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In the Wyoming high country, the biting creatures were
out and their impending attack made me loopy.
I used to imagine that if I were ever in a situation
that required grace under pressure, like if I was cornered
in the dojo of a pernicious aikido master, I would address
the challenge coolly, logically and maybe boldly.
The threat to Lynn and me, as we hiked in Yellowstone
National Park, was not grave, but it was a perfect opportunity
to test my mettle. Unfortunately, my response
was more than disappointing, it was—as I like to say—“darn
right embarrassing.” It did crystallize for me,
however, the answer to a question that I’d occasionally
dwelled upon for the last decade, namely, “Why didn’t
I ever date Helena Bonham Carter?”
The
crucible that forged my revelation emerged about a mile
into our hike, when Lynn warned that a moth on my elbow
was behaving strangely. Most moths flutter away
when brushed, but she noticed that when I inadvertently
pulled my elbow to my side, it stayed put. I moved
deliberately to brush it away, thinking that it would
fly off before being touched, but instead, my gentle
brush smashed it, covering my palm with blood.
I looked carefully for evidence of the moth, but there
was none. The moth ceased to exist. There
was no mark on my elbow, no bug-like remains, only the
blood on my palm.
This
confused me and somehow that confusion triggered irrational
thoughts. Unless I’m mistaken, science hasn’t
yet discovered a vampire moth. There’s the busty
woman that turns into a giant blood-thirsty moth in
the Peter Cushing movie The Blood Beast Terror,
but that’s a little different. As far as I was
concerned at the instant when I was attacked—is that
too strong a verb here?—moths were merely a minor nuisance,
particularly the ones—the size of small birds—that fly
into your face at San Diego Padres games. Of course,
I knew that there was nothing to worry about, but I
was sick of our hike and craved an excuse to stop, so
I began to worry about moths anyway.
We
were at the halfway point of an eight-day stay in Yellowstone,
mentally and physically in need of a brisk hike; in
the past two weeks, we’d seen some of America’s lushest
habitats almost exclusively from our car. In our
first four days at Yellowstone, for instance, we averaged
about six hours in the car and about one mile of walking,
always on the heavily traveled trails next to parking
lots. On these trails, we strolled next to great-grandmothers
walking next to five-year-olds and sidestepped morbidly
obese families.
In
Yellowstone our hotel was close to 7,000 feet above
sea level, so we had an excuse for the first day, at
least. Still, by Day Four, our sloth embarrassed
us. We’d driven over 150 miles a day in the park,
but during our entire road trip to that point, we’d
barely hiked ten miles, not counting strolls on city
streets. That’s not acceptable behavior for people
who display a Sierra Club emblem on their car.
What would John Muir think of this? He’d come
to the same conclusion that we did: The Lewises
are soft, lazy, unworthy citizens. We needed to
take hikes, not little half mile loops from the parking
lots, but real hikes. Ones that would require
us to take a bottle of water, band aids for blisters
and maybe even a map and compass.
I
checked with a ranger and read several publications,
hoping to find a suitable hike to break us in.
The excellent Watching Yellowstone and Grand Teton
Wildlife by Todd Wilkinson suggested several, including
a promising one through Midway Geyser Basin. It
was a summer Saturday, which meant large crowds at the
park, so its description sounded great:
When
we choose to escape the huge crowds with our families,
we head to Midway Geyser Basin...Elk and bison are
regularly seen here as well as coyotes, and occasionally
grizzlies and wolves. Keep your eyes open for
raptors and remember not to feed the ravens.
Large
mammals, raptors, no crowds—that’s the hike for us.
As
we pulled into the parking lot, we couldn’t help but
notice that the views of Midway Geyser Basin were not
particularly appealing, at least by Yellowstone standards.
It was flat, brown and featureless—apart from a beige
thermal pool that stank of sulfur. The excuses
for not taking this hike began to flow. I wanted
to see moose at dusk elsewhere in the park and we were
getting a late start. I didn’t bring a map of
the area. It was hot and we were low on water.
We forgot to buy bug spray. These were feeble
excuses that we rightly ignored, at least until the
moth encounter.
As
I mentioned earlier, I welcomed any excuse to end this
hike. Can you think of a better excuse than a
vampire moth bite? We kept plodding along for
about five minutes after the incident, but for me there
was nothing fun about it. The only animals we
saw on our walk were ravens and bugs. To take
my mind off the heat, bugs and smell of rotten eggs,
I tried to remember the details of a Philip K. Dick
short story in which intelligent, propane-torch-wielding
moths stow away aboard a time machine in order to destroy
mankind. Thinking of this story only made me more
aware of the dive-bombing bugs, which seemed to be getting
more plentiful. Thankfully, it didn’t take much
to persuade Lynn to turn back because she was parched.
After
the initial moth attack, I made indifferent swats at
bugs that approached, similar to how I imagined a Bedouin
would casually flick his camel whip at flies, but as
the bugs increased, my flicks became vehement flails.
Then, I began to walk very fast, like a race-walker,
but with a less pronounced hip wiggle. This put
me far ahead of my wife, so to avoid ditching her, I
walked in a zig-zag, from one side of the path to the
other. That’s vehement flails and a zig-zag race
walk with a hip wiggle. I was kinetic.
Lynn’s
response—after her hysterical laughter subsided—was
to call me Cecil, after Cecil Vyse, the Daniel Day-Lewis
character in A Room With a View. Cecil
Vyse is a Victorian prig who ineffectually woos Helena
Bonham Carter’s character. She prefers the virile
George Emerson to the effete Cecil, who is part Niles
Crane, part Pee Wee Herman, but with the humor of Sam
the Eagle. A wife with a husband acting like Cecil
Vyse is a wife who wants to return immediately to the
car.
The
Cecil comment started me thinking about Helena Bonham
Carter, which brought to mind the year I spent studying
at the University of Sheffield in northern England.
When I set foot on English soil in 1994, I held two
unrealistic, irrational convictions. I believed
that, if luck were on my side, through a series of unlikely
events, I would date Helena Bonham Carter—she’s so impetuous—and
then later be fortuitously propelled into a career as
a professional soccer player. This was not a two-part
plan. I wouldn’t parlay my fame as a soccer player
into a romance with Helena. They would be separate
lucky circumstances. I’d been lucky of late, so,
while improbable, this didn’t seem impossible.
I’d stumbled upon a full-ride scholarship, had won routinely
in poker games, football pools and in small bets at
the track. I had a blessed life and Fate would
provide, provided It overlooked my inarticulate speech
around women and dearth of soccer skills.
Of
the two convictions, a professional soccer career was
the biggest longshot because my soccer credentials do
not point to a professional career:
1980
I
played a season of youth soccer. Like almost all
American youth soccer leagues, ours played packball.
Eight kids on each side ran around in a cluster, chasing
the ball and occasionally kicking it towards one of
the goals. Each team had a couple of meek kids
that stood next to their goalie and talked about either
Star Wars or horses. In soccer parlance,
this is called the 8-0-2 formation. I played mid-cluster.
1984-1986
During
these years, I lived in a soccer-playing country, or
more specifically, a country of fussballers. Our
quaint German town had a fussball field, where round-bellied
men would play five-on-five matches in the snow, with
ski poles as goals.
Two
German kids from across the street sometimes would come
over to play fussball with us in our little yard.
The oldest brother, Marcus, was a couple of years younger
than me, but was nearly my size. My younger brothers
would split up—one with Marcus, one with me—and we’d
play two-on-two. Marcus’s little brother, Tinny,
would nominally be on his team, but would spend the
entire game hiding in the bushes, stalking my youngest
brother, Brad. They were the same age and size
and should have gotten along well, but Tinny was a psychopath.
He’d wait until Brad wasn’t looking and jump out from
behind a shrub and punch Brad in the ear. If there
was ice on the ground, he’d sometimes mix things up
and hit Brad in the face with an ice ball instead.
Every time this happened, we’d stop the game, dumbfounded,
and Marcus would try to punch Tinny, who’d be off like
the Flash, hightailing it for home.
Later
that night, my mom would explain to us that the kids
were going through a difficult phase because of their
parents’ recent divorce, so Brad would try to be nice
to Tinny the next time we saw them. Thankfully,
they moved out after about a year, but to this day,
whenever I see a crime drama about a murderous, psychopathic
kid, I don’t think it’s too far-fetched.
In
our third year in Germany, I played on the junior varsity
fussball team at my American Armed Forces high school.
I learned that two-on-two fussball in a small yard with
four kids and a young psychopath doesn’t necessarily
translate to the eleven-a-side game, but I did get some
playing time and even scored a goal in a scrimmage against
the girls’ squad. I paid handsomely for the goal,
though. The girls’ team was mean; we’d have cleat
marks all over our thighs, calves and chest to prove
it.
I
developed my trademark soccer move during this time,
which I call the non-header. Because I’ve always
disliked getting hit in the head, I found it foolhardy
to purposely stick my head in the path of the ball.
I particularly loathe blows to the nose, which was usually
where I connected. Even Pelé occasionally
got hit in the nose, so I didn’t see the viability of
an improvement in my heading technique. Rather,
I decided to develop a method that would eliminate bashed
noses altogether.
The
trick was to make it appear like I was trying to head
the ball, but instead use leverage on my opponent so
that we both missed the ball. This was a neutral
play that technically didn’t hurt my team, but if the
ball rebounded high in the air, I sometimes had to do
the non-header a second time, which looked a little
fishy. I ran into additional troubles when there
was no opponent nearby to lean on and the situation
called for a header instead of a chest trap. These
instances always earned me an extended stay on the bench.
1987-1988
We
returned to California for my junior year and I continued
my soccer career. During tryouts, I thought my
pedigree (living in a country of fussballers for three
years) would more than make up for the coach’s annoyance
with my heading skills. I was not surprised, therefore,
when I made the varsity squad.
Playing
for the varsity was a great boon for a number of reasons.
For one, we usually played on fields without lights,
so after daylight savings time, the JV team—which had
to play after the varsity—only got in about a third
of a game before it was too dark to play. Also,
the varsity team was filled with football players that
had aggression left over from their disappointing football
season so they picked fights or took cheap shots nearly
every game. Because a few of them were worse than
bullies, it was advisable to be on their side.
Like Tinny, there was something seriously wrong with
them and when we scrimmaged the JV squad, they would
punch and kick the younger players. Once, when
the worst perpetrator clothes-lined a freshman standing
next to me, I halfheartedly challenged him in a nervous,
bumbling way: “That’s not a nice thing to do.”
Normally, I speak slowly in a dull baritone, but it
came out pip-squeaky, so he didn’t hear me, or pretended
not to. “What?”, he said, staring me down.
I should have used this opportunity to devise a better
opening line, but instead, I tried to John Wayne it:
“That’s not a…nice…thing to do.” He stared at
me a couple of beats longer and then mocked my pipsqueak
delivery: “That’s not a nice thing to do!” he
trilled, third-grade style, and ran off down the field.
What do you say to that? (Our coach was a kind
man, so I can only conclude that he wasn’t paying much
attention to our scrimmages or had poor vision.)
Part-way
through the season, I began to view my selection to
the varsity squad differently. I noticed that
I was the only junior on the team. There was one
sophomore, but he was our best defender. When
I reevaluated my skills, I wasn’t really any better
than any of the other juniors. Other than my promising
hard knuckleball kick—useful only for shots on goal,
which I never took—I was unremarkable (if I knew how
to harness the hard-knuckler, it would be a different
story: the US would have a poor-man’s David Beckham
on their hands).
I
thought back to the day when the coach made the final
cuts. During warm-ups, I was practicing the hard-knuckler
and kicked the ball way over the goal, off the field
and into a row of trees. As I started off to retrieve
the ball, the coach blew his whistle to signal the start
of stretches. While I’d climbed off the field
into the trees, the coach announced the cuts, so that
when I returned with the ball to the stretching circle,
only the varsity team remained. The JV squad was
off with the assistant coach on another field.
My thoughts were, “Great. Made the varsity.
Not surprised.”
Later,
though, I pieced together another scenario: While
I was in the trees, the coach told all of the non-seniors,
save the one sophomore, that they didn’t make the varsity
side. I had been lucky—not good—and both absent
and oblivious. The coach confirmed this theory
during the last fifteen minutes of the season finale,
when he took out the starters and told all the bench
players to “finish off your last games as seniors.”
When I told him I was a junior, he looked at me blankly,
unable to process this information. Finally, he
said, “Well, just finish out the game.” The next
year, I was back for another season of headerless soccer.
1994
In
San Diego, I developed a severe case of World Cup Fever
in the summer of 1994. You may recall that the
US hosted the World Cup that year and if you paid attention,
you probably remember that the US had their best showing
in over fifty years. For three months, between
June and August, the Fever spread among my friends.
Our primary symptom was a nearly maniacal drive to schedule
weekly soccer games. For the past several years,
I’d played in organized pick-up basketball games with
these friends at least once a week and I lobbied successfully
to change these to soccer games, even though half of
the participants hadn’t played since the packball years.
Each
week during the summer, my confidence increased.
As one of the more experienced players in our games,
I had my fair share of goals and I felt that at times,
my no-look passes were spooky, they were so good.
It was like I had a supernatural grasp of the game.
Best of all, with no coach glaring from the sidelines,
there was no need to head the ball. I didn’t even
need my non-header.
I
was a little shaken, though, when I realized that my
friend Ned was better than me. He always dominated
our basketball and volleyball games, but since he hadn’t
played soccer since grammar school, I thought I’d have
an edge. However, my confidence soared when I
scored a legitimate goal in a scrimmage with a local
soccer club. Granted, it was on a breakaway and—because
the goalie was a loaner from our team—he was only moderately
coordinated and didn’t know how to play goalie.
I nearly missed the empty net, but the important thing
was that I broke my eight-year drought. When I
almost scored again later in the match, my confidence
was boundless.
The
Fever reached the breaking point when we played a pickup
game on a small field adjacent to a Spanish-language
game. All but a few of our players lacked skill
and a couple kicked like Charlie Brown, but we made
up for that through team play. Our sister game,
on the other hand, was not a showcase for cooperation.
Players took turns trying to dribble through the defense
single handedly. Seeing this made me take pride
in our humble scrimmage because everyone in our game
looked to pass instead of dribble. We were practically
Brazilians, the masters of the crisp pass! I felt
so giddy that the Brazilian battle cry sprang from my
lips: “Olé Olé Olé Olééé,
Oléééé Oléééé,
Olé Olé Olé Olééé,
Oléééé Oléééé.”
The Spanish speakers, to a man, shot me glances that
I translated loosely as, “Dumbass.”
Our
collective Fever subsided when the World Cup Final ended
in a 0-0 draw and was decided by penalty kicks.
I could only manage one lackluster “Olé” during
the two hours of futility and by the end, our spirit
was broken, the Fever was done, the pick-up games were
no more.
Still,
I had the memories of those magical passes and that
one goal to reflect on. I was moving to England,
winners of a World Cup, and I thought that maybe I could
play on a club team over there. I know that it
sounds far fetched, but if the right coach were to see
me play, one that could figure out how to harness the
hard-knuckler, maybe there was a place somewhere in
professional soccer for a free-kick specialist who didn’t
need to head the ball.
The
sad truth, though, is that there was no place for me,
particularly because I only played soccer two times
during my year in England. Pick-up games are not
a part of their culture, like in Germany or the US.
Because I chose to play on the university water polo
team, I didn’t play soccer at all until midway through
the year, when my water polo team rented an Astroturf
pitch for a knockabout. We played like water polo
players, which means throwing each other to the ground,
so nobody noticed my latent talent.
Near
the end of the year, I finally found a pick-up game,
on a hill near my hall of residence. It wasn’t
what I had in mind, though: it was raining, we
were playing across a five percent grade and I was wearing
two layers of cotton sweats, which soaked up at least
ten pounds of water. I impressed nobody, except
maybe the Spaniard who looked like a Muppet. She
kept trying to tackle me.
Too
bad I can’t say the same thing about Helena Bonham Carter.
Dating her was undeniably a long shot, but back in 1994
I’d been on that lucky streak, although not necessarily
with the ladies. It seemed fairly conceivable
that if I could figure out a way to have Helena Bonham
Carter see me brooding, she would fall madly in love
with me, partly because her characters always are falling
for the brooder and partly because I have a dimply-thing
in my chin when I brood, like Cary Grant, but less pronounced.
She seems like the type of woman that would appreciate
a subtle chin dimple. I’m not talking about a
Kirk Douglas divot; that would be different.
What
I needed was to be isolated with her for several hours,
not in a stalker type of way, but perhaps in the ruins
of an Italian cathedral after on earthquake or, even
better, a beached ferry in conditions that threatened
to induce hypothermia. I would be heroic and she
would see past my bad glasses, sub-par small talk (“I
hand wash my pants.”), and inability to pronounce her
name. After the danger subsided and we were stuck
waiting for rescue, we’d cozy up and talk about this
and that. We’d both be very charming.
Of
course, this never happened, since I doubt we were ever
within a hundred miles of one another and even if we
had been, there weren’t any disasters. When I’d
been concocting these scenarios, I didn’t take into
account the fact that E.M. Forster didn’t write much
about Sheffield. I’m not bitter, though.
We wouldn’t have been a good match, because I’m not
an actor/director and, in reviewing her period pieces,
I now realize that the “wall of hair” thing that she
does is too big (anything over Julia Louis Dreyfus circa
1992 is too much). But most of all, there’s just
too much Cecil in me.
Mr.
Lewis can be reached at jeff@babblog.com.
Copyright
Jeff Lewis, 2004 |
