A guy 6 feet 5 inches tall pulls up on a Vespa scooter wearing rooster pants and the mustache of Salvador Dali. He walks into a school, speaking Italian. Sometime later, the same guy dons a full-face protective helmet, seals himself into dry gear and a plastic kayak, and launches into the most remote and beautiful whitewater he can find. In a snowstorm. Later still, he is found discussing fine wine and gourmet ingredients while serving some of the most sophisticated foodies in Pittsburgh at one of the city’s leading restaurants. If we define age to be the accumulation of experience rather than the number of years since birth, Carl Schneider outlived most of us.
Talking to many friends about Carl in the past few days, it’s become clear to me that he was as unique a friend to everybody else as he was to me. Who doesn’t want to be part of this guy’s life? Carl was dripping wet with experience, culture, and passion and as his friend I was lucky to be close enough to get splashed from time to time. I think everybody here got splashed a little. Even people who didn’t know Carl got splashed, like the lucky patrons of the quiet neighborhood coffee shop where I used to meet him to catch up every week or so. Carl couldn’t contain his larger than life emotions: sobbing with pride when he described his students’ accomplishments and then bellowing with laughter while telling rafting stories. After some time we had to change our meeting place.
For whitewater boaters, Carl was more than an activity partner just as he was more than a teacher to the kids at St. Bede’s School. Carl did not come first for Carl, a fact I found out countless times during my friendship with him. One particular day on a small, secluded stream called Fike Run, I found myself pinned against a rock in my kayak. Within milliseconds of my desperate situation, Carl had released himself from his boat and dove into the icy water so quickly to help me that his boat and paddle were immediately swept away downstream. Of course it’s no surprise that Carl would help me when I needed him to, but doing so in this situation compromised his own security. Without his boat and paddle, he would have been marooned in the forest, soaking wet, in the middle of winter. Fortunately we found his gear shortly afterward on the side of the creek.
A few months ago, Carl and I led a group down a section of whitewater on the Youghiogheny River in Swallow Falls State Park in Maryland. Toward the end of the run, Carl and I decided that we’d continue and paddle the flat, shallow stretch below our intended take out and continue into the next section of whitewater, which was about 5 miles below. For one reason or another, nobody in our group wanted to join us. But, Carl and I were both feeling good and decided to continue anyway, just the two of us. Soon the river flattened and became shallow. We got stuck in places and had to get out of our kayaks and walk in the inches deep river. When we did, we would let the boats float aimlessly around us, stopping each time they’d hit bottom and then freeing themselves after spinning. As we talked our conversation mirrored the action of the boats, circling and swirling between relationships, love, our pasts, and our futures. Of all of the exciting whitewater we paddled that day, the part where there was no thrill at all ended up being the part that we agreed was best. Was it because human interaction, which is stifled by the intensity of roaring whitewater, is a more potent experience than any river can provide? Deep human interaction was something that Carl somehow cultivated with everybody he came across, and that’s obvious by the reaction we’ve seen in the past 5 days.
Before my wife, Molly, and I moved into the house we had recently bought in Carl’s neighborhood, we showed it to him on a summer afternoon. As Carl ducked under the doorframes of our second floor, we heard shouts of “Signore Schneider!” Downstairs we found a crew of children. They were in our living room, too excited at seeing their beloved teacher in the middle of summer to wait for us at the front door. They were our new neighbors, who live on our street, and they had seen him walk in with us. The kids were as excited to be with Carl as I always was on the river. He made his students and colleagues, his friends on the river, and his friends and customers at Legume all part of his family.
I sat down with a third grader who is a neighbor of mine a few days ago. She has been a student in Carl’s class at St. Bede’s since Kindergarten. She started the conversation by telling me how sad she was and that she knows that she’ll never forget Signore Schneider. She described to me with enthusiasm the finger puppets he created and the stories he read to his class. She told me that Carl’s class was “way much more funner” than any of her other classes. By the end of the conversation I was jealous. I wanted to be in Carl’s Italian class. It made me realize that although Carl didn’t have the opportunity to have any of his own children, he left a school full of them who will never forget him. At the end of our conversation, she revealed to me that she wasn’t ready for Signore Schneider to die because she had a Christmas present for him. But, she said, she knows how much he loves his friends at the restaurant up the street, so she may give the present to them instead.
I’m so proud to have been your friend, Signore Schneider.
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| Carl, somewhere between the Top Yough take-out and the Upper Yough put-in. |
