Speed

When you sit at the rink and watch other skaters turn or change direction on the ice, you see a constellation of skills building one on the next that impress you. Maybe you think about how quickly the skaters’ feet seem to move in a turn, how balanced they are over their centers, how graceful they make such quick movements seem. But attending every observable motion in a quick turn are a myriad of invisible and intangible body/mind moves: the quickness of breath stilled for the moment preceding the turn, the laying aside of fear and doubt, the instantaneous decision that now is the moment and the concomitant will to believe one is prepared to change direction in the blink of an eye.

To earn a Level Three badge, one of the skills I will be tested on is the two-foot turn on a circle. This skill builds on the standing two-foot turn that I learned in Level Two. For the Level Two turn, my feet, carefully held together, point toward the boards on one side of the rink. I have one arm outstretched in the same direction as my toes and the other stretched out parallel to my torso. To turn, keeping my feet close together, I torque my upper body, at the same time as I quickly swing my feet 180 degrees so that my toes point to the boards on the other side of the rink and my arms have switched positions.

On Wednesday, my teacher tells me it’s time to try a moving two-foot turn on the circle. Now I need to gather speed as I move around the inked-in face-off circle on the ice, bring my feet together in a glide, and perform the same two-foot turn in motion so that I end by gliding backwards on two feet around the circle. I’ve watched hundreds of kids perform this move both in figure skating and in hockey and admired their sureness, quickness, and grace. I’ve never imagined doing it myself. In fact, this move is one of several thousand that I’ve imagined would be impossible for me. Jenny says you can’t do it slowly or your feet will come apart, you’ll waver on your center, and you’ll fall. I don’t want to fall.

One autumn day in 1989, I stand on a firing range with my friend, Dave. He’s showing me how to shoot a gun. I feel like a character in a movie. He tells me to stand with my feet shoulder-width apart. Not too wide, he says, and nudges my feet a bit closer together. He fusses about my arms too. Two hands on the gun, arms straight, but with just a little give. He instructs me in how to aim. He tells me to pull the trigger and I do. The shot is loud and my arms jounce. He laughs and tells me to try again. This time, he says, I need to breathe in deep, relax my shoulders, let the breath out slowly and stop when I’ve released about half. Now he wants me to fire. I do. I hit the target, but wide of the bulls-eye by a large margin. We do this over and over again.

One summer day, years later, I’m bobbing in a lake, having squeezed my feet into the rubber boots of two skis. I’m holding onto the bar of a ski rope. The line of the rope goes between my skis to the back of the boat that rocks ahead of me. My knees are bent almost up to my chest and I’m imagining pushing down with my heels, but letting the boat pull me to standing. The waves of leftover wake from the boat are tilting me this way and that so I struggle to keep the tips of my skis above the surface of the lake. I want to wait until the surface of the lake is still, but the occupants of the boat are looking back at me, waiting for me to shout, “Hit it.” So I do. I land face-first in the water. The boat circles to bring me the rope. I reach for it, wrangle it between my skis, pull my knees to my chest, and the water rocks me. The water won’t be still. I have to decide, I think, that I can do this. I put my doubt, alongside my frustration at the way the water rocks me, in parentheses. I turn myself over to the power of the boat and the sluicing of the waves and yell, “Hit it.”

It’s 1979. I’m standing on a beam of the Toby Bridge where it crosses over the Clarion River, outside the railing that prevents cars from slipping off the pavement and into the green water below. None of my friends have made the leap, the patently illegal and transgressive leap. I want to be the first. I want to land feet first and slice into the water so that I don’t slap my belly or back or hit my head on the water or the bridge pilings. Every moment I spend thinking about the jump increases the likelihood that someone else will jump first. I feel the nagging tickle of adrenaline at my core. I decide and go. Just like that. I just do it in the blink of an eye.

On the ice, I gather speed around the circle. I’m scared and I can feel the fear less as an abstraction than as a physical sense of dread pulsing in my muscles, blood, and breath. My left arm is outstretched ahead of me, over my toes. My right arm reaches toward the center of the circle. I pull my feet together and try a glide. I stroke some more around the circle, gather speed again. I see Grace glance at me from the other end of the ice. I get up some more speed, take a breath, release it halfway then hold it. I feel the wobble over my blades and imagine, quick as lightening, what it will feel like to be gliding backwards. I decide and rip my blades around, willing my feet to stay together, while I wrench my torso in the opposite direction, switching arms as I go. Now I’m facing the opposite direction, still on my feet, and slowing to a stop. I breathe again.

In the afterward of this lesson, I think about limits. I think about the ways I seem always to be looking for the outside edge of myself -- and for the knife-thin slice of opening in the membrane that separates self from world and from others as if I might slip through. I think about the ways in which I am both repelled by the possibility of the end of self and simultaneously and nearly inexorably drawn to it. I think about the impossibility of realizing that possibility or of knowing, assuming that one could achieve it, what slipping through would feel like. I can only know that feeling as an approximation: this is what it might feel like, and never this is what it is. And as I think about limits, I think about the strange matter of fact that skating (and shooting and skiing and leaping off bridges) and writing seem all to be expressions of this terrible fascination I have with the limit, with the arts of the impossible, with speeding toward oblivion in the absurd, but lovely faith that I will find life there.