The part we all walked

I ran a Paranormal loop a few weeks ago.  In running shoes.  On foot.  That kind of running.  By "running" though - and I've found this is especially true of trail running and trail runners - there are parts -  many parts actually - where you walk.  But it's still called running.



I had prepared for this to some extent - 11 miles is a pretty big run for me these days.  And yet, like so many adventures in the past that I have felt OK about when I started, I emerged from the woods in absolute shambles.  Zombie-like, disheveled, I stumbled around The Paranormal field in circles, coming unglued.  Though I finished, I had to wobble and crawl back to my couch, tail tucked fully between my legs.  Running is hard.

Of course, parts of that "run" weren't.  I walked a considerable amount of it.  Similar to biking, if you're running slowly enough, walking doesn't actually affect your pace all that much anyway.  So I walked some of the uphills.  Then I walked some downhills.  Eventually, I walked the flat sections.  I just walked, off and on, like a caveman, hellbent on finishing and eating some leftover Bodos.  Cavemen ate Bodos.  Prove me wrong.

One interesting thing that I have noticed about running - especially long runs - is that you don't remember which parts you walked.  You're just out there, on foot.  It's slow, and it blends together.  A bystander might mistake you for a bird-watcher and strike up a conversation with you about the local thrushes and warblers.
"Have you seen any pintails, lately?"
"No, I'm actually running."
"No you're not."
"Yes, I am.  I'm running this trail.  This whole thing.  It's a race."
"Um, no.  You're clearly walking.  Look at how slow you're going.  Check out these cardinals."

The truth is, on a long enough time scale, speed isn't actually a useful marker to determine effort.  What you see here - me barely creeping along this relatively flat trail, with my tummy sagging and my tiny steps inching forward - though I might resemble a fat caterpillar right now, this is wide-open, full-bore, racing.  Please move aside when I get there, I'm accelerating.

As a cyclist, any race you do, if you walk a section - whether it's too steep or too scary or you're just too blown to ride any longer - you know it.  You remember that stuff.  Pushing your bike is so different from riding it that - when you finally do - it's emotional.  You trudge uphill with your cleats grinding on the rocks and your shins banging your pedals, and you know it: "I am fucking walking."  You remember it.

It occurs to me now that we, as a country...the entire world is walking.   We will look back on this - the part we all walked - and we will nod and say something about it.  We'll remark upon how little we really knew.

But we will remember.

Up, up, up.

The Trees Don't Care

The trees don't care.

It's Spring, and Virus or not, they push out the brightest, greenest leaves I have seen in years, reflecting and glimmering dew in the cool, wet air.  The trees grow and watch and wait, without blinking.  They can feel the trails that Shawn and I have created - it's just empty space to them, filled with sunlight.  In a natural way they take it back, every spring, with every leaf and branch and vine they thrust forward to fill the gaps.  Nature does not social distance.  She doesn't oblige space.  Beneath the trails we are carving to pass the time, these trees - maples and oaks and loblollies, mostly - they push in and dig deeper.  They hold on.

For a few weeks now, I've been riding a fixie.  I won't bother to explain in much detail what a fixie is, because if you're way down here at the bottom of the cycling internet, you probably already know (or can figure out) what a fixie is.  Succinctly, it's like a bike that someone looked at and thought, "how much of this can I remove?"
Riding a fixie is a little sketchy at first.  Your brakes and your engine, paradoxically, both happen to be the same thing now - your legs.  It takes some getting used to.  But, like a world held hostage by a Virus, your brain adjusts.  The list of things that the human brain will adapt to - if you just give it a few days - keeps growing.

Bender is really showing his years, now.  He'll be thirteen in December if he can hobble along that far.  He used to accompany me on midday trail rides, in great unfaltering bounds, 20 feet at a time.  At one time, we would crank out ten miles on my lunch break, me on the bike and Bender a sleek black blur right next to me, like a panther, leaping downed trees and slipping through sketchy berms, fast and silent.  Now, he mostly just naps on the porch in the sun, not beholden to any schedule.  He picks his way carefully on short, slow walks, like an old dancer, reduced by the passage of time.

The one thing Bender still gets excited for is trail work.  If he sees me pick up a hoe, he sheds about eight years, immediately.  If I even think about the chainsaw, he knows, he can sense it, and if the trail I'm trying to fix is close enough, I let him come along.

Earlier this week, in a big storm at night, four big pine trees uprooted right at the base, toppled one against the other like dominoes, thrashing and dying out there in the darkness.  I heard them in the night.  They next day, I found them still and dead, log-jammed into a low spot in the trail.  They needed cut.

When we got there, I checked the chainsaw while Bender sniffed at them.  The air was fragrant with sap and dogwood blossoms and freshly splintered pine, alive one day and gone the next.  The saw was finicky, though, and it took me a minute to figure it out.  Thunder in the distance gave way to thunder right on top of us, and just as I got the chainsaw spitting the skies opened and it absolutely poured on us.  Not the time to be cutting trees, but we were already out there so...Bender stood back.

This Virus, whatever happens, it's hard to argue that we're not a little closer to death now, all of us.  We are more aware of it, more exposed to it, this hypothetical thing come to bare.  The chainsaw shrieks and guts the trail back open, time and time again, and nature gives way for a little while, anyway.  I'm careful when I cut the fallen trees that block the trail, but still, I'm out there.  So are you.  In every place that humanity runs up against nature, all of these trails and rivers and oceans, even the grocery store now, we try to twist around each other to co-exist.  But sometimes we break that trust.  What comes next?

After it's over, Bender hobbles back out from wherever he took shelter.  He sniffs at the carnage and pees on a broken branch.  He's old, and he can't quite lift his leg any longer, but this is still his forest.  He smiles at me the way that dogs do, so I sit with him on the ground there for a while, both of us soaking wet, right in with the ferns and the autumn olive.  The sun lunges back out, bright and low in the sky, and a gentle breeze picks up.  Everything around us shimmers, reflecting droplets of water and sunshine back into the bright evening sky, up, up, up, from which it all came.  I rub Bender's floppy ears and run my hands down the bones of his shoulders and hips.   We watch, and the whole forest sparkles and dances and flashes around us, like the finale of some show I wasn't prepared for, and it's winding down now and I'd better get ready.  A thing is always both living and dying.

I press my face down against his back, and I try to drink him in like I'm a tree.  I absorb him down into some deep root where I might keep him and grow from him - into the tremendous gap that will be hewn from my life when he finally goes - long after he is gone.

When I wake up early the next day, the room feels still and empty in the darkness.  Bender wags his tail at me a little.  He's awake, but he remains in his bed rather than come with me to the kitchen for coffee, granola, and intervals.  Lately, the kids have been feeding him hotdogs from the table.  Shannon literally tosses him entire slices of leftover pizza in the kitchen and praises him when he catches one.  His life down the stretch has become some kind of fantasy.  So he's got better things to do than intervals on a fixie at 6 AM.  

Out on the trails at sunrise, the trees rush past me, and the frogs buzz and croak.  I start slow, but the Fixie has a way of pulling you along, speeding you up before you think that you are ready.  But you are.  For a brief series of turns, the fixie and the world and I achieve some bizarre, fleeting unity, some unlikely rhythm down a ribbon of single track under a long row of pine trees, suspended and peaceful and buoyant.

The space created by the trail is vacant, but not empty.