Week Two ends in Millbrook, New York, with a six-miler along a gully and into sloping farmland, with the inevitable pop-pop-pop of a firing range. It’s hot, with a breeze, and rolling hills to keep me honest, but enough trees, towering oak and maple, to throw shade on the road at 10 a.m. that the sun is not beating down on me.
I wrote about my first race on a summer run: an international 10K in 1979, where for a year I wrote Corner Sports, a column that in July, when my race column ran, covered the girls’ softball team, the Prescott Angels and boys’ baseball, the Pirates. We ran across the bridge at Prescott, Ontario, to Ogdensburg, New York, where hundreds lined the streets to watch. “They had you,” I wrote in the Aug. 1 Journal, “with their smiles and clapping hands. For the first time, my bodily control had transferred into the hands of people who were completely foreign to me. Those people with garden hoses, cups of water and fruit drinks owned me.”
My placement: 136th out of 232, with a time of 50:31. Converted to miles, that’s a pace of about 8:10 per mile, pretty much what I’m doing on the road this summer.
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I was 23 then; at 20, my bedmate Sam sat up all night beside me to alert the nurse when I stopped breathing. Sam never let on, but Ben, the orderly, who was firing me up with a painkiller into the intervenous bottle that was connected to my arm told me what he did. For a week of nights, Sam didn’t sleep.
Ben is standing by the window, a cobalt blue sky. Sam, a heart patient, has left that day. Ben tells me about Sam, about how he had saved my life, how he willed himself to stay up night after night. Like an angel or something, Ben says. He tells me I am lucky to be indoors; it is the coldest winter in Ottawa in fifty years.
A homeless man who is scheduled for surgery to remove some frostbitten toes, and whose face is disfigured by the cold, moves into Sam’s bed. A man younger than me, who had had a drug overdose and whose lower body was now paralyzed, occupies the third bed that up to now had been vacant. He is receiving his first visit from a speech therapist today.
Sam and I did not even exchange addresses.
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Is a patient patient? I was, I suppose. I’m still very much that young man in the bed. As a writer, I go back to what Poets and Writers says about stamina and patience: that it's the right stuff for writers and marathoners. The last novel I read was “Salammbo” by Gustave Flaubert: if Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” doesn’t have a hero, than Salammbo doesn’t have a human being, the forward says in the edition I finished. It’s not that I will read everything, but I like to think that I focus into the heart of a writer’s intentions. Salammbo is painstakingly researched, a masterpiece of detail that takes the reader away to Carthage and its pagan rituals, a panoramic sweep of sights and sounds in North Africa that, if you read the history of the book’s publication, stirred only scholars nitpicking the historical accuracy of his account. Not every read is a classic, a first. But, with writing, you can tell from the first page. Like the first step of a run.
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Week Three I’d like to up the ante a bit. Run thirty miles, with a game of tennis with my neighbor, Gerry. Monday, it’s hot. Train for an early October marathon in New York City and August is the cruelest month. Temp: 91 on Monday, 93, Tuesday . Thankfully, though, there’s a little breeze, especially when I make my way down the hill stone-step staircase that leads to the manmade lake.
About halfway down, a female cardinal swoops down from an oak tree, squawking and surprisingly alone, definitely exercised over what it is impossible to say, flash of wings like close-up magic; who wouldn’t like to be on an updraft. Up, up and away.
On the 19th, I’m off for my second long run: again to the Christopher Street pier, the Brooklyn Bridge Watchtower clock and the mosque site. (See The Mosque on Thursdays.) The polls are showing an increasing number of Americans would like to see the mosque moved so that it is not so close to Ground Zero. Is it a mosque or a prayer center? Is there a difference?
Two days, later, Saturday, Aug. 21, we visit our friends Mark and Marilyn in Bridgewater, Conn. There is no bridge and no water, as far as I can see, but a long-gone town was flooded as part of a hydro development project so maybe that’s the connection. In the morning, we visit the county fair. Savory pulled pork, corn on the cob and birch beer.
A woman my age next to me near the grandstands at the tractor pull suddenly falls to the ground. At first I think she must have had a little something in her birch beer, but she doesn’t get up, and I see that she has stepped into a nasty hole. A moment later, we help her to her feet and someone who knows her calls to her daughter in the bleachers. The daughter hurries to her as Mom’s ankle turns purple-blue. I start to get light-headed, which I always do when I see a lot of blood or a personal injury like this, turn my head and move away. “Can we get medical staff to the edge of the grandstands,” the tractor pull announcer says. “We’ve a lady with a twisted ankle who’d like a little help.”
My ankle often feels a twinge. From when I badly strained my ankle, during my first summer of running. I feel it today, going downhill. From our friends’ house, it is either downhill or uphill. Very steep. It is hot, of course, and in my training so far I’ve not done heavy climbing, so I don’t want to overdo it. I’m extra careful, think Tai Chi as I run.
No trespassing signs, warnings to hunters. But, hell, there’s that pop-pop-pop again. Mark didn’t mention a firing range. At the bottom of the hill, there’s a lake and a lookout, called Lover’s Leap, and I wonder if anyone has, but then think not, if the town has no bridge and no water, then Lover’s Leap has to be metaphorical. Wishful thinking, maybe?
I’m guessing 20 minutes in, and my ankle feels normal again, as I run next to what I think is the manmade lake that flooded the town. At the end of the road is Mia Farrow’s house, where I imagine she gardens in a frontier-brimmed hat. I look toward the grounds, but there’s no sign of life.
The return road is steep, and for the first time in I don't know long my bad leg swells to twice the size of my healthy one. I think to stop, but I don’t. I slow to a light jog and like a cross-country skier scaling a mountain, crisscross my way up as best I can.
Next: Running for Your Life: Rest Stop: Say No to Jobs
