I tried to be the good immigrant by assimilating as swiftly as I could when I arrived in the United States as a young girl. I tried to be a grateful immigrant by learning to talk, dress, cook, eat, drink, dance, and even think like an American. Following the logic of meritocracy, I believed that my success was earned by merit. And my merit was my virtue. I was entrepreneurial. I fashioned myself to increase my chances of finding success. I wore whiteface. And just when my colleagues and friends simply “forgot” I was Not White — an unexpected tide of anger welled up inside me. Just when I thought I had succeeded in following the rules of my own DIY whiteface manual, I found myself angry and overwhelmed by sadness.
As Stephen Olshansky hiked south through alpine Colorado in the crackling beauty of autumn 2015, he knew he was playing chicken with the arrival of winter. He was almost past the highest peaks along the Continental Divide Trail as fall storms laid down the first sheets of snow—not enough to stop him in his tracks, but plenty to slow him. “I was postholing a lot, shin to knee deep above 9,000 [feet]” in southern Colorado’s San Juan Range, he wrote on his blog.
Olshansky, a veteran thru-hiker who went by the trail name Otter, knew snow. He’d often been a southbounder—a sobo, as hikers say—starting at the northern end of a long-distance trail in the spring, before the snow had completely melted, and covering the entire distance of the trail, rather than picking it off section by section. “He was a master, a top expert,” says Art Rohr, one of Otter’s thru-hiking friends. But what Otter had encountered in previous years was spring snow—compacted enough for him to cruise along on top of it.
Blame it on the religieuse pastry, two stacked, chocolate cream-filled puffs that sent me to patisserie nirvana the first week of my long-ago junior year in Paris. When you’re used to Twinkies, that kind of experience is, indeed, a revelation. After marrying a lemon-tart-loving Frenchman and producing a daughter (vanilla macaron) and son (coffee eclair) who share my passion, I thought I had pretty much covered the gamut of French pastries.
Until this past April, that is, when on a Sunday afternoon stroll with an old friend down the Rue de Rivoli, near the Louvre, I realized my guilty pleasure had emerged from the shadows and, seemingly, been embraced by le tout Paris.
This is still an engagingly unusual saga that stakes out a place for its author as a sharp chronicler of an urban demimonde that few will ever experience, for good or ill.