영어로 과거의 성공 말하기: “could”, “was able to”, “managed to”의 차이 (C1+)

What the comeback story leaves out

Every summer for eleven years, Ines Okafor ran sea-kayaking trips from a small harbour on the west coast. She could read the water better than almost anyone in the village, and returning clients would ask for her by name. Then, in the space of a single spring, the business fell apart. A landslide closed the only road to the harbour, her insurer disputed a claim for two damaged boats, and a wrist injury meant that she was unable to paddle for most of the season.

What happened next is the kind of story magazines love. With the road shut, Ines was able to persuade a fishing cooperative to carry her kayaks round the headland by boat. She switched from guiding to teaching, trained two young instructors, and by the following summer was running more trips than ever. When a regional newspaper wrote about her, the headline called her “unbreakable”. She has the cutting pinned above her desk, she says, “mainly as a warning”.

The warning is about the word itself. Comeback stories tend to present recovery as a quality of character: some people can bend without breaking, and others simply cannot. It is an appealing idea, and it may well contain some truth. Persistence matters; so does a willingness to look foolish while learning something new. But when Ines tells the story herself, character is only one element, and rarely the first. The cooperative happened to have a spare boat that month. Her sister could lend her money without asking for it back quickly. A former client who worked in insurance explained, patiently and for free, how to challenge the rejected claim.

None of this appears in the “unbreakable” version, and Ines thinks it is the whole point. “I may have worked hard, but I wasn’t the only one working,” she says. A neighbour whose café flooded in the same storm, she points out, was every bit as determined. He couldn’t find a lender, his landlord refused to wait, and the café closed within months. “He could have been the most determined man on the coast; it wouldn’t have saved the café. Nobody wrote a headline about him.”

There is, of course, another way to read all this. Critics of what they call “luck talk” argue that stressing circumstances can be just as misleading as stressing character. If success is mostly a matter of who happens to own a spare boat, why should anyone bother to persist? People who have come through real hardship can find it insulting to be told that they were merely fortunate. And it can’t have been luck alone that made Ines teach herself a new trade at forty-three while her wrist was still in a brace. The effort was real, even if the support was invisible.

The honest answer is probably that the two explanations need each other. Determination decides what a person does with an opportunity; circumstances decide whether the opportunity exists at all. The trouble with the heroic version is not that it praises effort, but that it quietly implies that everyone who failed to recover might have tried harder. That is a comfortable conclusion for anyone who has never been tested, and a cruel one for those who have.

Ines now runs a short course for small tourism businesses on planning for a bad season. Her first exercise is to list everyone who would help if the road closed tomorrow, and to be honest about which names are missing. “If the list is short, you might as well start building it now,” she tells them. “Nobody will be able to do it for you in the middle of a landslide.” When people ask whether she is proud of her comeback, she says yes, and then adds that she would like the word to come with a list of credits, like a film.