Fencing and Fiddling

Vermont, a state known for its dairy farms, maple syrup, skiing, and independent voting, hardly seems a place for the traditionally aristocratic sport of fencing to take root.

But in the last decade, a Champlain Valley group calling itself the Northern Horde has been making its presence known at fencing events around the Northeast. The Vermont Fencing Alliance, its formal name, delivered a wake-up call last year when Noble Clark, an 18-year-old from the rural village of Shoreham (pop. 1,155), took first place in a field of 50 sectional competition contestants from all over New England and New York state.

Clark had no access to a gym but got plenty of workouts on his parents’ farm slinging bales during haying season and moving stubborn cows around the barn. “I thought I had a chance of winning,” he says.

In part, that was because Clark has a secret weapon: As with the majority of the Vermont fencers, he’d been trained by Viveka Fox. No, not the Hollywood actress. Vermont’s Viveka Fox is a 37-year-old woman who has scored well in competitions but who now takes pride in giving youngsters an opportunity to learn fencing’s unique combination of strength, speed, agility, concentration, strategy, and team spirit.

Fox’s remarkable talents have led her to wins in the women’s open competition (all ages) at the U. S. Fencing Association’s divisional level (Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine) and in the sectional competition (all six New England states and New York).

Fox also has won trophies in fiddling contests. In recent years, though, she’s given up solo fiddling competitions to play with a trio. The music group she’s a part of, Atlantic Crossing, presents “the traditional music of New England, Canada and the British Isles” and has released two CDs in five years.

“My parents have given up telling me it’s impossible to make a living teaching fiddling and fencing,” she says.

Fox began fiddling at age 8, when a neighbor’s playing inspired her to study with a local teacher. Then, at age 12 in summer camp, Fox had “a crush on a camp counselor, and he was a fencer,” she says.

The challenge of competition outlasted the love interest. Six years later, she spent four years on Harvard’s fencing team and has trained and competed ever since.

“It takes a lifetime to master,” Fox says of fencing. “After 25 years, I’m still having insights and realizing things. It’s the quandary of all athletes—as you start to understand the game and get wiser, you begin to lose your strength as you get older.”

Her solution has been to help others start younger and develop more quickly. Her commitment to a sport Europe has dominated, and that got little publicity in American broadcasts of the Olympics, stems from the way fencing’s intense climactic moments inspire its practitioners to prepare, practice, plan, and put forward their best efforts.

It isn’t as intense as the days when young men learned fencing to prepare for possible duels or wartime battles, Fox says, but in single-elimination tournaments, “if you lose, you’re out.” Younger students learn most by example, watching how the more successful team members train and focus.

Parents get involved, sometimes as students, and “that gives it a family feeling.” That sense of sharing is important to Fox. Her students are very much her family, she says, a joy to see growing and maturing. She organizes local events to make sure traveling costs don’t turn fencing into a sport for the affluent, and out-of-state teams come because “they know they’ll have fun in Vermont.”

Her work-study program—where more experienced students assist beginners—not only helps students pay for lessons, it helps them take responsibility for running classes and tournaments. For Fox, the fencing tradition counts more than the trophies.

As she puts it, “Teach them to teach, so they can pass it on.”

Freelance writer Ed Barna also pens stories for Vermont Life and several Vermont newspapers.

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