Jacques d'Amboise is the Johnny Appleseed of dance - sowing seeds for programs in America's schools as he hikes from Maine to Georgia

MOUNT KATAHDIN, Maine

IT WAS LATE on a sultry afternoon when the white-haired man staggered toward the summit of Mount Katahdin, a precipitous granite monolith inhabited, according to American Indian legend, by a deity who enjoys striking those who dare climb it. The man coughed deeply. He panted. His frame sank into his hiking poles.

Watching him struggle, it was hard to believe that he was Jacques d'Amboise, the former principal male dancer for the New York City Ballet, who for three decades had thrilled audiences with his dynamic pirouettes and changements.

It was harder still to believe that on this day in late May, d'Amboise was embarking on a seven-month, 2,160- mile hike along the entire Appalachian Trail to raise money for dance instruction in the nation's schools.

D'Amboise wasn't alone in finding the mountain daunting. Nearly a mile high, with a rocky spine that seemed to rise at a right angle from the ground, Katahdin was one of the most strenuous legs of the entire journey. But at the rate he was going, it seemed impossible that he could hike the whole route by late December, before winter would make the final stretch through the Georgia mountains impassable.

Slowed by bronchitis and the fragility of his knees and feet, which have been subjected to multiple operations, d'Amboise had taken nearly seven hours to hike the five miles to the summit, the last two of them crawling and hopping over boulders. And with no water or shelter at the top, he had to hike the whole way back that same night.

As d'Amboise came within a few hundred yards of the summit, a group of relatives and journalists awaiting him noticed thick cumulonimbus clouds assembling overhead. The hair on their heads stood on end from static electricity. Seconds later, thunder rumbled across the sky and rain poured down in buckets. Standing on a summit above the tree line in a thunderstorm is akin to walking in front of a trigger-happy firing squad with a sign reading "Shoot Me." Lightning gravitates toward the highest objects within its strike area, especially objects that happen to be carrying hiking poles. Those at the summit began frantically scurrying down.

"Turn back, Jacques, it's really dangerous," urged d'Amboise's nephew, Patrick D'amboise, who knew the risk from his years as an Outward Bound instructor.

D'Amboise was so close to the summit he could easily have turned back and still declared he'd hiked Katahdin. But he refused. "I'm going to the top," he said, his square jaw jutting out as he continued up. Once there, with thunder rumbling around him, he performed a few steps of a lively little jig called the Trail Dance, which he'll be teaching at stops along the Appalachian Trail.

By the time d'Amboise reached the base of the mountain seven hours later, at 11 that night, he could barely move. But he mustered an impish grin that lit up his brown eyes and turned his face into a boy's. "Isn't this fun?" he asked.

It was clear that d'Amboise had the will to hike the Appalachian Trail. The only question was whether his 64- year-old body would let him.

A photographer and I spent three days with d'Amboise at the start of his Appalachian odyssey, on which his 42-year-old son, George, a genial sports enthusiast and interior designer who used to teach crash-survival techniques to Air Force pilots, is accompanying him. The Sisyphean climb up Katahdin, the hordes of mosquitoes and black flies, the leg aches, the blisters and the relentless weight of a backpack quickly proved this trek was no picnic.

For the next seven months, nearly all of Jacques and George d'Amboise's meals will consist of granola bars, beef jerky, dried fruit, stream water purified with nasty-tasting iodine tablets and rice or noodles cooked outdoors over a single-burner camp stove with a finicky flame.

Tonight, as every night on the trail, the two will sleep in sleeping bags on the floor of a three-walled, wooden lean-to that may or may not be infested with mice - unless the lean-to already has been taken by other hikers, in which case they'll sleep on the ground.

They brought no tents or Coleman lanterns or books or folding chairs: They weigh too much. Only about once a week, when they stock up on food and teach the Trail Dance, will they emerge from the wilderness for such amenities as a night in a motel bed, a hot dog or a hot shower.

In the first few months, their torturers will include stifling humidity, rain showers and swarms of insects. Toward the end, they'll likely trek through snow, freezing winds and ice. Along the way, they may encounter hungry bears, clumsy moose, copperheads and rattlesnakes.

Of the 1,600 people who tried to hike the entire trail last year, only about 300 made it. Most dropped out in the first two weeks, unable to tolerate the punishing daily routine of 10 or more miles up and down steep, rocky slopes.

D'Amboise, a tall, sinewy man who has retained the poise of his dancing years, is amazingly blithe as he discusses these hardships. But he dreads the descents. Both his feet have been operated on to repair broken toes, which are now webbed together in such a way that he can't rise onto the balls of his feet. One of his knee operations was to repair his right knee-cap, which had slid to the back of his leg.

"It's like hitting your funny bone. The knees buckle under me," he explained of the pain each downward step was bringing to his knees as he struggled down Katahdin. "Can you imagine seven months of this?" So why is d'Amboise subjecting himself to seven months of physical torture? For several reasons, he answered in the nasal tones of his childhood in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan.

His trek, which he has dubbed Step by Step, fulfills his longtime wish to hike the Appalachian Trail, something he could never do while performing because hiking develops the wrong leg muscles for dancing. He also hopes the journey will bring him a step closer to his other big dream: providing dance instruction to all the nation's children, particularly those with special needs or few resources.

Already, d'Amboise has introduced dance to more than half a million children through his National Dance Institute, an organization he founded in 1976 that teaches dance in schools, most of them in the New York City area and most of them public. His work last year earned him the National Medal of Arts, the country's highest honor for cultural contributions. But he has only about 200 teachers trained in his motivational techniques, of whom 20 are currently active. He wants to increase that number to at least 2,000.

"Children that don't dance are being deprived," he declared the day after the Katahdin hike. Though sore and still coughing, d'Amboise on this sunny morning was striding at a swift pace along the banks of the gurgling Penobscot River a few miles from the base of the mountain, his boots crunching on a canopy of fir needles with so much vigor it seemed the previous day had been a bad dream.

"Dance is magical. It's natural, it's glorious and it's necessary. Plato said you could not be a voting citizen of Athens unless you could dance and sing." But in today's society, he continued, "we've lost our sense of the mystical.

We've lost the wonder at what is a human being and what is the universe. The arts express that emotion." D'Amboise isn't trying to turn every child into a professional dancer. Rather, he sees dance as a tool to inspire children and teach them discipline and perseverance that they can use for the rest of their lives.

"My goal is to open their hearts and minds to the possibilities within, using the arts in general and dance in particular as the window," he said. "We teach blind children, children in wheelchairs, emotionally disturbed children. People say, 'Why do you try to teach them? They'll be embarrassed.' It's exactly the reverse. You should see these kids. It's overwhelming. Better than a Broadway show." D'Amboise hopes to raise at least $1 million during his hike, stopping at 32 communities along the way to teach his Trail Dance. He'll ask participants to contribute a penny, a dime, a dollar or more to his cause, and make each of them pledge to teach the dance to two other people. He also hopes to drum up support with a Web site (www.ndi4all.org) that offers information about the Appalachian Trail and his notes about his journey.

"I'll be a Johnny Appleseed of dance," he said. "I'll sow the seeds of future arts programs wherever I go." D'Amboise also is hiking the trail for his older brother, Pat, a dance and hiking enthusiast who recently was confined to a wheelchair.

All of those factors, he said, came into play when he decided to proceed to the summit of Katahdin in the thunderstorm.

"What I did up there was a little crazy," he said. "But I wanted to tell the mountain all of that. I was going to dance my dance on the top of its head and I trusted that the mountain would hold the lightning off." There is yet another reason for d'Amboise's journey, one he doesn't bring up until prompted. The trek is an elaborate game he has set up for himself to test his own stamina.

"What is play? It's an expression of the real facts of life: You try to be a winner and everybody else is going to lose. We create games to test our endurance," he said. "But if you think play instead of chore, you can accomplish miracles."

Over the next seven months, d'Amboise will teach the Trail Dance to cadets in Annapolis, inmates and guards at a prison in Rutland, Vt., scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and orphans in Hershey, Pa. He hopes 1 million people will have learned the dance by the time he teaches his final class Dec. 20 in Atlanta, which will be telecast nationally. "Isn't it fabulous?" he said, beaming.

If anyone can make 1 million people dance a jig, including prisoners with their guards, it's d'Amboise. The technique he uses is the same one he hopes will help him complete the Appalachian Trail: turning chore into play.

This strategy was in full force the day before the hike, when d'Amboise taught the Trail Dance to about 40 elementary-school students at the Cathedral School in Portland, Maine.

Several of the students had behavioral problems or physical disabilities, or were recovering from psychological trauma. They included Stella Peter, 11, who saw many of her relatives massacred in her native Sudan, and who was placed in a concentration camp before she and her mother and sister fled to the United States five years ago. And Jacob Gurney, 10, who walked in jerky steps with his legs turned inward, because of cerebral palsy.

As he demonstrated steps, d'Amboise immediately engaged the children with jokes, grimaces and whispers. He called then by name and praised them profusely when they did well. He made the dance seem easy, promising, "It's a piece of cake!" Yet he also was a drill sergeant, dragging kids who faltered to the front to practice their moves solo until they met his satisfaction. "March! Legs higher! Faster! Hands out of your pockets! Ya-da-da, ya-da-da, ya-da-da daaa!" he commanded. It was a game, but a tough one.

D'Amboise broke the dance into segments named after fruit, explaining: "You eat dried fruit on the trail and you long for fresh fruit." The students learned the apple, which includes a jaunty march and a circular skip; then the pineapple, a sequence that evokes a meeting between strangers on the trail; then the banana, a move involving much thigh- slapping and the kind of wobble one might make after accidentally walking into a tree. In the middle was a free- form section where everyone found a partner and ran around doing whatever they wanted, prompting delighted squeals. D'Amboise had them end the dance with a goofy yelp.

Then he added music, explaining that he took the melody from an old boatmen's song that his French-Canadian mother used to sing to him.

"Youpe, youpe, across the mountain, follow the trail, now cross the river/Youpe, youpe, across the mountain, two thousand miles to go!" he sang with infectious enthusiasm. "... Maryland's gone, get set for a shock/Pennsylvania's next and most of it's rock!" Soon the students had learned the dance. Stella performed with a huge grin. So did Jacob, who kept up with most of the steps.

Portland police officer Roland Lachance, who'd been assigned to the event for security, also was dancing. D'Amboise had coaxed him onstage, urging: "Think what it'd mean for the children!" Stiff but game, he stayed in the back in his blue uniform with his gun in his holster, doing the apple, the pineapple, the banana.

By the end of the class, the children were swarming around d'Amboise like bees around nectar. It wasn't the first time.

Back in Queens, Darian Brown, a 16-year-old from East Elmhurst, spoke passionately about how d'Amboise turned his life around when he began taking NDI classes seven years ago at Martin De Porres, a special-education school in Springfield Gardens.

"I'd drift off in classes and daydream," he said. "But my dance classes gave me self-confidence and made me feel like I had a purpose." Brown, who's now thriving in a mainstream school, likened d'Amboise's technique to tough love. "He'll get in your face and threaten to throw you out of the class unless you do it to the best of your ability. But if you do it, he gives you an incredible feeling of self-worth." D'Amboise was just as inspirational later that day when he taught his Trail Dance again at a dance studio in Gray, a town 20 miles north of Portland. But his cough worsened as he worked up a sweat, and on his way down the three steps from the studio, his knees buckled and he stumbled.

D'Amboise honed his teaching skills early as a child in rough-and-tumble Washington Heights. His mother, Georgette d'Amboise, whom he credits for his fierce drive and love of the arts, sent him to ballet class with his sister when he was 7 to keep him off the streets. D'Amboise did stay out of the street gangs, and he also showed his hoodlum friends a trick or two. "All the guys in the gangs would say, 'Hey, what's all this dancing stuff?' Instead of being afraid, I'd say, 'It's fabulous, it's great.' I had them on the street corner, jumping and leaping." While still a teen, d'Amboise joined the New York City Ballet and became the protege of George Ballanchine, who choreographed ballets for him including "Stars and Stripes," "Jewels" and "Episodes." He also danced in movies, among them "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" and "Carousel." He and his wife, the dancer- turned-photographer Carolyn George, have four children: Charlotte is a Broadway performer, Catherine works in her husband's construction company and Christopher is a choreographer.

George, who lives in Boulder, Colo., spent several weeks training for the current hike, but his father, bogged down with National Dance Institute events and testimony before Congress on the importance of arts funding, did not.

Putting on his backpack the day after the Katahdin hike, the elder d'Amboise groaned. "It feels pretty horrible," he said with a laugh.

He and George were standing at Abol Bridge, about 71/2 miles south of Mount Katahdin, outside a small store and campground. They'd just downed microwaved cheeseburgers, the last perks of civilization before they began a trek through a dark, boggy, densely forested area called the 100-Mile Wilderness.

They were to spend nine or 10 days slogging through the vast expanse of trail, which crosses no towns or even public roads and has changed little since Thoreau in the 1840s described it as "savage and dreary," a "grim, untrodden wilderness." The last 20 miles of the 100-Mile Wilderness would be the most grueling, father and son decided as they peered at their trail map in their lean-to that night, using the light of a headlamp that was attached to a band around the elder d'Amboise's forehead. The air was pleasantly warm and the moon was nearly full, making it hard to imagine them seven months from now, shivering in a similar three-sided lean-to on a snow-capped Georgia mountain.

It was nearly midnight. They'd hiked 11 miles in eight hours that day and were exhausted. But after six hours of sleep they were up at 6 a.m., fortified for the day's impending 111/2- mile trek with a breakfast of cold water and granola bars.

"What a beautiful morning! What beautiful rocks!" the elder d'Amboise exclaimed as he set out, excitedly pointing out nature's bounty with a hiking pole. He coughed between phrases, but his step was brisk and his voice was chipper. He had 21 miles down, with 2,139 to go.

"It's going to be tough, George," he said, "but I think we'll make it." Watching father and son disappear into the thicket of forest, a cloud of mosquitoes whining above them, it seemed more than likely that they would.