Sunday, March 20, 2005
Back when I had cable, before I realized that cable and credit are evil, I was watching ESPN2 when they featured coverage of a spelling bee. I think it's quite a stretch to feature spelling on a supposedly all-sports channel. But then again they never broadcast stone skipping or pool lounging either.
Judge Not . . .
by Kit Kiefer
People who see me have no idea I was once a judge in the International Stone-Skipping Competition. It's understandable. Sometimes I have trouble convincing myself.
I don't even know if there is still an International Stone-Skipping Competition. I hope there is for the sake of the stone-skippers and the judges. I suppose I could find out on the Internet, but I'm not sure if I want to. It wouldn't be the same, what with the steroids and genetically altered rocks. I do know that the organizer of the competition, a large, shaggy professional rabble-rouser named Bill Rabe, is dead. I'm sure wherever he is now he's feeding its writers a story a day, because that's just the sort of guy he was.
Bill Rabe's base of operations was Lake Superior State College up in Sault Ste. Marie, a school without much more going for it than five months of winter. In Rabe's skilled hands this sow's purse of a land-grant university became the splendiferous home of the Unicorn Hunters and the repository of words and phrases banned from the English language for misuse and overuse. He didn't quite reach his goal of having an LSSU person quoted every time a cow got stuck in a well or a government fell in Turkmenistan, but by every other measure he was the best thing that happened to Lake Superior State since the invention of the goalie mask.
Bill Rabe did such a good job with LSSU that in summertimes he was allowed to do publicity for the silk purse of Mackinac Island. Mackinac Island is a time-capsule cookie of land full of fudge shops, horse-drawn carriages and hotels with broad verandas. A lesser story-plugger would stop somewhere between quaint and charming, and mention the fudge in the last paragraph. Bill Rabe created reasons above and beyond to write about Mackinac Island, and threw in the charm for free.
One of the above-and-beyond reasons Bill Rabe created was the International Stone-Skipping Competition. Mackinac Island rolls itself into a neat ball most nights. The day-trippers go home and the staying guests, full of fudge and sun, turn in early. There's not much to do, but there are lots of flat stones and a broad expanse of water to throw them against. Bill Rabe took that raw material and whipped up a frappe of publicity. That, my friend, is genius.
If you're not familiar with the nuances of championship stone-skipping, let me tell you what I remember. On Mackinac Island skipping stones are called "petoskeys," for a town down the coast; they're shades of grey and rust, worn smooth by the lake and slightly dished on the bottom, so they have a lifting action like an airplane wing. The best skippers throwing the finest petoskeys can register 30 to 45 honest skips, not dribbles or piddles or splashes.
One of the problems with stone-skipping from a competitor's perspective is that there is no such thing as a favorite stone. You throw it, it's gone, and it's not like baseball, where the new ball is almost identical to the old ball. It's plays heck with your consistency. A good-looking stone may fizzle and a rock, a real boulder, may dance over the water like Michelle Kwan. You can't tell.
I became a stone-skipping judge nearly by accident. Bill Rabe had seen some of my travel pieces somewhere - they weren't exactly being handed out on street corners, and I know they weren't being sold - and asked me to be a judge. Not one to turn down anything free ever, I told him I couldn't promise that any stories I'd write would be printed, but if he was looking for someone who could impartially and accurately determine the number of skips and pittypats a stone takes on its way down, and eat fudge like a champ, I was his guy. In return I received a package of random scraps of paper that turned out to be coupons for free fudge, free horse rides, a lifetime pass to the rocking chairs on the porch of the Grand Hotel, and free bicycle rentals, a package of value that still staggers me. I don't think a man ever received better swag, considering where he was at the time.
At the time I was driving the '63 Plymouth Fury that I got from my brother in exchange for an electric guitar. Going anywhere with that car was an adventure - not that it didn't get me there, but that something always failed on the way. The brakes, the muffler, the alternator all went out on one of my trips, and only the fact that I was young and didn't know cars weren't supposed to do this kept me from giving up driving altogether. I once drove it all the way from Knoxville to Wisconsin with a broken universal joint, and the mechanic said, "You did what?"
This time the trip across the Upper Peninsula was uneventful, or at least I remember it as uneventful. Most trips across the UP are. Something huge has to happen, like a moose forcing his way into your back seat or civilization appearing out of the mist, for a trip across the UP to be anything but ho-hum.
But anyway. I parked the car in the ferryboat lot and rode the ferry over to the island. I've been on roller coasters and on canoes caught up in waterspouts, but never anything like this ferry going across the straits to the island. I didn't eat much in those days, which was a very good thing, because I wouldn't have held onto it for the duration. Bill Rabe met me somewhere in the vicinity of the dock, patted me on the back - which I really didn't need -- and whisked me off to the first event.
The events run together as I try to remember them, but one of the first was the HMS Queen Mary Deck Chair Lounging Competition. The Grand Hotel, the whitest hotel on Mackinac Island and the one with the biggest, broadest porch, some time back acquired the deck chairs of the Queen Mary, chairs sat in by some of history's most famous posteriors, and installed them around the planked wooden deck of the Grand Hotel's pool. People were then invited to lounge in them and pretend they were aboard the world's most famous transatlantic ocean liner. That would be the only thing they could dream, because as lounging apparatus they were comfortable as freshly split cordwood.
The difficulty with the lounging competition besides the composition of the chairs was the weather at Mackinac Island, which all times of year could best be described as bracing. There are days of soaking, soothing warmth on Mackinac Island, certainly, but the days I was there - typical Mackinac Island days, I was told - featured a brisk wind and the sparkling blue skies possible only with what the weathermen call "Canadian high pressure." Nothing comes out of Canada warm, so the dozen or so loungers whom Rabe earnestly rousted off the porch and out of the fudge shops laid on the hard wooden chairs and exposed their flesh gingerly, as though it were New Year's Day and the next stop was a plunge into the Big Two-Hearted River.
Judging the loungers was a piece of cake. Whoever kept their composure and kept from shivering the longest won. Keeping one's eyes closed and thinking warm thoughts was the usual technique, so powers of suggestion were at a premium. There's a picture of me in my lone, worn, salmon-colored Izod polo shirt, holding a clipboard in my hand and evaluating a bikini-clad young lady who I believe was later crowned winner. She was all of 14 but looked older. Bill Rabe got the picture on the Associated Press wire with a gaudy cutline underneath, that old fox.
The rest of the long weekend blurs, except for breakfasts, the croquet game and the stone-skipping competition. I don't know quite how he managed it, but Rabe got me breakfasts at the Grand Hotel and no other meals. (I stayed on the town's main street in a lesser hotel that appeared to have been built shortly after the Civil War and whose chief characteristic, I discovered, was a propensity to burn down with great loss of life. I never closed my window the whole time I was there, just to be safe.) I ordered Michigan blueberries and cream for breakfast and watched the sun, so warm-looking, stream across the broad lake and through the gauzy curtains. I have never again lived so well so early in the morning.
The croquet game was held on the lawn of the Grand Hotel on a piece of turf that rolled and pitched and had probably never seen the game before. If there are subtleties to be grasped in the game of croquet we didn't grasp them. The martinis didn't help our appreciation of croquet, though I went with soda and fudge and still disgraced the game. The scene was the thing far more than the croquet match: what appeared to be the privileged class enjoying their privileges in front of a hotel that hadn't changed its face in a century, on a day where the sky was a hard northern blue, the sun the color of the center of a daisy and the shade almost black, it contrasted so with the intensity of the sunshine. Nothing ever moves in my memory of this scene; it stands frozen like a painting, which it may well have been.
The stone-skipping contest was held on my last day there, which may have been the fourth of July. The only other judge I remember was a correspondent from Newsweek who dressed like he had just been shipped in from Vietnam, with a sweat-stained vest bulging with pockets and shorts full of more pockets, all of which were more than capable of holding fudge. We talked about bad places to drive. I nominated Quebec City, which I had visited with my parents when I was 12. He chose Cairo, which he suggested was his last port of call. We hit it off regardless.
The skippers were an odd lot: summer help from the hotels, locals, tourists on a goof, and a handful who took the competition as a sport to be studied and trained for. I asked one of the serious participants what he does to prepare. He said, "I throw rocks." What else could he say?
The competition began. I was introduced as a writer for a magazine which I no longer wrote for because it no longer existed. I felt no shame. With the first flick of a stone the competitors separated themselves immediately. The tourists all failed in their efforts to get their stones to make more than five or six honest skips. Most of them took stones that were too light, I learned later. Weight distribution -- that's the key in picking a proper petoskey. Most of the summer help departed, along with some of the locals and a surprising number of the serious competitors. Bad water conditions, they explained later. So much can go wrong when the lake churns on a skipper used to calm waters.
Finally the contest came down to two locals - a slender Canadian from the Soo and another person, I believe much larger, from the Michigan side. The Canadian waded out 20 feet and threw his last stone. I recall we gave him 32 skips but were being generous because he was perceived as the underdog and the fellow from Newsweek and I wanted him to win.
No matter the count, the runner-up didn't grouse, the winner held the trophy high, everyone shook hands and that was that. I checked out of the downtown firetrap, caught the lurching, bouncing ferry back to shore, fired up the Plymouth Fury and headed for home. I wrote stories about the contest and tried to sell them but no one bought. I feel I betrayed Bill Rabe, and though he said he understood I was never invited back. It was just as well; the thing was bound to lose its luster after a while. Still, I was just getting the hang of being a judge. I'm sure that had there been a next time not a single pittypat or slouching lounger would have gotten past me.
Judge Not . . .
by Kit Kiefer
People who see me have no idea I was once a judge in the International Stone-Skipping Competition. It's understandable. Sometimes I have trouble convincing myself.
I don't even know if there is still an International Stone-Skipping Competition. I hope there is for the sake of the stone-skippers and the judges. I suppose I could find out on the Internet, but I'm not sure if I want to. It wouldn't be the same, what with the steroids and genetically altered rocks. I do know that the organizer of the competition, a large, shaggy professional rabble-rouser named Bill Rabe, is dead. I'm sure wherever he is now he's feeding its writers a story a day, because that's just the sort of guy he was.
Bill Rabe's base of operations was Lake Superior State College up in Sault Ste. Marie, a school without much more going for it than five months of winter. In Rabe's skilled hands this sow's purse of a land-grant university became the splendiferous home of the Unicorn Hunters and the repository of words and phrases banned from the English language for misuse and overuse. He didn't quite reach his goal of having an LSSU person quoted every time a cow got stuck in a well or a government fell in Turkmenistan, but by every other measure he was the best thing that happened to Lake Superior State since the invention of the goalie mask.
Bill Rabe did such a good job with LSSU that in summertimes he was allowed to do publicity for the silk purse of Mackinac Island. Mackinac Island is a time-capsule cookie of land full of fudge shops, horse-drawn carriages and hotels with broad verandas. A lesser story-plugger would stop somewhere between quaint and charming, and mention the fudge in the last paragraph. Bill Rabe created reasons above and beyond to write about Mackinac Island, and threw in the charm for free.
One of the above-and-beyond reasons Bill Rabe created was the International Stone-Skipping Competition. Mackinac Island rolls itself into a neat ball most nights. The day-trippers go home and the staying guests, full of fudge and sun, turn in early. There's not much to do, but there are lots of flat stones and a broad expanse of water to throw them against. Bill Rabe took that raw material and whipped up a frappe of publicity. That, my friend, is genius.
If you're not familiar with the nuances of championship stone-skipping, let me tell you what I remember. On Mackinac Island skipping stones are called "petoskeys," for a town down the coast; they're shades of grey and rust, worn smooth by the lake and slightly dished on the bottom, so they have a lifting action like an airplane wing. The best skippers throwing the finest petoskeys can register 30 to 45 honest skips, not dribbles or piddles or splashes.
One of the problems with stone-skipping from a competitor's perspective is that there is no such thing as a favorite stone. You throw it, it's gone, and it's not like baseball, where the new ball is almost identical to the old ball. It's plays heck with your consistency. A good-looking stone may fizzle and a rock, a real boulder, may dance over the water like Michelle Kwan. You can't tell.
I became a stone-skipping judge nearly by accident. Bill Rabe had seen some of my travel pieces somewhere - they weren't exactly being handed out on street corners, and I know they weren't being sold - and asked me to be a judge. Not one to turn down anything free ever, I told him I couldn't promise that any stories I'd write would be printed, but if he was looking for someone who could impartially and accurately determine the number of skips and pittypats a stone takes on its way down, and eat fudge like a champ, I was his guy. In return I received a package of random scraps of paper that turned out to be coupons for free fudge, free horse rides, a lifetime pass to the rocking chairs on the porch of the Grand Hotel, and free bicycle rentals, a package of value that still staggers me. I don't think a man ever received better swag, considering where he was at the time.
At the time I was driving the '63 Plymouth Fury that I got from my brother in exchange for an electric guitar. Going anywhere with that car was an adventure - not that it didn't get me there, but that something always failed on the way. The brakes, the muffler, the alternator all went out on one of my trips, and only the fact that I was young and didn't know cars weren't supposed to do this kept me from giving up driving altogether. I once drove it all the way from Knoxville to Wisconsin with a broken universal joint, and the mechanic said, "You did what?"
This time the trip across the Upper Peninsula was uneventful, or at least I remember it as uneventful. Most trips across the UP are. Something huge has to happen, like a moose forcing his way into your back seat or civilization appearing out of the mist, for a trip across the UP to be anything but ho-hum.
But anyway. I parked the car in the ferryboat lot and rode the ferry over to the island. I've been on roller coasters and on canoes caught up in waterspouts, but never anything like this ferry going across the straits to the island. I didn't eat much in those days, which was a very good thing, because I wouldn't have held onto it for the duration. Bill Rabe met me somewhere in the vicinity of the dock, patted me on the back - which I really didn't need -- and whisked me off to the first event.
The events run together as I try to remember them, but one of the first was the HMS Queen Mary Deck Chair Lounging Competition. The Grand Hotel, the whitest hotel on Mackinac Island and the one with the biggest, broadest porch, some time back acquired the deck chairs of the Queen Mary, chairs sat in by some of history's most famous posteriors, and installed them around the planked wooden deck of the Grand Hotel's pool. People were then invited to lounge in them and pretend they were aboard the world's most famous transatlantic ocean liner. That would be the only thing they could dream, because as lounging apparatus they were comfortable as freshly split cordwood.
The difficulty with the lounging competition besides the composition of the chairs was the weather at Mackinac Island, which all times of year could best be described as bracing. There are days of soaking, soothing warmth on Mackinac Island, certainly, but the days I was there - typical Mackinac Island days, I was told - featured a brisk wind and the sparkling blue skies possible only with what the weathermen call "Canadian high pressure." Nothing comes out of Canada warm, so the dozen or so loungers whom Rabe earnestly rousted off the porch and out of the fudge shops laid on the hard wooden chairs and exposed their flesh gingerly, as though it were New Year's Day and the next stop was a plunge into the Big Two-Hearted River.
Judging the loungers was a piece of cake. Whoever kept their composure and kept from shivering the longest won. Keeping one's eyes closed and thinking warm thoughts was the usual technique, so powers of suggestion were at a premium. There's a picture of me in my lone, worn, salmon-colored Izod polo shirt, holding a clipboard in my hand and evaluating a bikini-clad young lady who I believe was later crowned winner. She was all of 14 but looked older. Bill Rabe got the picture on the Associated Press wire with a gaudy cutline underneath, that old fox.
The rest of the long weekend blurs, except for breakfasts, the croquet game and the stone-skipping competition. I don't know quite how he managed it, but Rabe got me breakfasts at the Grand Hotel and no other meals. (I stayed on the town's main street in a lesser hotel that appeared to have been built shortly after the Civil War and whose chief characteristic, I discovered, was a propensity to burn down with great loss of life. I never closed my window the whole time I was there, just to be safe.) I ordered Michigan blueberries and cream for breakfast and watched the sun, so warm-looking, stream across the broad lake and through the gauzy curtains. I have never again lived so well so early in the morning.
The croquet game was held on the lawn of the Grand Hotel on a piece of turf that rolled and pitched and had probably never seen the game before. If there are subtleties to be grasped in the game of croquet we didn't grasp them. The martinis didn't help our appreciation of croquet, though I went with soda and fudge and still disgraced the game. The scene was the thing far more than the croquet match: what appeared to be the privileged class enjoying their privileges in front of a hotel that hadn't changed its face in a century, on a day where the sky was a hard northern blue, the sun the color of the center of a daisy and the shade almost black, it contrasted so with the intensity of the sunshine. Nothing ever moves in my memory of this scene; it stands frozen like a painting, which it may well have been.
The stone-skipping contest was held on my last day there, which may have been the fourth of July. The only other judge I remember was a correspondent from Newsweek who dressed like he had just been shipped in from Vietnam, with a sweat-stained vest bulging with pockets and shorts full of more pockets, all of which were more than capable of holding fudge. We talked about bad places to drive. I nominated Quebec City, which I had visited with my parents when I was 12. He chose Cairo, which he suggested was his last port of call. We hit it off regardless.
The skippers were an odd lot: summer help from the hotels, locals, tourists on a goof, and a handful who took the competition as a sport to be studied and trained for. I asked one of the serious participants what he does to prepare. He said, "I throw rocks." What else could he say?
The competition began. I was introduced as a writer for a magazine which I no longer wrote for because it no longer existed. I felt no shame. With the first flick of a stone the competitors separated themselves immediately. The tourists all failed in their efforts to get their stones to make more than five or six honest skips. Most of them took stones that were too light, I learned later. Weight distribution -- that's the key in picking a proper petoskey. Most of the summer help departed, along with some of the locals and a surprising number of the serious competitors. Bad water conditions, they explained later. So much can go wrong when the lake churns on a skipper used to calm waters.
Finally the contest came down to two locals - a slender Canadian from the Soo and another person, I believe much larger, from the Michigan side. The Canadian waded out 20 feet and threw his last stone. I recall we gave him 32 skips but were being generous because he was perceived as the underdog and the fellow from Newsweek and I wanted him to win.
No matter the count, the runner-up didn't grouse, the winner held the trophy high, everyone shook hands and that was that. I checked out of the downtown firetrap, caught the lurching, bouncing ferry back to shore, fired up the Plymouth Fury and headed for home. I wrote stories about the contest and tried to sell them but no one bought. I feel I betrayed Bill Rabe, and though he said he understood I was never invited back. It was just as well; the thing was bound to lose its luster after a while. Still, I was just getting the hang of being a judge. I'm sure that had there been a next time not a single pittypat or slouching lounger would have gotten past me.
