lumière des étoiles

way out... there
2005-06-01 10:57 a.m.

We took a loooong drive this weekend, which was smartly split up between Nicole, Steve and I, to spend the holiday with friends at their new vacation house on Lake Champlain. I'd forgotten how beautiful Vermont was, since it had been a while since I was up there. I tried not to ask myself (or Steve) why we live where we live when plenty of nice people live on Lake Champlain. After being there for a few days, breathing clean air, rowing through the water, and seeing nothing but open land all around us, I didn't want to leave.

I did raise the question of why NJ and not someplace like this to a few friends after a bbq dinner on Sunday night, and I got the whole "this is the middle of nowhere" answer. That's true - the closest "big city" to where we were was Rouses Point, NY, and then whatever border towns might be swingin' in Canada. And those are hardly big - they're not even cities. So I'm assuming life might get a little monotonous - dare I say boring - around Lake Champlain.

There's something about the "middle of nowhere" that is extremely appealing to me, but that might be only because right now, where I live is so crowded and loud that the opposite extreme becomes a welcome alternative. Still, it's always the "middle of nowhere" that I prefer in travels. I preferred Lake Volta to Accra in Ghana, San Gimignano to Rome in Italy, Kilkenny to Dublin in Ireland. I tend to like African Cities, like Maun or Livingstone or Kumasi, that are "cities" but still feel like "the middle of nowhere". But could I live in a place like that, having grown up so fond of New York City? Loving Philly, Atlanta, and DC - would I ever be able to live happily in a place like Lake Champlain?

They're fun places to try out for now, anyway. I will say this about the little town in VT. on the lake: property is unbelievable cheap - more in our price range than anything around Northern NJ, where we currently are looking. Our friends bought the four-bedroom, 1 acre, lake-front house, complete with GUEST HOUSE with 3 extra bedrooms, for $310k. We all know that would go for 1.7 million in N. NJ or S. NY state (just west and north of Manhattan - where we were also looking for a house).

I really have been enjoying watching a whole lot of "middle of nowhere" on DVD, since my amazingly thoughtful husband bought me the Africa series DVD box set for my birthday. PBS ran this brilliant program once or twice, and then seemed to yank it or play it only at obscure times, even though it got all kinds of awards and critical acclaim. Well now it's mine to have forever and ever, and I've been watching it a lot since I had the last few days off.

My favorite so far is the episode called "A Desert Odyssey", in which we follow a young Tuareg boy named Adam as he travels for the first time with his father, uncle, and various other men of the village across the Sahara to do the yearly trading.

The boy is nine - and small for his age, yet treks with the caravan from Timia, his village in Niger, to the oasis town of Bilma, in the middle of the desert. The journey takes six months and is difficult, to say the least, but the boy learns a lot about his role and his responsibilities along the way.

I happened to be flipping through Christina Hoff Sommers new book, One Nation Under Therapy : How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance, a few days before watching this particular episode. Though I typically don't like Sommers' "Look-At-Me-I'm-Controversial!" approach to discussions about gender, politics and sociology, I'm so behind her scoffing at public schools' refusal to fail students for fear of "emotional distress", and I can completely agree with her outrage at some public schools' decisions to ban competitive sports during gym class, favoring "friendship ball" instead.

The juxtaposition of "friendship ball" with this 9 year old crossing the Sahara was just too much. I see: it's too stressful for American 9 year olds to lose at kickball, but 9 year old kids from Niger can travel 400 miles through the desert, collect salt at a mine in Biskra, and then learn to sell it at market in Zinder. All the while, might I add, being left in charge of their own heard of camels.

The infantalization of American children (and adults) drives me crazy. It's not that American kids can'thandle failure, it's that they never learn how to cope if we don't help them to. And we can't help them to unless we let them fail, lose, and hurt - badly. How else are they supposed to learn about life and their responsibilities? I feel really, really bad for students whom I encounter who don't want to or can't learn - and not because they grew up poor, going to bad schools. The students who seem to suffer most from this total lack of self-reliance and autonomy are those who grew up comfortable or even wealthy. Many can't learn because they're afraid to take any chances, need to be told how to think, what to do, what to say and where to go. If they need someone holding their hand at 20 years old just to write a seven page research paper or complete a biology experiment, I fear for our future work force.

Yes indeedy, between that kind of school-culture and all of this "don't teach science in science classes" stuff, Americans will quickly become the stupidest, most incapable people on the planet. Congrats, compassionate conservatives.

I'm going swimming. I was hanging out with a pregnant friend all weekend, so I had waaaaay too much yummy snacky food.