For those of you who have never been a students in my English class, here is a synopsis of Jack London’s magnificent 1951 short story “The Sun-Dog Trail”: Two people are chasing a one-eyed man across Canada. The narrator and guide, Sitka Charlie, never understands the relationship between any of the characters or why the man and the woman are chasing the one-eyed man. Sitka Charlie asks the woman her name. “She laugh, then she says, ‘Mary Jones, that is my name.’ I do not know her name, but I know all the time that Mary Jones is not her name.”
Sitka Charlie is a naïve narrator, but he himself is not naïve. Sitka Chalie is “born to the trail.” He can thrive in environments where lesser men could not survive. Sitka Charlie can drive dogs; paddle a canoe through rapids; hunt, skin, and cook wild game. The man and the woman—tenderfoots with soft hands—pay Sitka Charlie to track the one-eyed man throughout Northern Canada in the winter. Every day they get up earlier than the day before and drive the dogs relentlessly. They do not rest. The reason they pursue the one-eyed man is never stated.
Sitka Charlie says, “It is a hard journey. December is most gone. The days are short. It is very cold. One morning it is seventy below zero. ‘Better that we don’t travel to-day,’ I say, ‘else will the frost be unwarmed in the breathing and bite all the edges of our lungs. After that we will have bad cough, and maybe next spring will come pneumonia.’”
The man and the woman do not listen. As Charlie points out, “they do not understand the trail.”
“They are like dead people they are so tired, but they say, ‘let us go on.’ We go on.”
“They cry aloud in their sleep at night. In their sleep they moan and groan with the pain of their weariness.
Through January, Sitka Charlie guides the man and the woman to Fort Yukon, Fort Hamilton, and Minook. They travel mostly in the dark as daylight only lasts six hours. They travel for hundreds of miles without seeing another human.
“I am Sitka Charley, a strong man. I was born on the trail, and all my days I have lived on the trail.” But even Sitka Charlie is tired.
After 1500 miles they are near the Bering Sea, still trying to catch the man with one eye.
“That night is the end of February. I kill three ptarmigan with the woman’s revolver and we are made somewhat strong again… We sleep like dead people, and in the morning get up like dead people out of their graves and go on along the trail.”
The man and the woman now see the one-eyed man. He is a mile ahead, falling down in the snow every few steps.
“’Hurry!’ they say. All the time they say, ‘Hurry! Faster, Charley, faster!’”
“We make hurry very slow. All the time the man and the woman fall down. When they try to ride on sled the dogs are too weak, and the dogs fall down. Besides, it is so cold that if they ride on the sled they will freeze. It is very easy for a hungry man to freeze.”
I will leave to the interested reader to finish the story—spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well for either the man or the woman or the one-eyed man—and return to thinking about parenting and how we shape our kids in our image or in someone else’s image.
How hard and how far are parents willing to pursue the future we have in mind for our kids. How much of our emotional and economic resources will we spend trying to convince our children to be who we think they should be rather than who they are.
I have counseled students and their families about college choices for 40 years; I have taught math for 50 years. At the risk of overstating the obvious, some kids are better at math than others. Some kids belong at technological institutes, some don’t. Some kids have athletic gifts, others not so much. Some kids should apply to “top” colleges and, if admitted, attend them. Some kids would be harmed by attending a highly competitive institution.
The goal has to be for the kids to try their best, perform up to their own standard of ability. Trying to force the kids to “get an A in calculus because all the highest paying jobs for college graduates are in engineering” can be a fool’s errand–harmful to the relationship, devastating to the children. In my experience, kids who can do well in advanced math, do. No amount of threatening or cheering changes the outcome.
Support is one thing. Refusing to believe that the kids have done all they can is another. Or, stated another way, if at first you don’t success, try, try again. But don’t be a damn fool about it.
Parents berating, bullying, promising, beseeching their kids to do that of which they are not capable reminds me of a man and a woman endlessly chasing a one-eyed man through the weeks of bitter winter across a bleak wasteland. Even if you catch him, even if you kill him, you have expended all your strength—or in the case of our children, all our good will—in a pointless exercise.
Be careful what you wish for; you might get it. We are given such a brief window of opportunity with our beloved children. Shouldn’t we spend as much of that time as possible enjoying? Rather than pointlessly pushing our kids, chasing inappropriate, inaccessible dreams through the snow.
