“Good,” I replied, offering only commonplace elaboration that could have been spoken by anyone who went home for the holidays. Stephanie made similar remarks about her own Christmas break.
Getting back on the ice was my first order of business upon returning to South Carolina. Holiday sessions in Sacramento had been crowded, so crowded that I often preferred not to skate and simply spent my time with Howard. I accomplished precious little in a jam-packed rink with tiny jumping beans darting around and more aggressive adult skaters taking command of rare openings in the swarm. I longed for Martinsville adult nights and daytime sessions when I could sneak away from Dr. Butler’s purgatory lab.
My skating time grew limited as efforts to complete my research and write my dissertation consumed my waking hours until I only skated twice per week, then once, then rarely at all. Clive Butler became a tremendous pain in my backside, constantly wanting more or reminding me of some additional detail that he had never brought to my attention before. The work seemed endless, as though it were spawning in the laboratory overnight, as though Butler were trying to squeeze his final quota of slave labor out of me. Soon I not only had little opportunity to skate, I had no time for anything. I worked all day and into the night, often staying in the laboratory until midnight compiling data, accessing the mainframe computer and working with specialized software packages.
Before the absolute crunch overpowered me, I sought refuge at the ice rink where I spun free of the burden of graduation and becoming a doctor of philosophy. I indulged in lessons whenever possible, spending the generous allotment of money bestowed by my father as a Christmas gift. Unfortunately, his gift came late in my tenure as a graduate student adult skater. I had little time to spare for lessons and no freedom to devote to competitions or performances. However, I cherished the thought of his kindness and the memory of that conversation. I saved most of the money and planned to buy a pair of custom made skating boots as a graduation present.
During the first two months of the New Year, I worked with Willa for thirty minutes per week. I learned to do a toe-loop by holding the barrier, planting my free toe in the ice, pivoting forward and launching into a waltz jump. Technically a waltz-toe and not a true toe-loop, but this method aided in overcoming my fear of picking into the ice and jumping. I only did waltz-toes for a couple of weeks before developing a more fluid style. The term “waltz-toe” is often spoken with a derogatory sneer. Those who are too clumsy to perform a genuine toe-loop perform waltz-toes. The even nastier variant, the “toe-axel” is the scourge of the skating universe. Skaters who cheat their double toe-loops often do so by turning completely forward on the vaulting toe pick before lifting into an axel, rather than an actual double. While I was far from attempting a double anything, Willa insisted that I only use the despicable waltz-toe as a walk through exercise, a building block toward the desired jump. Had she caught me prancing around the rink popping pitiful little waltz-toes and calling them toe-loops, she would have pulled me aside, poised her hand on her hip and corrected me in no uncertain terms. Willa did not condone squat spins, nor did she allow blatant waltz-toes from her students.
While true mastery of any simple element took months early in my skating career; I managed to learn an unimpressive, though technically passable, version of the toe-loop. I was terribly jump-challenged and the toe-loop added only a second single rotation jump to my arsenal. While I also performed ballet hops and other little half jumps, my competence with standard jumping skills lagged behind my developing spin expertise and growing confidence with stroking, turning and gliding exercises. I learned the basic toe-loop toward the final days of my graduate school skating experience. It was still shaky and uncertain when my rink time reduced to absolute nil in favor of burgeoning duties leading to my degree. The dismal toe-loop, that had barely surpassed the embarrassing waltz-toe stage, disappeared completely and had to be relearned at a later date.
Before my ice time expired, I enjoyed the humble toe-loop and the other skills that had provided me with a full range of emotions from delight and pride to disgust and shame. I learned no other new skills that spring, but worked diligently on my spins and remedial jumps. They offered solace from work-related stress and allowed me the luxury of forgetfulness. While on the ice, I was only a skater; not even an adult skater, just a person who loved the sport. Whatever I did outside the rink became irrelevant. The correlation of experimental factors in my research had no bearing on my camel. Dr. Butler’s comments meant nothing to the arch in my back while spinning. Computer problems were unimportant to controlling a landing. In the arena I was just a skater practicing the same types of skills that occupied everyone else. Maybe I did not practice them at the same level, but we were all on the ice together -- young competitors, career people, and college students -- bonded by a common love of ice skating.
Factors at school may have had relatively no effect on my skating performance, but skating did positively influence my accomplishments in the laboratory. It gave me the courage to keep striving when I was exhausted. Skating made me feel good about myself when I received no encouragement from my advisor. It reminded me that surviving graduate school would result in a meaningful existence afterward. I would have liked to learn a loop or flip jump that spring or maybe a backward camel spin, but stacking up new conquests was not the objective during that semester. Skating gave me strength and joy when everything else depleted me of both.
Modest personal expectations prevented the crippling jealousy that disheartened me when Vijay and Stephanie began to practice axel drills the previous summer. Had I been of a less focused mindset, I might have given up skating on the afternoon when Stephanie -- not Vijay -- became the first adult skater in the Martinsville Arena to land an axel. It was not a beautiful axel, but it consisted of a forward outside edge take-off and a backward outside edge landing with one-and-one-half rotations in between, more or less.
Stephanie’s painstaking methodology yielded noteworthy results. Her other skills improved at a slow, even pace as she forged onward adding waltz-backspins and waltz-loop jump combinations to her regular work-outs. Determined to land an axel, Stephanie utilized entire two-hour sessions without attempting a single spin. Stephanie enjoyed spinning and was a respectable spinner. She had begun to experiment with flying camels, but they were little more than vague trials, tentative hops to a hesitant spiral position that failed to rotate. Depriving herself of spin exhilaration, Stephanie warmed up with stroking and dance patterns then reviewed all of her basic jumps, which were still unremarkable things, but each would meet the requirements for any beginner test. Then she began to combine the jumps, first with a toe-loop (occasionally a waltz-toe, by mistake rather than design) then with a loop jump, mimicking the action of a double. She worked axel exercises before attempting true axels. Most of her efforts resulted in under-rotated flat-footed bipedal landings. As her skills evolved and she persevered, Stephanie’s landing blade contacted the ice before the free foot touched down, a forerunner to actual rotation over her axis. She did not cross her legs in the textbook aerial backspin position, but tried to raise her hip, and therefore her free foot, allowing it to clear the surface and kick free into a landing posture. Her body huddled self-protectively while airborne as though swathed in an invisible blanket.
Every time I saw Stephanie she followed the same protocol, though she occasionally broke down and practiced spins, to preserve their integrity and to play with new movements, but then the dedicated young woman returned to her axel, landing in various ungainly poses and dropping to the ice. Stephanie never complained about the falls. She rarely even brushed the slush off her derriere. Maybe she believed any effort to clear the back of her tights was an exercise in futility as the next mishap would merely wet her rear end anew. Stephanie probably could have achieved a respectable level of success in any endeavor to which she applied herself. In this way, Stephanie’s work ethic on the ice resembled my efforts at school. I had to graduate and I set my mind to doing whatever was necessary, though I might have preferred to quit and try something else. Stephanie’s approach to skating seemed to drain the joy from the sport. I spun and frolicked, with little regard for documentable progress while Stephanie followed a regimented formula, denying herself the pleasure of spinning while she repeatedly plopped on her tired buttocks, making the same frustrating mistakes for hours.
Oblivious to the bristling activity surrounding her, Stephanie continued to jump and to fall. Meanwhile, I flitted around the ice like a carefree fairy stopping every now and then to chat with another skater. Vijay erupted from all corners of the rink and occasionally joined our social meetings. Skaters of all levels worked around Stephanie, who somehow maintained sufficient contact with the outside world to avoid the program skater.
Centering a powerful sit spin, I grabbed my free leg while holding the position. For an adventuresome twist, I decided to try touching my head to my knee to achieve a cannonball variation. This resulted in a painful pulling of my quadriceps and a quick drop to the ice where I sat sprawled with my legs outstretched aiming directly toward Stephanie’s practice zone.
Up she went in another dubious attempt. However, this time she landed on one foot, her blade shimmying to find a safe exit edge. Her free leg extended in surprise and triumph as her face illuminated with delight. It ranked among the homeliest axels I had ever seen, but no one starts with a sophisticated rendition of any skill. I scampered to my feet to intercept the victor.
“I saw that axel, Stephanie! Congratulations!”
She laughed with jubilation. “I can’t believe it. I knew if I kept trying I would eventually get it, but I’m kind of surprised that I did.”
At the root of Stephanie’s determination was the firm belief, instilled by her parents or other significant elders in her life, that hard work begets success. Conversely, no matter how hard I practiced as a teenager, my parents assumed I would never become a good skater or a decent fashion designer. While I may have lacked inherent talent, their defeatist attitude colored my self-perception. Although my original skating goal, established in the Arctic Circle early in my adult figure skating escapade, involved learning the axel; I still struggled with my latest acquisition, the simple toe-loop, and wondered if I could ever break the axel barrier. Stephanie never even considered not learning the difficult jump. If she followed the formula and did her part, she would get the axel. And she did.
“Do it again!” I exclaimed.
Modestly, Stephanie shot me a look of doubt. She did not necessarily doubt herself or believe that she had landed her one and only axel, Stephanie merely maintained the realistic attitude that consistency came with even more practice. But she completed another embryonic axel, jumping up, turning around and managing to come down backward on her right foot. Now Stephanie faced the daunting challenge of developing this seedling into a fully formed classic axel, a task possibly more arduous than landing her first one.
Later that semester, I witnessed Stephanie’s first double salchow. It resembled the axel except that it was initiated from a forward outside three-turn. Lacking sweeping power and fluidity of motion, it just popped out of the three-turn, crouched for a fraction of a second in the air then touched down clumsily on one foot. For all of their inadequacies, Stephanie overcame the first obstacle to mastering the axel and double salchow. She landed the jumps cleanly, if not beautifully. The rest was polish, and polish came with time.
In spite of his strength and obvious talent, I never saw Vijay execute an axel. He often landed with a tap of the free foot; but never cleanly, short of rotation or otherwise. Vijay was a daredevil, a trait that would have made him successful as a child skater. In his mid-thirties with a career and family to support, Vijay knew no fear. He willingly tried anything, a personality characteristic that probably translated to other facets of his life and could have contributed to his professional prosperity. Vijay attempted almost every double, excluding the axel. He did not land any of them during the time we were acquainted, but he usually came down backwards and was often astonishingly close, so close that future success was virtually assured. Because his jumps were so huge, beyond what I had ever seen performed by a true adult-trained skater (and have never seen again since), Vijay even tried a couple of triples. He landed backwards on both feet, offering evidence that some adults may have the potential to learn triples.
Vijay displayed his inherent ability most clearly, not in his bold jump attempts, but during an on-ice conversation with me. I asked Vijay if he knew how to do a star, the move Eric at the Sacramento rink demonstrated and I emulated with toe assisted three-turns. Vijay admitted that he did not even know what a star was, much less how to do one. When description failed and Vijay obviously still could not formulate my words into an image of a skating maneuver, I walked through Eric’s steps, in my wrong direction. Immediately, Vijay recognized the skill and proceeded, at full speed, to make his own attempt. Had he been eleven years old, coaches would have declared him a prodigy. As a man of at least thirty-five years, his talent seemed miraculous. Vijay completed a series of three stars ending with an Arabian cartwheel, another skill he had never tried but had seen attached to star series in televised performances. The answer to my silly question: Yes, Vijay could do a star, not just one star but three in a row. He could also do them in combination with an Arabian cartwheel.
It is a foregone conclusion that no one at the Martinsville Community Arena saw me complete an axel. I never even tried a waltz-backspin or waltz-loop. I did not know how to do a loop jump; although I observed Stephanie performing one that appeared achievable facile. She glided backward, hopped simply and landed without incident. I tried to duplicate her effort, hidden at the other end of the rink, where Stephanie could not see that I had mooched a free lesson from her. Unfortunately, I did not understand how the blade edges interacted with the ice providing a secure springboard for take-off. I could not begin to jump, much less make Stephanie think I was a copycat. I did not pursue the loop further with Willa. I would have other opportunities to learn the loop jump. For now, my ice time had essentially expired.
How was your Christmas?” Stephanie asked as we laced our boots in the lobby of the Martinsville Community Arena.
Chapter 46 posted 2/18/02
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