by David Rakoff
They are further told that in the New World teachers use modern teaching methods, unlike, it is implied, Austria. The New York educators—only a few of whom have ever been in an Austrian classroom—warn them time and again about the dangers of the dreaded “chalk and talk,” that driest, most outmoded Teutonic kind of pedagogy, where one stands at the board and lectures, with no room for inquiry or discussion.
One of the more useful moments in the whole orientation, however, comes not from educators, but from a group of actual New York City high school kids who have come to meet them. The students give them a quick lesson in New York Slang. They pass out handwritten flash cards: Bounce, You Played Yourself, Whatever’s Clever, Flavas, the Bomb, Phat, You Buggin’. Andrea is asked to use one of the new terms. “I think you all look very jiggy,” she says to the students. They applaud.
The lesson in slang continues just a few days later in a weekly class about life in the city that is being called “New York 101” by the media. Although no one out of the media seems to have another name for it. They just call it “What the media are calling ‘New York 101.’ ” The professor, a retired English scholar and native Brooklynite, spends the opening twenty minutes of the first class quizzing them on their various subway routes up to City College and telling them quicker alternatives. It is one of New Yorkers’ favorite pastimes, telling one another the best subway routes to get someplace. As the only other resident in the room, I am thoroughly entertained and cannot resist weighing in at one point about the long underground transfer between the 4/5 and the 2/3 at Fulton Street. The Austrians stare blankly and seem exhausted.
Then comes a new set of colloquialisms, in the form of a handout. This glossary of New York argot has words and phrases like “eighty-six,” “schmear,” “bimbo,” “maven,” “What am I, chopped liver?,” and “Schlepping all over town looking for some chotchkes.” All of which would be very useful if it were 1949, if you were a hard-boiled cutie-pie gun moll, in the USO, a private dick, anyone from a Damon Runyon story, or auditioning for Seinfeld. There is even an entry for “a quick pop,” meaning an alcoholic drink, a term probably not in use since the prime of Cab Calloway.
What becomes evident over the course of the orientation is that the Austrians are also being given an unvarnished glimpse, albeit an unwitting one, into what it can truly be like to be a student in public high school in North America: hours spent sitting, listening to lecture after lecture, frequently droning, and frequently about things they will never need to know—the bureaucratic structure of the Board of Education, for example, or how to say, “Eighty-six the whiskey down wit’ da schmear.”
It turns out I’m not all that up-to-date myself. When Lutz and Andrea ask me if I know where they should go dancing (after I tamp down my initial excitement, mistakenly thinking they have asked me to go with them), I can come up with the names of only two places: Limelight, closed for over a year at that point; and Palladium, a block from my apartment. When I get home that evening, I will see that it, too, isn’t just no longer open, it has been torn down.
I try to be of help in other ways. In exchange for two carpets that I’m not using, I get Lutz and Nikki to agree to show me their apartment—huge and sunny in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn—and take me along with them when they go to see their school for the first time, a few days before the beginning of the semester. The media attention surrounding them shows no signs of abating. Their schools are fielding inquiries from CBS, Austrian TV, and a Japanese television crew. They tell me how fed up they are getting with being portrayed as being too scared to take the subway, unfamiliar with different ethnicities, and oblivious to social problems. Lutz gently points out that the small matter of the genocidal civil war in former Yugoslavia is happening not too far from Vienna. There are refugees coming into Austria every day. Lutz and Nikki are not men who are unaware of the outside world. “We are international people,” says Nikki, whose girlfriend is spending the year working in Moscow. I ask them if they have drugs and teenage pregnancy in Vienna. Lutz replies, Of course, although not to the extent of New York City, obviously. But it’s really an idiotic question. Where do I think they come from: Shangri-La?
Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School is beside a huge cemetery. Literally beside the graveyard, with headstones coming right up to the building, like a teen exploitation film joke—a summer camp actually built across the lake from an insane asylum. Architecturally, the school is one of those early sixties structures of glass and cinder block. It is quite an attractive building, actually, and there’s a friendliness, a sense of community, about the place; it’s in perfect repair, the floors gleam.
We run into the school guidance counselors. “We saw you on the news!” They treat the Austrian Four like celebrities. Andrea is still a little surprised by all the scrutiny and occasionally frustrated by some of the questions:
“People keep asking us where we are from. We tell them Austria, they say, ‘Oh, Australia.’ And we say, ‘Austria,’ and they say, ‘Oh, but we call it Australia.’ I tell them, ‘No, it’s absolutely different,’ and they say, ‘Oh, but it’s the same area.’ ”
At almost that exact moment, a passing security guard asks excitedly if they are the Australian teachers.
Despite the fact that she has two days to get the school ready for four thousand students, and that Andrea, Lutz, Nikki, and Elke are by no means the only new teachers starting this year, FDR’s principal, Adele Vocel, takes the time to sit down with them in the conference room. She doesn’t talk to them as though they are Austrian teachers, just teachers. And it’s not for my benefit, either. I am, in a word, tolerated. I follow along as Lutz and Andrea are shown the newly renovated science labs, given the ninth-grade biology curriculum, and introduced to some of their fellow teachers. Like everyone we meet at the school, they project this sense of shared purpose and excitement; they make it look like great fun, and there’s no false nobility here, either; there’s none of that sun-washed earnestness of films like Dead Poets Society. All of it goes a long way toward dispelling my fear (I mean, of course, their fear) of the school year that begins in two days’ time.
The New York these Austrians will be working in is very different from the New York inhabited by the members of the media covering them. For starters there’s a lack of irony to almost everyone I encounter. Nobody is making constant air quotes or dropping their voices in “what, me serious?” disaffection. No one acts as if they’ve seen it all before. At one point at the Board of Ed during a teacher orientation, Adele Vocel reads a poem called “Average” to a room full of adults. It is a work of cudgel-like subtlety, telling of a student who, having been told he is average, loses the volition to pursue his dreams:
’Cause since I’ve found I’m average
I’m just smart enough to see,
It means I’m nothing special
That I should expect to be.
Later on, at a reception at the Austrian consulate, another woman in public education plants herself in the middle of the room, takes a laminated card from her pocket, and intones an extended affirmation to the effect of “One hundred years from now, it will not matter how much money I made, what kind of car I drove, how big my house was, whether or not I was famous. WHAT WILL MATTER is that I made a difference in the life of a child!” Her delivery is almost one of umbrage.
Generally, the words I’m just going to read you this poem elicit feelings of mild embarrassment in me: how avid, how earnest. I admit that I was a little amused when I first heard these two poems. Neither of them is very good poetry, after all. But on reflection, I realize that they achieve precisely what poetry is meant to accomplish: they edify, they elevate, they speak to an underlying truth not immediately apparent, they change the way one looks at things. I had thought the Austrians were heading off into a quagmire of cynicism, institutional neglect, and violence, when, in fact, they were entering a world I hadn’t imagined—a world where being earnest and avid and passionate is anything but
embarrassing. The embattled tone of the woman with the laminated poem is completely justified. In a society fixated precisely on how much money one makes, what kind of car one drives, how big one’s house is, and whether or not one is famous, the education of young people isn’t just undervalued and underpaid work. It is looked upon with a sense of benign dismissal. Precisely the weary, slightly ashamed indulgence of a beloved, albeit overpoliticized, relative in the habit of intoning bad poetry in the middle of one’s elegant cocktail receptions.
It’s been made clear to me that I am not welcome in the classrooms once the students arrive. FDR’s obligation is to the kids, and I would be an unnecessary distraction. I see the sense in this, so I invite the Austrian Four for dinner instead. And they accept and seem happy to be asked.
Although school has been in session for at least a month, they have been teaching for only ten days, owing to the Jewish holidays, in which they have become rapidly versed. The whole experience still feels new and strange and surreal to them. “If I woke up now at home, I would say, ‘Oh, that’s a crazy dream,’ ” says Elke.
I observe as how the reality of their situation seems to lie somewhere between an urban war zone and Maria von Trapp. “Maria von Trapp?” they ask me. They have no idea who I am talking about. I find myself explaining The Sound of Music to them.
“No Austrian has ever seen The Sound of Music,” Andrea says.
“You should teach us to sing ‘Edelweiss,’ ” Nikki suggests. They have each been asked more than once if it’s the Austrian national anthem. When I ask them what they know of Julie Andrews (Julie Andrews, for God’s sake!), Andrea replies, “Mary Poppins. And Victor/Victoria.”
The dinner is jovial and comfortable. I feel that they now know me well enough that I can ask them what has been on my mind since that first day in the California Lounge at JFK. I ask them, finally, about Jews: whether they know any, if there are any in the program. The closest contact to those few remaining in Austria, it seems, is that Nikki taught in a kindergarten near Vienna’s Jewish quarter and saw some.
“My grandmother doesn’t like them,” Elke says matter-of-factly.
I suppose I’m glad she feels such ease in my home, but I’m a little put off by the complete lack of contrition or guilt by association in her tone. As the child of immigrants who rejected apartheid and left South Africa in 1961, decades before it was politically expedient or fashionable, I still never failed to explain and apologize for my grandmother’s presence in Cape Town when she was alive.
That one moment aside, the dinner establishes something between us. We become friendly. I get fairly regular calls from the Austrian Four, questions about excursions they should take, where might they find Indian food, and so on. In late November I take them to see one of the city’s great and most overlooked landmarks: the New York Panorama at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadow. It is an enormous diorama of the five boroughs, with scale models of every single building in the greater metropolitan area. I checked. Everything is there, right down to a half-inch replica of the four-story brownstone where I live. Spectators walk around its perimeter on a catwalk above.
The videotaped presentation about the display’s construction that plays constantly on a loop begins with an announcer exclaiming over a Gershwin score, “New York City! The Big Apple! Making it big! The Arts Capital of the World!” This bit of cheap New York, New York propagandist metaphor, seems a little naive. Because what one actually sees when looking at this accurate depiction of the city in its entirety is that most of the city—the New York that is New York to most New Yorkers—is actually the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island, which all contain some pretty vast areas of urban blight and desolation.
We stand over the Brighton Beach and Rockaways part of the diorama, Manhattan far behind us. And while it’s certainly the most crowded of the islands and its buildings are the tallest, it is also noticeably the smallest. Seeing it from here, from the equivalent of a few thousand feet up, Manhattan’s disproportionate influence, the power of its few over the millions in the outer boroughs, seems not just strange, it seems feudal.
All this time I have been wondering how the Austrians would deal, expecting them to crumple when actually faced with real New York, with the smug assurance that a boroughist Manhattanite like myself knows what real New York is. But more than almost anyone I know, these four teachers have been thrust into an environment where most everyone is from somewhere else. Even in my search for an authentic backdrop to this particular interview, I brought them to a large simulacrum, when probably the most authentically New York place is the block they live on.
Night descends upon the miniature city—their city. The sky darkens and black lights illuminate the buildings, whose windows seem lit up in millions of pinpoints. A few moments later it is morning again, and another day dawns on the greatest metropolis on earth. The orchestra on the video plays. It is all one can do not to stretch out one’s arms and turn around like some singing nun on a mountainside for the sheer joy and beauty and hugeness of it all.
Tiny planes on invisible wires come in for landings and take off from the diorama airports. And far higher than all of them, an airplane sails through the sky, tracing its path from across the Atlantic westward to somewhere else on the continent.
Nikki wonders aloud how any plane passing over New York could possibly resist landing here. Indeed, how could any aircraft ignore the very center of the universe? Spoken like a true New Yorker.
BACK TO THE GARDEN
It is difficult nigh on impossible to construct either my Figure-Four or my Paiute deadfall trap, to say nothing of having them work, in the dark, in the rain, at eleven P.M., after a seventeen-hour day of lectures and demonstrations during which I have already been instructed in (among other things) the sacred order of survival—shelter, water, fire, food; how to make rope and cordage from plant and animal fibers; how to start a fire using a bow drill; finding suitable materials for tinder (making sure to avoid the very fluffy and flammable mouse nest, as it contains hantavirus); the signs of progressive dehydration; how to find water; how to make a crude filter out of a matted nest of grass; how to distinguish between the common, water-rich grapevine and the very similar yet very poisonous Canadian moonseed; how to make a solar still with a hole covered with a sheet of plastic (and how to continue the condensation process by peeing around the hole); and the Apache tradition of honoring those things one hunts, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral. All of this in the scarcely day and a half since arriving at the Standard class of Tom Brown’s Tracking, Nature, and Wilderness Survival School.
The Standard is the first of twenty-eight classes offered by the school. A Wilderness 101 of sorts: a week-long, lecture-heavy, intensive introduction to outdoor primitive skills and nature awareness. Skills and awareness at the very heart of the bildungsroman that is the oft told life story of Tom Brown Jr.
Briefly, it is as follows: Growing up in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey in the late 1950s, a young Tom spends almost every waking moment from the ages of seven to eighteen in the woods under the tutelage of his best friend Rick’s grandfather Stalking Wolf, a Southern Lipan Apache. Brown’s apprenticeship ended in 1968 upon his graduation from high school. He spent the next ten years working odd jobs to make the money necessary to spend his summers testing his skills in unfamiliar environments across the country—the Grand Tetons, Dakota Badlands, Death Valley, and the Grand Canyon—living in debris huts and scout pits of his own devising and subsisting on food he foraged or killed himself, often without even a knife. (Brown was 4-F owing to a chip of obsidian that had lodged in his eye years before. Stalking Wolf had predicted years earlier that “the black rock” would keep him out of Vietnam.) After a decade Brown reemerged into society with the single-minded mission to teach others and lead them back to the woods and a love of nature.
All of this is told in The Tracker, Brown’s first book. It is a tale of an adventurous boyhood of limitless self-reliance, in an unfathoma
bly Arcadian wilderness. It makes for compelling, if not always entirely credible, reading: part Richard Haliburton, part Carlos Castaneda, part Kung Fu. Grandfather, already an octogenarian in 1957 when Tom first meets him, is a man of almost Buddha-like wisdom with a penchant for posing oblique, seemingly insoluble riddles with premises along the lines of “Do you know how to live as the squirrels do?” and laughing discreetly behind his hand as the boys fumble for answers. The Pine Barrens themselves are portrayed as an idyll under constant threat from encroaching industry, suburban sprawl, and an advancing world with decreasing patience for the nonlinear philosophizing of an old man.
It might not be Thoreau, but it is the key to the legend that Tom Brown may very well one day become and certainly already is here at the Tracker School. At the very least, Brown is a cult figure of international stature: the best-selling author of sixteen books, Brown has trained navy SEALs in high-speed invisible survival and has helped national and state law enforcement in tracking persons, both missing and criminal (with the perplexing exception of the prosecution in the O. J. Simpson murder trial, who declined his offer of help). He solved his six hundredth case on his twenty-seventh birthday. Nowadays the bulk of Brown’s tracking of humans is of the armchair variety. Having trained thousands of people who have passed through the school, Brown now has an international network of former and current students to call upon when he gets requests to track.
Many of us here for the Standard—some ninety people from the United States and Canada, four from Italy, and a young woman all the way from Japan—are aspirants, yearning to join those ranks of expert trackers. Certainly everyone is an acolyte of one sort or another. There is no one unacquainted with Stalking Wolf. Most have read at least part of Brown’s oeuvre, be it one of the meat-and-potatoes field guides to wilderness survival, wild edible and medicinal plants, and so on, or perhaps one of the more spiritually oriented titles such as The Vision, The Quest, The Journey, and Grandfather.
