Third World Athletes

Third World Athletes

As the world follows the peregrinations, permutations and politicizations of the Olympic torch, and while this country follows and bets on the National Basketball Association championship, I’m collecting pictures of third world athletes.
Sometimes we get a glimpse of them, like the Maasai who ran the Boston marathon with spears and shields, chanting, the way they do chasing lions from their herds. East Africa’s runners—is it just a coincidence that the bones of the earliest humans were found in Olduvai Gorge, whose name comes from the Maasai word Oldupaai, for the wild sisal plant?--are so famous they’ve even been in a TV ad. It was one of the most subtle I’ve seen, deserving to be put in the commercials Hall of Fame, if there is one: a herder out in the arid Kenyan bush asks another herder, “How do you stop a rhino from charging?” Then he gives the answer: “You take away his American Express card.” “That’s good!,” says his interlocutor, “They’ll love that in Nairobi”—and he turns and starts running. The camera turns and shows a dusty road going up and down, up and down, into the invisible distance. Thirty miles to Nairobi? Sure, why not?
But back beyond this, I mean athletes like the workers in the sulfur volcano in Indonesia, who go down into the fumes and come back carrying 70 pound chunks of sulfur as if they were schoolkids carrying backpacks. Like the Laotian boatmen who have long, skinny, shallow craft that can speed when needed and navigate shallows when essential, which they pilot with poles, while standing upright in the stern. The peasant haymakers bringing back a wagonload of their harvest, pulled by a donkey, with the workers balancing on top of a load piled so high that it scarcely seems possible to have arranged it. The shipbreakers on the tidal mud flats of Chittagong, Bangladesh, about whose working conditions one observer said, “just a brief look around is enough for one to know that the working conditions found there would give an OSHA inspector instant cardiac arrest.”
To me, the glory of the Olympics and the championships is that they expand our ideas of what humans can do. We all gain respect for each other through such events: maybe we can’t do those things now, but in time, as our children’s children’s children to the seventh generation meet and marry, who knows?
The Third World athletes expand our ideas of what humans can endure.
So, as I weed old National Geographics that are threatening our foundations (Remember how Omya marble is used in the papermaking industry? This must be how) I look for pictures of these unregarded heroes and heroines—unregarded except for the photographers trying to pay attention to their settings and timing and not be overwhelmed by the inhumanity of it all.
Today, in one issue, I found three such athletes. Arguably four, since one picture shows candymakers in Kabul, Afghanistan, each wrestling with a huge rope of hardening sugar paste. The two turn out a thousand pounds of sherni a day.
Another picture shows the rice field worker in Japan, headed back home the same way he came: via a long path made of what look like two-by-eight boards, set in a staggered line about eight feet above a shallow river on top of poles and crosspieces. It’s not short walk: the end of the plank road is invisible in mist rising from the cooling water. One hopes the photographer had a telephoto lens.
When the work day is done, they relax: like the Zambian swimmer a foot away from the 365 foot drop of Victoria Falls, standing on the edge of an eight-foot-deep pool that somehow they discovered carved into the rock next to the waterfall. Deep enough for good underwater swimming, and probably no crocodiles, either. Just don’t dive in and come up forgetting which way you’re going.
There are towns in Vermont where the high schools have great athletic traditions that were raised into place by grandparents and great-grandparents who worked in mines and factories. There are factories in Vermont where the leaders will tell you the operation would have left the state long ago were it not for an incomparable work ethic, which in some cases they think may be founded on the work ethic of farming. Elsewhere in the world, the connection may not be so clear, but here at least we can appreciate that hard work can be athletic and heroic—and I hope in time we will honor all the other workers around the world for what they have suffered and survived, and what they have put into place.

ICE STORM ZONE

ICE STORM ZONE

Now that it seems as if there’s a reasonable chance that we might be past having ice storms, I’d like to share a few thoughts about them. But to make sense of the first part, I have to digress into family history.
“Barna” means “brown” in Hungarian. If you know immigration history, you know that means the American branch of the family is only about a century old, having come over in the big wave of Eastern Europeans before and after the turn of the last century. Like many such groups, the “Bohunks” (it was hard for Real Americans to tell the Bohemians from the Hungarians from the Czechs from the Slovaks, so that was a handy label for all the solid, stolid Slavs). Did you know the Hungarians won the war with Japan? There was a moment during the atomic bomb project when Enrico Fermi left the room, and one of the other nuclear physicists remarked, “Now we can speak Hungarian.” Stolid indeed—look up the Polgar sisters’ record in the chess world. Don’t mistake the Asiatic eyefolds for sleepiness; behind that cover, he’s probably thinking several moves ahead.
But to return to the digression: like many such groups, the first immigrants clustered, close to Ellis Island more often than not. My parents were pioneers in leaving the New Jersey nest to come to Vermont, first for my father to use his G.I. Bill benefits studying languages at Middlebury College, then to teach in Brandon at the behest of the high school principal, another Midd grad.
Our cars were what grandparents gave us when they bought something newer, so for most of my childhood, we toodled about in a 1940 wood-bodied Chevy station wagon. It was a good car, so reliable that one time I dreamed World War Three had happened, and almost nothing would run because the bomb blasts had ruined the electronics—but the old Chevy went on as before.
So it was that we made trip after trip back and forth between Vermont and New Jersey. Enough of these took place in winter for us to hit ice storms—or rather, an icy zone through which we had to pass to get to the safer roads in Vermont (which was not that hard on the New York Thruway but a bit dicier on Route 9 before the Northway opened). I came to the conclusion that the Albany-Troy area was the ice zone.
You may have leaped to the conclusion here: global warming has shifted the ice zone northward, and now I think we have met the enemy and not only is he ours, he is us (the Pogo quotation gets shortened by most users; look it up, and wonder how many other great statements now differ from the originals).
Of course if conditions are right, you can have an ice storm just about anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line. (The Mason-Dixon line: Mason says to Dixon, “Why the hell are we out in this wilderness surveying a straight line to nowhere? Nobody will ever remember or care about it.” Moral of that story: do your work and do it well, you never know what it will become when joined with the work of others.)
Which brings me to ice storms and work. Ever look at a stone wall and wonder how the farmer ever got those multi-hundred-pound boulders into place? Part of the answer can be seen at the Rutland Fair if you get to the oxen pulls. Ice storms are the other part of the answer. With such a glaze on the ground, a stone boat could haul quite a load. Even an icy crust could carry smaller loads—read Robert Frost’s poem “Brown’s Ride” (that’s from memory, but I’m pretty sure it’s right).
One fascinating illustration of the same principle at work can be viewed, oddly enough, in Death Valley National Park. There is a flat stretch of dry lakebed that acquired the name “The Devil’s Racetrack” because again and again visitors found big stones with long tracks showing they had been moved, but never any human footprints. I’ll put a picture of this phenomenon at the end so you can see for yourself.
Though no one ever saw any stones moved, someone finally figured it out. Seasonal rains were soaking into the clay of the former LAKEBED and making the surface very slippery (something that can be observed right now in Addison County, much of which was once UNDERSEA). The prevailing winds were sometimes strong enough, coming off the area’s slopes (like the big windstorm did in Rutland) to send sizable rocks skidding along—no demons or UFOs necessary.
If you Google all this, use advanced search and put in Death Valley NATIONAL PARK, because there is a high-banked one-third-mile clay oval near the California-Nevada line whose enterprising proprietors have named it Death Valley Raceway. Bob Dylan comes onto the subconscious soundtrack here: “It’s easier to see without lookin’ too hard there’s not very much that’s really SACRED.”
Just remember, when it rains on a highway and the water pools up, the same skidding effect can make it harder to brake your car. And if it rains on a frozen road, turn around and go back home, if you aren’t turned around already.