BIGFORK - Two twins, two perfect scores, two valedictorians, all in one small town, all in one small family.
How does such a thing happen?
Sister Arielle cringes visibly.
“Off the record on that OCD thing, please.”
But that is the record, the unblemished 4.0 grade-point average, the never less than perfect academic achievement that is so rare among teenagers. It's the golfer's hole-in-one, the gambler's jackpot, the long shot that comes through maybe once in a lifetime.
Unless it comes twice, a twin-pack of achievement.
Arielle may squirm when Aftan tosses around those OCD comments, but she's the first to admit she's driven in a way most teens - most adults, for that matter - are not.
“Anything less than the best I can do is unacceptable,” she said. “If you're not going to put forth your best effort, then why are you here?”
It's a good question, one for which the twins' schoolmates surely have any number of answers, most of them glib.
So really, how does this happen?
“We've been blessed, that's all,” said their mother, Linda Snyder. “Of course, you always try to do the right things for your kids, but it's really their accomplishment. They've always been hard workers, focused on what's positive and not negative.”
It started, Aftan said, at the dinner table, where “we talk about interesting things.”
Things like science and politics and world events.
“We don't have idle chit-chat at that table,” Arielle said. “We get into it.”
Then the girls launch into a mini-debate on Darfur, on Iran, on religious and cultural clashes, on the moral imperatives that attend the world's only superpower.
“Are we part of the broader world?” Arielle asks. “Are we caretaker to the world? As the only real superpower, do we have any obligations to the world?”
These are big questions, and the instigator, more often than not, is their father Randy, a Kalispell attorney who was known on the speech and debate circuit while a high schooler himself back in Great Falls.
“No one tells us what to think,” Arielle said, “but people have taught us how to think.”
People like Randy Snyder. He always loved to learn, he said, still does, and even today he pores over his twins' college course catalogs, wishing he could go along for this next leg of the journey.
Linda, likewise, admits a bit of envy when browsing those course offerings.
“I wish I could go with them,” she said, “because the things they're going to get to study are so interesting.”
And that, finally, answers how this happens.
“We like to learn,” Aftan said.
“The world is so cool,” Arielle added. “How could you not want to learn as much as you can about it?”
Take that childlike wonder of the world, spice it with some sophisticated kitchen-table debate, stir in Mr. Little and Mrs. Burns and Mr. Hammond and Mr. Boshka and Senora Best and all the rest of Bigfork's teaching team, then let it rise and keep on rising. That's the recipe.
“The girls had great teachers along the way,” Randy said. Then he immediately corrects himself. “They had challenging instructors, not just good teachers.”
Talk to Aftan five minutes and you're sure to hear about Senora Best.
“I love foreign languages,” she said, “and I want to take as many as possible.”
“She's fluent in gibberish,” Arielle said, a sly look at her sister.
It's clear that a balanced blend of cooperation and competition has helped these sisters stay on top, pushing each other even as each lends the other a hand.
“Personally, I think it'd be really cool to be an ambassador,” Aftan said.
“That was my idea first,” Arielle interrupts. “She's always stealing my ideas.”
“Who's stealing ideas?” Aftan cries. “I was so photography before you were!”
This could go on a while. Actually, this has gone on a while. But not much longer.
Aftan is headed to Hope College in Holland, Mich., while her twin is enrolled at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn.
“That's going to be hard,” Linda said. “They've never been apart. The team is splitting up.”
Suddenly, you have the feeling an intriguing course book is not the only reason Linda wants to go along to college with her girls.
College, for both teens, means foreign languages, global studies, political science, the roadway toward international ambassadorship.
“I just want to help people,” Arielle said. “Being an ambassador in a trouble spot, in a place that needs help, that's for me. I just find it really interesting, when people aren't talking to each other, to sit down and find a solution.”
Aftan, though, has her sights set on Spain, a place that lives perhaps more vividly in her mind than it does on the ground itself. She's never been there, “but I'm all about Spain. I'm going to Spain.”
Of course, things might change between here and Madrid.
Aftan might be an archaeologist, or a photographer, or an author. She did, after all, receive a creative writing scholarship.
And Arielle might be a historian, or a national intelligence agent, or maybe a fighter pilot. She is, after all, joining the ROTC program as a freshman, “just to try it on.”
And that's the last, but most important, ingredient in this simple recipe: try.
“We want to try everything,” Aftan said. “I mean, why not?”
Why not indeed.
“This world is a fascinating place,” Randy said. “If you don't get out in it, it will all pass you by.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
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