate west. It is surrounded by steep, green hills and filled with rivers and lakes. With all of the recent political rhetoric about “real Americans” and the media emphasis on blue versus red states, those of us who call this hard-to-get-to and harder-to-leave slice of America home defy easy pigeon-holing.

The town, according to its 2007 Annual Report (which all Connecticut towns submit to the state government each year), consists of 60.65 square miles or 38,761 acres and it encompasses 2 villages and 3 hamlets. Of the total population of approximately 4,100 people, as of September 2007 there were 1179 unaffiliated registered voters, 706 registered republicans, 970 registered democrats, 6 voters registered with the Independence Party, and 2 voters registered as Socialists. There are equal numbers of farmers and second home owners here, and many fascinating retirees who enrich the intellectual and cultural life of town. The “business district”, such as it is, is bounded by a Congregational church on one end and the Episcopalian church on the other (with other denominations not far away), there’s a graceful old inn on the green, and soldiers from conflicts dating all the way back to the French and Indian War (a/k/a the Seven Years’ War) are buried in the cemetery behind town hall. We have not one, not two, but three highly reputable private preparatory schools in town along with the excellent regional public school district. We’re not without our social tensions, we have our share of hardship and poverty, and we definitely are not immune to the other ills of society. As far as I know Jimmy Stewart does not operate a Savings and Loan here, but you get the picture. Many families over the past 350 years have staked out their piece of the American dream here – some have made it and many haven’t, but all have a pride of place and of their association with it.

I have just spent four months on the far side of the world during the most vigorous portion of the now-completed political campaigns, literally as far from home as one can get without leaving the planet. Whether in spite of or as a result of that great distance, and coupled with the events and conditions affecting our nation at home and abroad, I have felt moved by the current election in ways both cerebral and emotional to an extent I have never before experienced. Certainly, the frequent and sincere queries from Kiwis and others looking for some insight into our national consciousness and our political process kept events in the forefront of my mind and required that I be able to articulate my own views to others, with all the requisite careful consideration. Imagine a casual, polite dinner conversation where I am asked to explain the Electoral College, the role of US monetary policy on the world economy, the defining events in the lives of the Presidential candidates, why Texas is so different from New England, and what’s so important about Brett Favre playing for the Jets and you get the idea.

One particular comment from an older friend in Wanaka struck an interesting chord with me, one which has been on my mind quite a bit as the second Tuesday in November has approached. My friend is classic Kiwi: he’s an octogenarian, fit and mentally sharp, a retired and quite brilliant psychiatrist who immigrated to New Zealand from Scotland with his young family in the 1960’s. His comment to me (which clearly struck a nerve) was that the American Dream is really just a fantasy, noting that he’s “an expert on fantasies”. The problem is that my friend, like so many British, doesn’t get it. A fantasy, as he considered it, is not grounded in reality. In America, because we have and continue to create our own reality, we are free to dream of a nation and a world which may seem far-fetched, which may seem beyond our reach, but towards which we can dedicate ourselves, our resources, our efforts and our hopes – “our sacred honor”, as it were.

As Americans we are aware that the American Dream is a representation of our aspirations as individuals and as a community. We understand that there will always be a gap – sometimes large and, hopefully, sometimes small – between our abstraction of America the dream and the reality of America the nation. My friend failed to grasp that the dream was born of the confluence of the flowering of the liberal concepts of the great enlightenment philosophers, the antithetical relationship of their philosophies and an oppressive colonial power, and the destiny of a people empowered by their own natural inclination towards self-expression and self-betterment. Our “inalienable rights” arose out of the ether and took root in each and all of us. Believe me, I’ve seen the soil in New England up close and anything which is going to take root here and flower for generations had better be stubborn.

My intention is not to preach about how right we are, nor is it my intention to lecture on the merits or nature of the American Dream. My intention is to take a moment on the night before Election Day, at a time when our concepts of who were are as Americans and our goals for our country and its place in the world find challenges at every turn, to consider the essentials. There are many attributes we share with people on the other side of the world and I am blessed to consider so many of them my friends. They have and continue to enrich my life. Still, there is no place I’d rather be on Election Day than in my home town, among my own people – farmers, teachers, doctors, retires, and even ski instructors - considering our common aspirations and our differing opinions over a cup of coffee and a ballot box.

Putting It All On the Line

It’s coming. It’s in the smells in the air, the nervous energy in town and the thick frosts and occasional flurries whitening the mountaintops here in New England. Another winter and another ski season are nearly upon us. I’m excited. Each time I’ve spent the “summer” working in a Southern Hemisphere winter, I’ve had a little anxiety about whether I’d be able to share in the excitement that comes to skiers and riders after the leaves have fallen and before the cold really hits. Each time, as I’ve dealt with the inevitable logistics and pre-season planning, I’ve been gratified to find that I am genuinely ready for another winter, I am genuinely psyched. This year is no exception.

At Okemo this coming winter I’ll be back to my normal role on the line as a ski instructor and I couldn’t be happier. Yes, I still will have a lot of responsibilities off the hill. Yes, I still will be supervising a couple of days each week. Yes, I’ll be conducting a lot of staff training. But, at the end of the day, I’m a ski instructor. I love it. Skiing, as an Italian colleague of mine once said, is not rocket surgery. Even at its most technical level of analysis, the movements are simple (though not necessarily easy) and the nature of the job also is simple. What makes it a challenge is working to understand each person we teach and articulating to them (verbally and otherwise) the technical aspects of skiing in a way that they understand and can replicate. Sometimes this means being direct and technical and at other times it means using a little guile and creativity to reach the desired result. Make all of this fun and keep the guests safe, and the challenges multiply. It’s immensely gratifying and a lot of fun.

My role at Treble Cone coordinating programs for the guests and running the training for the staff is a great gig. Our operation in Wanaka, New Zealand is small enough that I do get to teach a fair bit, and the whole experience is a wonderful counterpoint to Okemo – the two places are different and complementary in many, many ways. Notably, each of the three of us who run the TC Snow Sports School - me, my counterpart Nick who runs the children’s programs, and our director Tim – think of ourselves as instructors first and last, and we view it as an important facet of our jobs that the staff knows it.

Now that I’ll be back in my spot at Okemo, sitting on the bench in the Wernick House locker room, booting up next to Joe, Courtney, Fred, John and the rest, comparing notes on the weather, judging how to dress by how many layers Fred is wearing that day and dividing it by five, laughing constantly and grumbling occasionally, and heading out on the hill to teach everyone and anyone who comes our way, it’ll be a wonderful way to spend my time. We have an exceptional collection of instructors, exceptional teachers and exceptional people, and I’m glad to be home and to be back amongst them.

One More Look

Just as I couldn't resist one more look back over Lake Wanaka before leaving town on Tuesday, I couldn't help posting one more photo taken last week from right outside my back door. I'm glad to be home in the United States and to be headed to another winter in Vermont, but a piece of Wanaka will stay with me. Until next time ...

Somewhere Over the Pacific…

I’m committed. I’ve just crossed over the Equator on my way from Auckland to California. There will be no going back to summer this year.

The past week has been a bit of a whirlwind, both in the bubble in which I’d been living and in the world at large. I’m not yet sure if it will turn out to have been a blessing or a curse to have been isolated from the barrage of media surrounding the current international credit crisis, but I’m certain the ramifications of it will be immediately apparent and deep seeded at home upon my arrival. At present, however, I’m sitting in a more than half-empty, brand new Boeing 777-200ER, I’ve watched an episode of Top Gear where the hosts sped around Europe in three different “supercars” looking for the perfect driving road and spending fuel like there was no tomorrow, I’ve eaten what likely will have been my last lamb meal for a while, and I am half-way through this week’s Economist, trying to put everything in perspective. The number and size of the advertisements from banks now in financial distress provides some intensely ironic gallows humor.

To say the least, the places I’ve been over the past several days would have been distracting to even the most serious of people in even the most dire of circumstances. On Saturday, I drove for five hours from Wanaka in the heart of the Southern Alps, to Te Anau, a large town on the shores of Lake Te Anau surrounded by mountains, and then on to Milford at the head of Milford Sound, a fjord on the West Coast of the South Island. The road from Te Anau to Milford, paved only since 1996 and called, nicely, the Milford Road, is 100 kilometers long but takes at least two hours of driving, in part because it’s windy and mountainous and in part because it’s so beautiful that it hurts. My neck was sore when I arrived, literally. I spent Saturday night along the banks of the Cleddau River, explored the fjord by boat, making it out to the Tasman Sea and back, enjoyed lunch with good friends with no concern for the viability of the Western capitalist system, and then drove the five hours back home. Milford Sound was justifiably called one of the eight wonders of the natural world by Rudyard Kipling himself. Milford Sound and the Fjordland National Park generally are as remote and as beautiful as I could imagine and left me absolutely distracted, leading to some of those lucid moments that may or may not result in a better understanding of the world but which provide a welcome cleansing from the hustle and bustle of the mind.

What effect the current financial crisis in the world will have on the Vermont ski industry is uncertain, in both nature and extent. It won’t be good, regardless. Though I try at all times while working to focus on the positive, the many benefits of skiing and teaching skiing, at the end of the day it is my job and it is a business. It is also a luxury. The seals lolling about on the rock ledges surrounding Milford Sound may not care whether the Western democracies can stave off financial collapse, but as I head across the ocean to an uncertain future at home it is foremost on my mind. Regardless, Okemo will open in time for Thanksgiving and I will be there, ready to share, to teach and to enjoy with all that come my way. How many do so remains an open question.


The photos appearing here, all taken within the past week, are, from top to bottom: the Aspiring Range as seen from Glendhu Bay on the Western shores of Lake Wanaka (above the text); The Aspiring Range looking up along the Matukituki Valley; the Eglinton River Valley seen from the Miford Road; Mitre Peak at sunset, seen from the boat basin in Milford Sound; Milford Sound looking out towards the Tasman Sea from the deck of the Milford Wanderer; and one of the remakable rock formations in The Chasm along the Cleddau River near the Milford Road. Given the difficulty in choosing which photos to post here, I've made two photo albums posted on facebook available to anyone interested in viewing them. Many more photos are available, and worthwhile, at the following links:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=43641&l=bdc59&id=642938180

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=44023&l=699e0&id=642938180

In Cognito

Kiwis have a very disarming love of wearing costumes. Any party, any event, any occasion is reason enough to dig into the back of the closet, head to the recycle center for something second hand and a bit odd, or go all out and hire something exceptional. This reflex is not in any way limited to the young party crowd – older (for Wanaka, that means older than 25), completely respectable, professional people will grab hold of a costume theme with the same if not more enthusiasm as the cool kids. It really is amazing.

Sunday, October 5th was the last day of the season at Treble Cone, and it brought out everyone in the finest. The retro ski gear that showed up (clothing and ski equipment both) brought back many memories and, in some cases, made all of us cringe. The sheer numbers of people in tropical prints, funny hats, odd ensembles, gorilla suits and the like was incredibly funny. This included the staff, the managers, the medical personnel, everyone. If you had arrived from Vermont without being prepped for it, you might have thought someone spiked the morning coffee. It was an incredibly funny and exceptionally fun display, and a great way to finish the season.

At the end of my second winter season here, I’ve concluded that this costume phenomenon is the result of the combination of two related factors. First, New Zealand is very far from everyone and everything else on earth except Australia (which Kiwis probably wish was further away anyway) and Antarctica. Anyone not able to get enthusiastic about the next themed party is destined to end up grumpy and alone that evening, not a happy state of affairs when marooned out here in the middle of the Pacific. Think about the funny madcap evenings spent on Gilligan’s Island and you get the idea.

This remoteness results directly in the second factor, the determined and refreshing lack of pretension in all aspects of life here. Nobody is above getting all gussied up in costume. It also means there is a certain lack of apprehension about getting drunk in public, but that’s another story. Regardless, if coming to New Zealand, definitely leave your stiff upper lip at home. It’s as though, having left behind the social rigidity of Great Britain, those first immigrants to the South Island, many of whom were from Scotland, saw the perfect grazing land, the salmon and trout-filled rivers, and the massive peaks, breathed a deep sigh of relief, and decided to let fly their inner comedy. It’s contagious, I must say, though it creeps in slowly. I’m not expecting “fancy dress” parties at Okemo this coming winter, but I haven’t minded dipping a toe in the costumed waters while here in Wanaka. At a minimum, the costume phenomenon and all the energy that goes with it shows the spirit and enthusiasm of all those Kiwis and those who travel here to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of a life in the mountains.

Insert Toes in Sand Here

This past Monday, I traveled to the city of Dunedin to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Dunedin is a small port city here on the South Island of New Zealand that was a bustling commercial center in the nineteenth century and which now has a pleasant mix of industry and shipping, together with all the trappings of its modern role as an important university city. Dunedin has little pollution, lots of parks, no traffic, and lots of bungalow style single-family homes and tidy little retail buildings along the sea wall in the St. Clair neighborhood where my friends live. Consider that all of this is a short stroll from a great surf beach and it’s all a three hour drive from the great skiing at Treble Cone, and Dunedin certainly provides its residents and visitors with a balance and a lifestyle rarely found. In many respects, these factors combine to make the place feel a bit like Seattle and other towns on the Pacific coast of the US. Dunedin may not be the coolest or most moneyed city in New Zealand, but the residents are justly prideful of their home. As was the case for me Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, any place where I can insert my toes into the sand of an ocean beach less than twelve hours before skiing in a couple of feet of fresh, light, dry powder in high alpine terrain gets my vote.

Traveling the three hours to Dunedin from Wanaka by car, one stays on “major” roads. That is to say that the two lane road that snakes through the rolling hills, orchards, vineyards and pasture-lands of central Otago is a major thoroughfare for the South Island but certainly does not qualify as a highway. Imagine if US Rt. 100 in Vermont were the only means of travel from one end of the state to the other and you’ll be able to put this in perspective. The surrounding countryside (as seen in the photo above) is, like so many places here, astonishingly beautiful. On Monday driving to Dunedin and on Tuesday evening driving back, it was a very green and very welcome relief from the jagged peaks and wind-swept highlands of the Southern Alps where Wanaka is located.

In the few days since returning from celebrating the new year, I’ve been trying to put the holiday and its meaning into perspective in light of the interesting experience of celebrating it with ex-pat English friends in a tiny synagogue on the South Island. I have failed to do so, or at least I have failed to draw from the experience something instructive about it for anyone taking the time to read my blog. Ultimately, my conclusion is that the celebration of Rosh Hashanah, and of Yom Kippur next week, are by nature personal. As Jews, we celebrate them as a community and as congregations, but the High Holy Days for me are a collective way of engaging in personal experience. I am exceptionally grateful to have been able to join my friends, to celebrate the holiday in a congregation which consisted of twenty or so people and may be the only dedicated synagogue on the South Island. Given that my friends are returning to the UK after five years here and are grappling with all that they will be leaving behind in Dunedin and all that they will be finding back home, it was particularly rewarding to visit with them at home as a means of appreciating all that I have been fortunate to see and do over the past year and all of the people who have enriched my life, both here and at home.

Tomorrow, Sunday the 5th of October, is the final day of the 2008 ski season at Treble Cone. There are a lot of the usual festivities on the program – pond skimming, costume wearing, live music, various drink promotions – all of which seem to pale in comparison to the natural signs of Spring’s arrive in full force here in Wanaka. Daylight now extends past eight o’clock in the evening and waterfalls seem to emerge each night from all corners of the mountains we pass to and from work. Ultimately, for me, the High Holy Days are an opportunity to move from one year, one season, one set of circumstances to the next and a joyful way to contemplate what came before and, certainly, what will come next.