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In The Shadow Of Disappointment Peak


by Steve Sklar

     Late one hazy summer afternoon, in the middle of the bayside inlet at First Encounter Beach on Cape Cod, I thrashed around in snorkel gear, doing my best not to drown.  A confluence of circumstances had put me there.  Not the least of these was my perennial desire to spot crabs.
     Thirty-two years earlier, a young master of ski writing and stoke named Dan McKay had a fatal accident while ski mountaineering alone in the Tetons.  Before he wound up unconscious in the early morning shadow of a mountain crag, McKay had been chasing a glory far greater than crab sightings — he’d wanted to be the first to make a complete ski descent of Grand Teton.
     Other than the fact that once upon a time we both wrote ski articles for Powder Magazine, what earthly connection is there between my crisis at sea level and McKay’s fall above ten thousand feet?
     The story of Icarus holds the answer.  Often enough, what puts our lives at risk is not just the unlucky confluence of otherwise innocuous circumstances but our ambition to transcend the routine. 
     We’ll come back to Icarus.  But first, the details of these incidents.

First Encounter    

     I am one of those oddballs who snorkel the Cape.  Like many people, I developed a taste for this activity while on a vacation in the Caribbean.  In tropical water, coral reefs and therefore panoplies of brightly colored fish abound.  It was there that I discovered that there’s no finer break from office work than watching sea creatures from inside their natural habitat.  But on Cape Cod, where my family and I have traveled from suburban New Jersey to spend a week or so nearly every summer for the past twenty-five years, the underwater sightings are more modest.  These tend to feature pale white or silvery creatures with, at most, dark green or brown markings — pickerel, herring fingerlings, pumpkinseed fish, and the occasional turtle or crab.  Accordingly, the Cape’s freshwater kettle ponds and bay inlets rarely host snorkelers.  In these places, when I kick out past wading kids and their parents in a shorty wetsuit that gets tighter year by year, I invariably do so alone.
    In the clear water of the ponds, the fish seem to be as interested in watching me as I am in watching them.  It’s not unusual for me to turn around in mid-snorkel there to find a pair of pumpkinseeds ogling me, which is fair enough and oddly enjoyable.  However at First Encounter — so named because that is where the Pilgrims and Native Americans are said to have first encountered each other — the snorkeling draw for me is the crabs that can be spotted underwater halfway down the clayey bank that stands eighty yards across the channel from the beach.
   There are calicos there and darker, rounder and more furtive green crabs.  (The green crabs are an invasive species.  Like the Pilgrims and, for that matter, my mother and grandparents, they came from Europe.)  The crabs scare me at least as much as I scare them.  They skitter away sideways when they see me and skittishly I swipe at them with the net I bring on these outings.  The sightings are the main point of these forays but I award myself a mental bonus if I can bring a crab back to show to my wife or kids as they read or play on the beach.  The captive will be deposited in a bucket of water, to claw its way around within.  The creature is dumped back into the inlet when, as happens soon enough, interest in it wanes.
     The fear these sightings engender in me is key.  Once, two miles from First Encounter, I snorkeled in Salt Pond, no aquatic animals or other people in sight.  Trawling for a least one noteworthy visual before calling it a day, I held my breath near the deep center of the pond and kicked down toward the bottom.  There I surprised a large calico crab.  It stood bolt upright in the sand, deploying its claws angrily.  Gasping underwater was counter-indicated, so I settled for shouting into my snorkel.  I kicked my way back to shore satisfied, the mutual fright a clear indication of success.
     So much for what drew me to the clayey bank at First Encounter on the afternoon of July 17, 2014.  But other circumstances made the outing precarious.  I’d had a beer at lunch.  That induced a post-prandial nap.  The nap delayed the moment my wife and I headed out to the beach; the late start put me in the water at the start of ebb tide.  As I knew from past outings, that moment when the moon’s gravity, having pulled the tide to its highest point, begins to relent is the worst time to snorkel the inlet.  It was Thursday, though, just two days before we were due to return to New Jersey; I did want to make sure to get in my annual trip to the far bank.  Moreover, the fuzziness of mind that lingered after the beery nap may be why, once at the beach, I grabbed the wrong snorkel out of our beach bag.  Unwittingly I set off with one of the ones our kids used to use beside us in the shallows and not the better one I’d been using for years. 
     In the middle of the channel the water was eight feet deep; the tide was fast and furious.  The sand it churned up made visibility dreadful.  Even so, as I kicked across the current through the murk I could just make out the sand ripples at the bottom.  They showed that I was making very little headway.
     I ought to have turned back then but confidence impelled me onward.  I’d made this journey so many times, some of them undoubtedly at high tide.  And after all, this time around I did make it to the far bank; I saw a couple of crabs there, too.  Sightings accomplished, I figured it was best to kick my way back to the beach promptly and to hell with capture.  That was when I discovered the additional circumstance that turned the whole set of circumstances that afternoon into a disastrous mix.  My snorkel — my kids’ snorkel, rather, though I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time — was malfunctioning.  As I twisted the tube near my right ear to make sure the tip was facing behind me, a plastic set ring, never a part of my own snorkel, came loose.  The snorkel started delivering water into my mouth.
     With the benefit of hindsight the next day, I realized that there were so many ways I might have managed the situation better than I did.  I might have taken off the snorkel and floated on my back to ride the current out to the calmer waters of the bay.  Without a functioning snorkel I am not a strong swimmer, but I could at least have done that.  I might have returned to the clayey bank, taken off my flippers and climbed up to sit there, to wait out the high tide.  I might have kicked my way to shallower waters inland along the clayey bank, using my hands for purchase.  Instead, I continued trying to cross the surging channel back toward the beach, thrashing my legs, swallowing gulps of seawater in the process.  Panic terror does not welcome a cool head.  As my legs churned, I hyperventilated and my heart rate skyrocketed.
     Mountain climbers speak of the Death Zone, that region above 8,000 meters where oxygen is so scarce that decision-making becomes sketchy.  At sea level that day I had entered a similar zone; I tend to think of it as a set of conditions under which the needle on an imaginary gauge of rationality moves into the red.  The Red Zone.  Red Zone, Death Zone, what’s the difference?  Either way, some flaw in judgment helps put us in peril.

Teepe Col 

     The mountain climbing ordeal of Dan McKay is another case in point.  Though I never met the man, we had a literary bond of sorts.  Occasionally, I had written ski articles for Powder.   Dan was a regular contributor to that magazine, the real deal.  Apparently he was also something of a legend around Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  Three decades on, a fellow skier remembered him online not only for having once stood atop a car going at 90 miles an hour to perfect his downhill tuck but for his attitude: “We skied together a fair bit, and I don’t know that I’ve ever known anyone with MORE passion and love for skiing as he had.” 
     On the morning of July 11, 1982, Dan answered a call to glory.  The call was uniquely demanding but probably not much different in kind from the call of stoke he’d answered for years.  According to the Grand Teton National Park ranger’s report about the ensuing incident, Dan had wanted “to make the first ‘complete’ ski descent of the Grand Teton” — the first ski descent, that is, with no downclimbing rappel in it.  And why not?  He was the man who after falling at downhill speed past the bounds of a race course had gotten back up and skied down to finish the course, swinging his skis into a twister off a jump to the delight of the crowd.  At Targhee he had entered a gelandesprung competition, a ski-fly fest, and conquered his fear on the in-run to soar nearly 200 feet.  Grand Teton Mountain, the highest peak in the Teton range, can be seen from the tops of both Targhee and Jackson Hole, places where Dan often skied and had his being.  A first descent on Grand Teton would have seemed within reach.
     The ranger’s report says that against his friends’ advice, Dan decided to go it alone rather than wait till climbing companions became available.  The report also notes that a deadline for his Powder column loomed.  Whatever he was doing that morning, he was going to write about it.  After rejecting several routes that were gapped due to snowmelt, Dan, “not an experienced mountaineer although he had climbed the Grand once before,”

went out toward the lower East Face from Teepe Col looking for a route to ski.  Evidence indicates that he traversed from the col on a ledge system and slipped at an exposed corner.  He fell about 30 meters to the top of the Teepe Snowfield where his skis and pack were found.  After sliding down the snow about 265 meters, he stopped.  He had a broken arm and was unconscious.  Lying on the snow in the early morning shadow of Disappointment Peak, he died of hypothermia.

Died of hypothermia.  Froze to death.  The writing in Dan’s Powder articles is funny and lyrical and real.  When he died he was all of twenty-six.

Return

     In the ebb tide at First Encounter, as I thrashed and swallowed water, it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to yell for help.  Nikki, my wife of nearly twenty-five years to that point, sat reading a paperback up on the rise of beach not forty yards from where I thrashed.  I could probably cover the distance to her or others with my cries, though I would really have to scream to do so.  “HAAAAALLLPP!!!!”  I kept mum.  Whether that was because I had never been called upon to scream that way before and had not developed the knack, or because my body was loathe to commit time and force to the effort, or in fact because I was too embarrassed to make such an undignified sound, I do not know.  But if it was because of the last of those things, my actions that day would stand as proof that I would rather die than yell for help, a prospect I find both remarkable and disconcerting.
     In the end, two things saved me.  One was my thrashing, which moved me toward a crucial part of the channel.  The other was the fact that while I spent critical moments in the Red Zone, the phrase “Go with the flow” came unbidden into my head.  From which I understood that instead of fighting it I ought to let the current carry me.  Although that mantra did not slow my thrashing or the wild beating of my heart all that much, it did give me the wherewithal to notice that the sand at the bottom of the channel had once again become visible.  I realized that the bottom might — who knows, hard to tell — be close enough to the surface there for me to actually stand.  In my beleaguered state, taking the risk of standing was itself scary: if it was too deep I’d have lost precious energy in the attempt.  But I extended my legs straight down, and found that although the current pushed me and made me stumble around in my flippers, I could just stand.  The water level was at the top of my chest.  Slowly the hyperventilating abated; the needle went from the red into the black.  I tottered my way back to the beach and lowered myself into a chair alongside where Nikki was ensconced in her book.  I felt a newfound gratitude just to be sitting on a beach, breathing air. 
    The glow of that gratitude was not long in fading.  Five days later, back in New Jersey, I was doing my best not to get annoyed as I exchanged emails with a pair of clients whose sense of entitlement in a visa application matter made them unpleasant to deal with.

Hubris

     The park ranger’s comment at the end of his report on Dan McKay’s accident in the mountains is telling:

Analysis

This is an example of the kinds of things that can lead from a minor mishap to death.  An intense desire to achieve a goal, heightened by the pressure of a deadline, can cause one to push too hard.  A slip on verglas, or skis sticking out of your pack hitting rock, can cause one to fall.  Not wearing a hard hat allows a bump on the head to cause one to black out.  Not having a partner prevents one from being helped off the snow and rewarmed.

With minor factual amendments, that forensic analysis might easily have applied to me.

     It is indeed the Icarus story that comes to mind.  I can’t help thinking that Dan flew too close to the sun, thereby falling into not the cold and deep waters of the ocean but snow-covered oblivion in the inhospitable shadow of Disappointment Peak.  As for me, thirty-two years later at lower elevation across the continent, the call of crabs as the moon released the tide very nearly treated me to a similar fate. 
     Daedalus and Icarus tried to escape prison at Crete by taking flight.  The craftsman warned his son not to fly too near the sun or too near the ocean, lest hubris melt his wings or complacency waterlog them.  Icarus perished; the story persists.
     Some say it is about balance: take the middle path between unbridled ambition and careless indifference.  Others feel the story is about exercising restraint in general.  Perhaps that is the view of the high-altitude mountaineer Ed Viesturs, who has summited all fourteen peaks above 8,000 meters without supplemental oxygen and lived to tell about it.  “Getting to the top is optional,” he says, “getting down is mandatory.”
     Sooner or later, one way or another, we leave the mundane behind in pursuit of exaltation.  May we have the good fortune to survive the journey.

On The Way Down

by Steve Sklar

 
     These images.
     My younger brother Joe — Joey as we called him then — all of ten, frozen in black and white mid-leap above the backyard picnic table in my sister Leeza’s Minolta shot.  Suspended exuberant, full of life, aware the camera is capturing him for all time.
     Or that early summer afternoon, it had to be around a year earlier, at the Grand Canyon.  Joey sits next to me on a ledge near the top; we breathe in the sweet smell of sun-warmed trail dust redolent of donkey shit, gazing out upon the vast space before our perch a mile or so above the canyon floor.
     “If I fell,” he tells me, “I’d be going to die anyway so I’d try to do some backflips on the way down.”  I am impressed that a nine-year-old can contemplate catastrophe with such poise.  Joey seen in the ambers of photo and memory, short, well-knit, good-looking, the sometime darling and youngest of our family, still well within life’s grace.
     Later years would be less gracious to him.  At eighteen, at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference the summer before he is to leave for his first year at Oberlin, he has a psychotic break.  This kicks off decades of struggle with bipolar illness, back when it was called manic depression, struggle that only really ends with the end of his shortened and by then beleaguered life.
     But still, even during those exhaustingly roller-coaster years, odd moments of grace.
     That fraught moment when I have tussled with him to try to convince him to commit himself to Mclean’s psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Mass., the safest place for him then.  Somehow in our wrangling he has managed to tear the shirt clean off me and we play tug of war with it; in Cambridge we are panting on the stairs leading up from the T station, having just come back from a random ride out to Quincy.  Bare-chested I cling to the sleeve of the contested shirt in this manic Mexican standoff.  Two police officers, drawn by our fracas, have arrived at the scene to offer me help.  “It’s okay,” I yell at them to back them off, “he’s my brother!”  Somehow this calms Joe down, possibly the ludicrousness of it, and in the end he is persuaded to go to Mclean’s.
     That moment in our parents’ bedroom a few years later.  Joe sits on their bed that late morning, the parents away on some short vacation, and I see fear quite sensibly showing in his eyes as his face contorts this way and that in a twisted mask. He can hardly speak for the muscular distortion.  As luck would have it, I’d only recently happened to read about tardive dyskinesia, an undesirable side effect of Risperdal, the anti-psychotic prescription Joe has been taking lately.  I am thus able to inform him that the sudden facial torture he is undergoing is, in its way, normal to the situation.  Joe reassured, his fear abates; together we weather the muscular storm.  Just as well I’d stumbled upon that write-up, otherwise there is no doubt we’d both have freaked out at this bizarre development, the very look you’d cast for craziness if you were staging, say, a Noh play about madness.
     In what would be his last year or so of life, Joe would get into crack cocaine.  Mental illness is one thing, and it’s not just the ill person but the people who love him who go through it.  In that sense, we rode the psychic roller coaster with Joe during his manic or depressive episodes, days he might spend running through traffic or incommunicado in a homeless shelter, and during the periods of respite that separated the episodes, periods when he was able to finish college or hold down modest jobs.  My sister acquired a tee shirt in the earlier days of Joe’s tribulations.  It read “Madness Takes Its Toll.”  They got that right.  But crack — that’s a hell on top of a hell.
     The lying, the stealing from my mom (my father having by then died in a car accident after leaving her for another woman), the disappearing and the surfacing half a continent away under an assumed name.  If what you look for is a modicum of stability, either as a mentally ill person or someone who loves one, then mental illness plus drug addiction is something I cannot wholeheartedly recommend.  By the time Joe is hospitalized at Trinitas Hospital in Elizabeth, New Jersey — no more cushy Mclean’s digs for my brother now that insurance coverage for mental illness care has become virtually nonexistent — I am the only one in the family and likely the only one at all who will visit him there.  For one thing, in those crack days it is not my patience but my mother’s that has been exhausted by theft.  She is the one, not me, from whom Joe has stolen $4,000 by way of credit card fraud to fund some mad jaunt he takes out to Chicago, calling himself Dean Smith there, after the Dean Moriarty character in Kerouac’s “On The Road”.
     And wasn’t I myself driven to Nar-Anon in those days?  A longstanding therapy skeptic till then, I fled gratefully into that twelve-step program for the friends and relatives of substance abusers.  (When Joe heard I had done so, he thanked me for doing him that service.  But Nar-Anon gave us license to distance ourselves from our “user.”  What we had thought of as nurturing in that direction was now to be seen as enabling, the  shift in perspective meant to free us from the grip of a drug habit we had vicariously acquired.  Joe was a bit taken aback when, channeling such wisdom, I responded to his thanks by saying “I’m not doing this for you.  I’m doing it for me.”) 
     Risperdal may cause facial contortions; addiction can sunder families.
     What then to make of the gift of the Casio?  The electric piano still sits in a corner of the sun room in my house, a gift from Joe when, broke as he was, he thereby encouraged me to start playing again.
     That gift began its journey to me as a used Fender Rhodes piano, a magnificent beast of an instrument that produced an enchanting and vibraphone-like sound.  With scant justification, my brother was an ardent fan of my playing; he acquired the Rhodes on a whim and shortly thereafter gave it to me. 
     I passed the Rhodes back to him when my wife and I moved into an apartment too small to accommodate it.  When Joe started using crack, he sold the Rhodes for cash in order to feed his habit.  He used part of the proceeds to buy me the Casio.  It was a smaller, lighter and altogether less sacred object than its predecessor had been.  But Joe was an addict by then.  I marvel that he would have felt compelled to get me the replacement at all.
     The hellish period ends when Joe’s body is found in his Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, apartment.  On a hot July weekend, following a day or two when none of us have heard from him, my mother and sister have had the super open his door.  He’s died in his sleep of congestive heart failure, a casualty of quintuple risk.  If madness does not take its toll, obesity, a fatty food diet, chain smoking, lack of exercise and crack addiction probably will.
     Naturally, these are not the days I like to remember.  I prefer to recall photos of Joe from my wedding, my sister’s wedding, my college graduation, Joe’s college graduation.  Or I might call to mind Joe laughing his cackling laugh or making me laugh.  (His verdict on the behavior of people we knew, or sometimes of me, delivered with a twinkle in the eye — “That’s crazy, Steve!” — never failed to amuse me.)
     The memory I like best, though, is of that afternoon moment, a few years before the advent of crack, when Joe and I lean against a low tile-covered wall outside the old My Favorite Muffin place in Millburn, New Jersey.  Joe smokes a cigarette; I’m having one too, just to be companionable.  We take our ease in the late-summer light; Joe is in remission and we shoot the breeze, early September and nowhere else we need to be.  In this charmed moment, he is my admired and admiring younger brother and we have each other.
     Life via manic depression gave Joe a raw deal, no question.  But the thing about him is this.  During his long plummet to a sad ending he somehow avoided bitterness and remained a loving person, a series of graceful backflips on the way down if ever there was one.




Photo: Leeza Shea

If Improv Teaches Us Anything


by Steve Sklar

Scene 1.

     A couple of years ago, I’m shopping for a birthday card for my wife, Nikki, in Words Bookstore in downtown Maplewood, New Jersey, when I get into a nonverbal altercation with a young kid.  I’ve taken up a position at the card carousel that stands between the checkout counter and the window to the street.  I’ve gravitated to this particular rack because the cards on it have that wry and understated quality Nikki and I have tended to favor in the cards we exchange on birthdays and anniversaries.  Elsewhere in the store are racks that hold cards featuring literary quotes in block print, “March to the sound of a different drummer,” that kind of thing, quotes that are all well and good in and of themselves but that in the context of a greeting card manage to sound insipid.
     As I’m looking over the cards at the rack near the window I become aware of the kid, who looks to be about seven years old.  He’s standing near me, also looking in the direction of the rack.  I begin to get this vibe from him that he resents my having taken up a position there.  But really, this is the good rack and this space is tight; there’s nowhere else for me to stand.  This is pre-pandemic, so social distancing is not an issue.
    My suspicion about the vibe is confirmed when he reaches over and turns the rack.  I haven’t finished reading the column of cards in front of me when he does that but, no problem, I start reading the next column.  Then he turns the rack again, and I notice he isn’t looking at the cards.
    Okay, I think, I see what this is.  This, here, is a contest of wills.  And I am not going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that this is bothering me.  So I don’t look at him, I look straight ahead at the cards while he continues turning the rack.  I figure, he’s a kid, what does he know, for all he knows maybe I can speed-read cards.
    As he starts turning the rack faster, I think: I know something he doesn’t know — because I’m a grownup and he’s just a kid.  I know that time is on my side.  My office is just a block away, I’m here on my lunch break, I have a solo immigration law practice and I don’t have any case emergencies this day.  As a matter of fact, business has been kind of dead for a while now, and that’s probably made me a bit touchy, but never mind that, what’s important is, I have all the time in the world to ride with this thing here at the card rack.  Meanwhile, I figure, this kid is probably here with his mother.  With his mom.  With his mommy.  She’s bound to be his transportation.  She’s probably got better things to do with her day than hang out in this bookstore.
     Now you may think, why don’t I just say to the kid, Look, could you please stop turning the rack.  However, this particular day — like others, let’s face it — I don’t seem to have a middle gear.  I certainly don’t want to unleash The Beast.  I mean, I could say to him, Listen, you little shit.  But this is a family bookstore, come on, I’m not going to do that.  So I just keep looking straight ahead at the card rack as the cards go whizzing by.
     Soon enough my assessment of our respective strategic positions is shown to be astute because his mother comes and collects him and they walk out of the store.  And as they leave and the card rack comes to a stop and I select a card for my wife, I don’t look at the kid and I don’t need to look at him.  Because we both know who won that contest.
     Okay.
     A couple of days later I’m visiting my mother.  My mom.  My mommy.  I tell her the story of the bookstore encounter figuring it’ll amuse her, and it does.  I have a great relationship with my mother.  We seem to be able to confide fairly freely in each other.  One thing I love about my mom is that she’s a straight shooter when it comes to giving feedback.  If you have a person like that in your life, hang on to them.  Because if improv, which is something I’ve been studying for the past few years, teaches us anything, it’s that a genuine reaction, even one that catches you off-guard, is more valuable than a canned one any day.
     So after I tell her this story, I say to her, Listen, mom, I realize that this story doesn’t paint me in a very flattering light.  I mean, how petty is that, to get into a contest of wills with a seven-year-old?  And, I tell her, it’s true that I’ve often taken pride in the fact that I consider myself to be the designated grudge-holder in the family.  And you know I’ve been worried lately that maybe I’m just becoming a mass of pet peeves and petty annoyances.  But really, I tell her, the improv I’ve been working on has, I think, enabled me to see fairly quickly that that bookstore encounter is a noteworthy scene.  And I think it’s also let me see that I’m getting annoyed more frequently lately, and that gives me the chance to improve my outlook.
     What I’m hoping she’ll say to me, after giving me credit for the nice self-awareness I’ve shown in assessing my character in the bookstore encounter as petty, is what she has in fact been saying to me lately: Improv has changed your life, Steve.  I think it’s made you a more joyful person.
     But that’s not what she says.
     She says, About the grudge-holding and the peevishness — you’ve always been that way.  I think, she says, that’s just your nature.
     Which is not what I wanted to hear.

Scene 2.

     A month ago, I’m standing outside the ATM machine in downtown Maplewood, New Jersey, trying to think of a word for something that’s good that rhymes with “Steve.”  I’m doing this because I’d started keeping a journal on the little things that bug me during the course of a day.  At first I was going to call this list “The Daily Peeve,” but then my younger kid, Mal, says to me, No, a better name for that would be “Steve’s Peeves.”  And I love that, it’s perfect.
     So I’d started keeping a list of the things that bugged me, Steve’s Peeves, not just my go-to peeve — people tailgating me while I’m driving — but things like the fact that people talking loudly on their cell phones while I’m walking down the street has started bothering me more frequently.  I’ve become especially annoyed at people using a voice I’ve started to notice lately, what I would call a bro voice, a bro-ey kind of voice.  You know, where they might bray into their phone, MAKE SURE TO CALL HIM TUESDAY BECAUSE WE HAVE THE POINT-OF-SALE MEETING THEN AND WE HAVE TO–
     That kind of thing.
     I’ll look around to see where the voice is coming from, and invariably it’ll be coming from someone taller and thinner and younger than I’d pictured.  That will annoy me, too.  Then I’ll look down at their feet, and they’ll be wearing a kind of light brown shoe with a navy blue suit, and for some reason that will annoy me.
     I’m writing these things down and also my reaction to them.
     Because if improv teaches us anything, it’s that if you can get a sense of what a character is feeling, even your own character, then you have a chance to create strong, empathetic scenes with that character.
     However, the whole point of my writing these things down is to improve my outlook, so I begin trying to also become aware of little things that happen during the course of the day that make me happy.  And there are some things.  Like I’ll pass a stranger on the street on my way to work, and the sun is shining, and I’ll smile at them, and they’ll smile at me, and I’ll say hello, and they’ll say hello back.  Then a little while later on my walk to work the same thing will happen again with another stranger.
     Accordingly, I’m standing outside the ATM machine in downtown Maplewood, New Jersey, waiting my turn to go in and get cash, and while I’m waiting I’m trying to think of a word for something that’s upbeat that rhymes with Steve.  Because I have the name for the negative list, Steve’s Peeves, and I need a corresponding title for the positive list.  So while I’m standing there waiting, to help me focus on this difficult linguistic problem I’m scowling down at my feet while I go through the alphabet to come up with a rhyme.  A, beeve, ceeve, deeve.  I’m up to around “h” when this woman happens to walk by me on the sidewalk where I’m standing.  She stops a few feet past me, looks back at me and says:

Are you okay?

I tell her, No, I was just thinking!  Thank you!  I was just thinking!  I’m fine!
     Eventually she seems satisfied, because she leaves.  It occurs to me then that that was a nice thing she just did there.  That should definitely go on the Steve’s … Whatever list.  But it also occurs to me, Oh my God, I’ve never had anything like that happen to me before.  What was my face giving out that it would stop a person in the street, make them feel like they need to perform an intervention!
     Because if improv teaches us anything, it’s that the way our scene partner reacts to us can reveal who we really are.
     That question: Are you okay?
     I mean, I thought I was…

Scene 3.

     It’s 5:19 a.m. when I hear the drilling.  It’s loud, and it sounds like PPPPPPPPP!!!! — like a pneumatic drill — but it sounds like someone’s drilling on the other side of the wall of the bedroom, in Maplewood, New Jersey, where my wife and I are sleeping.  And I know what this is.
     It’s a woodpecker, and he’s drilling on the metal gutter above the attic way up at the back of the house.  I know this because we had heard the noise several times in the week previous, though not that early in the morning, and at one point I had caught a glimpse of the bird.
     I’m not an early morning person.  To be honest, I’m not even a 9 a.m. person.  But it’s loud, and I’ve had it, so I drag myself out of bed, pull on my pants, slip on my sneakers, and head downstairs and out the back of the house.  I look up and sure enough, way up there at the corner of the gutter I see the silhouette of a fairly large woodpecker.  I have a clear view of him and I know he has a clear view of me, because almost immediately after I spot him he kind of scurries off into the sky.  You know, like, Ooo, that guy is pissed off.  Pffft.
     I’m satisfied I’ve made my point.  I go back in the house.  Back to bed.  Twenty minutes later: PPPPPPPPP!!!!.
     Out of bed, pants on, tiptoe up the stairs to the attic.  I kind of sclathe my way around the worktable piled with the art project works-in-progress Nikki is working on and make my way to the window under that corner of the roof.
     I pull down the top half of the window and stick my head out.  I look up, but all I can see is the bottom of the gutter ledge.  So I yell out into the air:

YOU GONNA KEEP DOING THAT???

Just like that.  I’m talking to a bird like that.
     I get a broomstick and bang on the gutter.  I close the window and go back to bed.  The rest of the morning is totally quiet.  I go back to sleep.
     When I wake up, though, I’m worried, because I realize I haven’t had the gutters cleaned in over a year.  I Google “Woodpeckers attacking gutters.”   One thing the articles that pop up do say is that the birds may be finding bugs in there.  In which case you’ve got to get your gutters cleaned.
     The articles also talk about another possibility, though.  Sometimes, they say, a male woodpecker will drill a gutter because he’s trying to attract a mate.  Apparently, in the woodpecking world this is the sexiest thing.
     When I read this, oddly enough it takes the edge completely off my anger at the bird.  I realize, he’s just doing his best to take care of his social life.
     And once I think of that, it occurs to me, really, how much difference is there between these woodpeckers and the bros on their phones?  I mean, the bros are transacting business during the day, they’re prospering, and who can blame them if they maybe want to share that with the public a little?
     Or how about that kid at the bookstore?  I now remember that Words Bookstore caters to kids on the autistic spectrum.  The store owners have someone near and dear to them on the spectrum.  Considering that I do, too, how has it taken months for it to occur to me that maybe that kid is on the spectrum?  In any event, there’s a good chance that he was uncomfortable in close proximity to a relatively large person staring intently at cards and was just trying to create space the only way he knew how.
     Come to think of it, how different am I from any of these characters?  Here I am, putting this out there, albeit via a keyboard rather than a roof gutter, putting out stories, a thing I apparently need to do.
     I mean, aren’t we all just trying to make an impression on the world, make our presence known?
     Because if improv teaches us anything, it’s that listening deeply to your scene partner pays off.  That’s not just about hearing the words they’re saying or seeing the movements they’re making.  If you can get a sense of why they’re saying what they’re saying or doing what they’re doing, then you can really build strong scenes together.
     And so that question outside the ATM:

Are you okay?

     I’m getting there.

Writings

Here is a list of the titles of Steve Sklar’s written works that have been published on this site (so far). Click on a title to read the work.

The Last Outpost of Reason (a work in progress)

The Solo

If Improv Teaches Us Anything

On The Way Down

In The Shadow Of Disappointment Peak

The Solo


by Steve Sklar

     At first, as the fever to fly took hold out at the cliffs, the young man only watched from the comfort of the crowd.  The antics of the hopefuls with their contraptions amused him.  And, he noticed, even the more cautious among them, those who kept to the flats, could get hurt.  Not for him the torn shirt and the mangled knee, the bridge of the nose dragged in the rocky dirt.  He was content to enjoy the festive air among the spectators, the men in their top hats and the young ladies in their graceful bonnets.
     Then one day he caught the fever himself.  To soar!  If he did not boast of his new ambition as two or three other fellows in his classes at the local university did, perhaps it was because he’d had only a smattering of science, and that mostly chemistry.  He’d laid out his design, it was true, but it was guesswork.
     Nevertheless, he would run up and down a grassy field for hours, out of sight of everyone, bearing a rig of black silk above his head.  When fatigue overwhelmed him, he’d sit resting under an oak.  Then the prospect of taking up his place at his father’s apothecary, never far from his mind, weighed on him.  Eventually, a breeze would dry his sweat and cool him off and he’d be at it again.
     Although in three weeks his effort took on the acrid quality of a longing destined never to be fulfilled, he continued to spend an hour a day with the contrivance.  By the standards of a time yet to come the thing was heavy.  There were thick leather straps where a simple cloth harness ought to go, a knobby wooden handle where an aluminum steering-bar might be and wax-coated silk that would have been lighter as nylon.
     Early one evening that late September, the young man grew annoyed at a loud creak the handle had developed.  He resolved to go home to oil it.  One last run and he would call it a day.  He picked up the machine, strapped in and loped down the field.  His face registered surprise when favorable winds swept him into the sky.  More by luck than by insight he had shaped a wing.  Months before the world ever heard of the first non-balloon flight at Kitty Hawk he was lifted on an updraft, up, up, to the height of the low mountaintops nearby, then higher still.
     The air aloft was thin, cold.  In the ecstasy of being airborne, the young man, in his frock coat, hardly noticed it.  A plummet of three hundred feet did him no more harm than it would a hunting hawk.  He banked in a turn near a cloud and saw the vast horizon slowly tilt and right itself.  And the rush of air!
     Miles of farmland, forestland, farmland again, swept below him, eight towns in what seemed like minutes.  Half an hour passed, more, and still he flew.  Behind him he saw the last of daylight making its retreat.  Up ahead in the distance, below the setting sun, the great river glinted bronze in the oncoming darkness.  Then, once he had crossed above the river, the lights of some farmhouse flickered up at him from tiny windows.  The winds were dying. Down into the last gusts of the night sky he dropped.
     At three thousand feet, the air still clear, he had a crescent of rising moon and the first glimmering of starlight to see by.  He could make out the cloth of his taut canopy against the sky, velvet-black against silver-grey, shadow on greater shadow.  His cold hands shone white.
     At one thousand feet, at five hundred, at two hundred, he sank through a low-lying cloud.  This became ground fog and was joined by a fine drizzle.  Ahead through the haze he could see the pillars of a large estate.  He landed on the lawn that stretched behind it, running a few steps on wet grass before skidding to a stop.  Amber light from lamps somewhere inside the house lit his way across the lawn.  At the steps to the back porch, he paused to savor the details of the journey just ended.  He pictured the movement of tiny figures, the townspeople he’d been able to make out in twilight during the descent that had started back near the river; he would have been visible to them, too.  Even now, these figures must be stumbling over themselves, shouting in amazement that echoed his own.  They’d be rushing to find this town, this house.
     But more immediate considerations crowded in on him.  Where was he?  This must be one of the towns at the edge of the state.  Which one?  He’d never been this far from home.  Who lived in the great house?  Might he stay here for the night?
     In the blackness of the porch he knocked on the door.  No one answered.  Putting aside his rig, he tried the large oval brass doorknob.  The door swung at his touch, letting him into a dark foyer.  Light spilled from a dining room up ahead; navigating by this, he moved through empty drawing rooms and parlors.  He heard voices, expecting that at any moment a butler or at least a footman would intercept him.  He reached the main dining room unopposed.  He was surprised at the gathering he found in its light.
     Not that they were so odd in themselves.  Three boys, a burly young man and a skinny adolescent girl talked loudly as they ate, their mouths smeared with gravy.  A pleasant-looking young woman, whose ringlets of reddish-blonde hair fell over her linen smock, sat at one end of the long, polished mahogany table, spooning pablum into the mouth of her wailing baby.  A stooped woman in a worn black bonnet helped a suspendered old man in a soiled, collarless shirt to a portion of roast potatoes.  These she speared from a sturdy iron pot.  The pot was dented and smudged with ashes, as out of place in the middle of the gleaming table as were these people and the din they made in the middle of this grand house.
     They received him calmly.  Apparently used to feeding the occasional weary traveler, they invited him to join them.
     He described his journey.  Their reaction left him dissatisfied.  The ringleted young woman laughed at him and would not believe his story.  What was perhaps worse, the others considered his feat natural and accepted it as a matter of course, their easy, murmured assent due, he saw, to a ready acceptance of miracles.  They would believe anything.  He took off his coat and fell to eating silently, while the chatter resumed around him.
     He would have left the next day, but illness delayed his departure.  The time he’d spent in the sky, exposed to mountaintop temperatures, left him shivering that night; when he awoke he was sweating and could hardly stand.  Under the matter-of-fact care of the house’s ragged inhabitants, however, his strength returned.  In two days, he was up and around.
     He prolonged his stay.  Days became weeks, then months.  In order to be credited for the flight, he would have to be acknowledged by witnesses of the event.  He made forays farther and farther afield; these told him that this was sparsely populated country.  He decided that the stately house would be the best base from which to encounter his witnesses.  In any case, he could scarcely afford to make many land journeys back and forth along the route his flight had taken in search of corroborators, and he was loathe to write his parents to ask them to fund that effort.
     His hosts were hospitable with their rambling mansion, and made only the smallest demands on the young man in return for room and board.  He worked in the fields nearby, helping them to harvest the potatoes and cabbages they raised.  If he thought it odd at first that this family made so few inquiries about his background, if he wondered whether they had done away with the estate’s original owners, he decided soon enough that they were squatters or servants who’d remained behind while the wealthier occupants had moved on, and left it at that.
     He spent his days working in the fields and making scouting trips.  Despite the drudgery of farming, he was relieved to be away from the grind of schoolwork.  And the cheerfulness of the ringleted young woman, undoubtedly a servant-girl in her past, gradually sparked his interest in conversation.  Anticipation of fame bestowed on him a certain charm.  In their little chats, she seemed to feel its attraction.  For his part, he was pleased to be able to recognize when they talked that her hair was the color of sunlight glinting off a river at day’s end.
     Again he began devoting some time each day to the cloth glider, running up and down in a cool, soggy area separated by trees from the potato field.  He did this partly out of a desire to repeat the wonderful event that had carried him there, partly out of pride: the former servant-girl, whenever their chats came to that subject, still burst out in laughter.
     It was just as well that no one in the household bothered to come watch him practice.  At this low elevation, without wind, his determined runs never helped him to flights of over thirty feet.
     His good mood began to wane.  The daily visits out to the road beyond the log fence failed to reveal visitors.  He grew restless and short-tempered.  In his restlessness, he fell into a dalliance with the ringleted girl, collecting on his earlier charm.
     In the first weeks of the affair, it was exciting for him to carry on with her in the attic, over the very heads of her burly husband and her old father, who was shrewder than he looked.  But by November, it had become merely interesting — interesting, that is, that they never caught on.  He had been thrilled just to hear her name around the house — she was called Becky — and liked that she called him Joseph, not Joe.  But her skepticism about his feat began to wear on him.  He came to wonder if the trips to the attic were worth the domestic discomfort they were bound one day to cause.
     He took to debating with himself whether it might not be time, in spite of the cold, to try carrying his contraption back home.  The weight of the thing, which seemed to him somehow to have increased, dissuaded him.  There were no horses about the place, let alone a carriage, and the trip on foot would be hard.
     By the same token, winter was coming on.  For most of the year, the only way to convey a heavy silken rig across the great river would be to cross it by boat.  Since the young man had not hired or acquired a boat, he might in theory still prove to the world that he had to have crossed the river by air.  But soon the river would be frozen.  At that point anyone could cross it on foot, and then only the members of this household, such as they were, would be left to affirm the date of his arrival.  More and more, he took to spending his free mornings out at the side steps, in vest and shirtsleeves under a slate-grey sky, gazing into the distance, restive.
     Standing like this one day, indifferent to the rare bit of sun that peeked through the cloud cover, he spotted a group of people making their way toward the house.  They walked down a muddy slope of ground that wound through twisted pine trees alongside the log fence.  The men wore costly beaver top-hats and long black coats brushed clean even to the tails.  There were two women also, wearing many-buttoned overcoats of a fashionable rose color.  One white-haired man, with gold-rimmed spectacles, looked to be a lawyer or a judge; the others might have been merchants in one of the nearer towns.  They moved past the woodpile, dusted white with the year’s first light snow like confectioner’s sugar atop a nubbly chocolate cake.  They picked their way tentatively amid the logs and tree roots, clearly unfamiliar with the whitened ground, helping each other along and looking up at the estate with curiosity.  The young man caught the sound of one of the women’s voices on the air.
     “This must be it!” she said. “This is just the sort of residence that was described.”
     The young man felt his heart beat quickly.  In a comical flutter, he wondered whether to go to his silken glider in the backyard or stand humbly for their reception.  Becky’s mother rushed out of the house to greet the visitors; the young man stopped his fussing to listen.
     “Rebecca,” she called back inside, for once using the girl’s formal name. “Come out here, will you?”  From twenty yards off he could hear everything that was said with perfect clarity.
     The man in spectacles beamed. “This is Rebecca Dooley,” he announced. “She, ladies and gentlemen, is I believe the one who developed that wonderful apple diet that was so successful with the rubella-laden child.
     The young man took this in, immobilized.
     “The paper shall have an article about this, doctor,” one of the ladies piped up.
     “By all means,” said a bewhiskered man beside the spectacled one.  Becky smiled pleasantly at her mother.
     As the group began to file into the house, the young man could still make out their words in spite of himself.
     “Where is the child?  Oh, yes, this is the little Jeremy.  Oh, yes, definitely.  He is very healthy.”
     The young man turned at last in disgust and walked back along the house.  He crossed to the back lawn so he could no longer hear the visitors or see them.
     He stood looking up at the sky that had greyed over again. “But I’ve been up there,” he thought.  Not all the leaves had fallen; the scent of ice was not yet in the air.  He decided he would wait only two or three more weeks for the recognition that was sure to come.

The Last Outpost Of Reason


by Steve Sklar



1.

     Ludovic sat regarding the defective hard drive one more time, motionless, as he’d seen the cat who shared this space with him do in similar if not identical circumstances.  Ludovic had observed the cat, William, a Persian, grey, inscrutable, watching things, still, attentive.  A cricket, a mouse, some little creature rustling and invisible to anyone else.  Maybe the thing to do to suss out a problem was to just look at it for a while.
     The hard drive was a hefty rectangle of black metal, three times the size of a deck of playing cards.  Inside it, he knew, was a mass of chips and silvery pathways soldered onto silicon platforms.  It had been the brain of a PC five years earlier.  With probes and the appropriate tech specs gleaned from his collection of dog-eared manuals — and renewed patience — Ludovic could probably repair the thing after all.  You could fix anything, given enough time.
     But why bother?
     Why indeed.
     What had motivated him to give it another try was the guy who had brought it in.
     The shop had not always been called The Last Outpost of Reason.  For most of its existence, it had been Bresson’s Sales and Repair, the main computer store in Linden, New Jersey.  But come the Decline, when everything went sideways and retail, as such, disappeared, so did Charlie Bresson, bound for where, no one knew.  Ludovic, who had been Charlie’s main tech, took over the place, or what remained of it.  Eventually he settled on the name that now appeared on a carved and painted wooden plaque above the store.
     The man who had brought him the hard drive had done little more than shrug when he’d dropped it off, thereby making it clear that he had little expectation the thing could be repaired.  He was paunchy, no longer in his prime, yet something about the faint limp in his walk hinted at an athletic past.  More than that, he projected an air of both timidity and confidence, a baffling combination of vibes.  Ludovic peered through the smudgy plate glass window of his shop, past the empty parking spots across what was still technically Main Street, watching the man leave in a dusty green Jeep.  Ludovic and the cat chose this moment to look at each other, mute, as if sharing one thought: who was that guy?
     The repairman returned to his counter and with a probe somehow, uncannily, revived a digital pathway.  The monitor screen he’d hooked up to the hard drive flickered for a moment, then displayed the unmistakable signs of a short written work, black letters in Literata font on a white background.   At the top of Page One appeared the words:

The Solo

2.

    When he’d dropped off his hard drive, this customer had given his name as Stephen Sklar.  What, Ludovic wondered, could he tell about the man based on the story he’d just read on that apparently reviving device?
    Not much, other than this: the man was probably a frustrated seeker after fame himself, like the callow youth in his story.  Wouldn’t it be true for fiction, as it was said to be true for dreams, that each character you imagine is in some way yourself?
    Come to that, might it not be that Ludovic, too, was a frustrated seeker after fame?  After all, he had had a moment in his youth, as had the Joseph character in Sklar’s story, when renown had seemed within reach.  Then, he had developed code for the programming of computers that was innovative in its simplicity.  Or so his teachers had told him.  He had even been interviewed on a talk show on account of it.  And if a character of one’s imagining or dreams could be a reflection of oneself, why not also a character encountered in fiction that one found it easy to identify with?
    The hard drive was now unresponsive to Ludovic’s further probes.  Accordingly, he busied himself with other repair items.  Not, however, before thinking, with a wry smile — knowing that Sklar was bound to return later that month to check up on his item — “The repairman decided he would wait only two or three more weeks for more insight into this customer.”
    As it happened, he only had to wait ten days.  Here, now, came this customer, ambling, favoring his good knee, to sit without a word at Ludovic’s counter, typing on the keyboard Ludovic had hooked up to the hard drive and then driving off in his faded green Jeep.
    Ludovic looked at the monitor screen.  There on it was a second piece of writing.  As the Jeep disappeared in a swirl of dust, Ludovic found himself annoyed.  What the hell.  Does this guy know how to fix his own device, that he can conjure up more data on it seemingly at will?  And if so, what the hell am I doing with it?
    In spite of himself, he read the newly revealed piece:

If Improv Teaches Us Anything

3.



    Ludovic, sitting with William one sunny afternoon in early spring, realized with a start that he was becoming obsessed with his erstwhile visitor.  He was spending more and more time trying to figure out who or what the man was, what made him tick.  In the same moment that he became aware of this compulsion, he recognized the likely source of his obsession — solitude.  It had been some time since his wife, Holly, had, with Ludovic’s blessing, left him and, also with his blessing, taken the twins with her.  And so, what was he to do for companionship but try to figure out his enigmatic customer?
    William, his feline companion, was obviously as known to him as he was ever going to get: particular, willful, uncomplaining, inscrutable.
    But this Sklar fellow.  What could Ludovic tell about him, so far, anyway? 
    Take his latest revelation, the “If Improv” story.  What did that reveal about its author?
    That he had a sense of humor, or wanted a reader to think he did, for one thing.  And Ludovic was willing to think so.  That business of the woodpecker, bringer of insight.  Droll.
    And what of the sequence, so far, of the writings on Sklar’s hard drive that repair work — or perhaps Sklar himself — had made visible to him?
    Might it be that the initial story, “The Solo,” had emerged from digital obscurity first in order to show that the author was imaginative, cerebral, earnest?  It might.
    And might the next release, the “If Improv” piece, have been the second revelation in order to demonstrate range, to present humor as a counterweight to earnestness?
    It might at that.
    As if to ask the cat for confirmation of his theories, Ludovic looked at William, who had his eyes closed as he took in the sun through his grey fur.  But the Persian merely opened one eye slightly, as if in reproach, then closed it.
    The repairman considered engaging his authorial customer in conversation the next time he came in, to get more clues about him than mere speculation could provide.  If nothing else, there would be conversation.
    However, this would, Ludovic knew, be a challenge.  The repairman had been alive on this earth long enough to be able to recognize when someone did not care to talk.  Never mind his years dealing with customers, he had lived with Holly.  Before she had left with the kids — again, a thing for which he did not fault her — and though on the whole they had gotten along well, there had been moments when with a look or a frown she had made it clear that silence was what was wanted.
    Accordingly, when Ludovic contrived to engage Sklar in conversation, he knew he would first have to find out what interested him.
    That was how he came to surveil him.
    This, too, was, at least initially, challenging.  Ludovic did not have a car.
    He thought first of following Sklar on the old bike that had been leaning for ages against the back of the building the store was in, sheltered by a sort of half porch there.  He could find some oil somewhere, get himself into shape to ride.  But how far would he get following a Jeep?
    He thought of putting a tracking device under the rear bumper of the Jeep, then remembered that Internet service was now mostly a thing of the past.
    Finally, it came to him that he should just inspect the vehicle as much as he could the next time his customer visited the shop.
    That is what Ludovic did.
    When Sklar showed up at the counter on a rainy Wednesday, taciturn, clearly in no mood to chat, the repairman excused himself, saying he had to look for a delivery, and stepped outside.  Sklar could see him through the shop window, but Ludovic did his best to look like the package he was supposedly expecting might have been anywhere out there.  Time enough for him to spot two bumper stickers on the back of the Jeep.
    One said “Warning: I brake for pedestrians.”  The other said “Magnificence Anyhow.”
    Bingo.
    It was in light of these clues into the author’s life that Ludovic read the next story that popped up on the hard drive after the Jeep pulled away:

On The Way Down

4.



    Sklar resolved to engage Ludovic in conversation at the next drop-in.
    If it’s true that Ludovic, on reading “On The Way Down,” perceived that his customer had some sadness in him, it happened that Sklar thought the same of the repairman.  Here was a person with little human contact in his life, his only real companion a cat, for God’s sake.
    Finishing the coffee he’d made with the one-cup press that Merry had left behind, Sklar ran through how he might strike up a chat with Ludovic later that very day.
    “How goes it?” he might say.  No, that was too chummy.
    “How’s the repair going?”  Better.
    Ludovic would be bound to answer that he’d retrieved a few of Sklar’s written pieces from the hard drive – he’d mentioned that already.  “It shouldn’t be long now,” he’d probably add.
    As Sklar drove to the repair shop in Linden, he chided himself.  “Better not to overthink,” he thought, reprising the advice that Merry had often given him.
    In any case, as is often the way of such things, the chat did not go as planned.
    The cat was on the counter near Ludovic, awake for once.  As Sklar entered the shop, the animal looked at him curiously, amber-eyed.  Maybe that look was what made Sklar forget his opening gambit.
    “Why ‘The Last Outpost of Reason’?” he blurted out.
    Ludovic was a bit taken aback.  This customer had barely spoken to him before.
    The repairman searched for a reply.  Surely the question deserved an answer.
    “Well,” he said finally, putting down a probe.  “I guess it’s because when I took over the shop everthing had gone to shit.  People were going crazy – we all were.  Drivers’ etiquette, lousy.  The business failures.  The gangs.  The overdoses.  The despair.  I just wanted something positive on the front of the building.  Safe haven.  Oasis.  Sanity.”
    Sklar took this in. “But what about the death of the Internet?” he said.  “You repair computers.”
    “Yeah, I know,” said Ludovic.
    They looked out toward a cell tower near the highway, clearly visible a few blocks away, past rooftops.  It stood there in sunlight, functionally useless, beaming nothing, an artifact, a symbol of what once had been.
    “Anyway,” said Ludovic, surprised to be talking to this customer.  “What can I do for you?”
    But before Sklar could answer, as if on cue another piece of his writing arose from the hard drive to appear on the repairman’s monitor.
    William, sensing fuss, sauntered down the counter to look at the screen, then began licking a hind leg he’d raised like a flag, signaling indifference.      This time both men read the newly revealed piece together, Sklar looking over Ludovic’s shoulder.  The title at the head of the piece was:

In The Shadow Of Disappointment Peak