FORBIDDEN TRAIL

"Let go... let go" I huff down the long decline into the Wissahickon for a rehabilitation run.

 Slowing to a jog as I cross an old stone bridge over the creek, I turn onto Forbidden Drive, a wide gravel path that courses the seven mile length of the Philadelphia park.

"Breathe... breathe" I now chant, encouraging the lungs to open to rifampin and isoniazid with each footfall through the dense forest of a July evening.

__________

Internship year had been tumultuous, peaking fast with thirteen new doctors eager to save the people of lower North Philly. Just as quickly we descended into the resentments and accusations of the chronically stressed and sleep deprived. Why didn't you treat that midnight high blood pressure? You left that admission for me? You left the ER early and I had to run that code!

I survived by focusing on the patients as people while trying to leave them at the hospital, a tactic that worked until one of those people's problem came home in the apex of my right lung. This was the mid-eighties when the tide of sexual and intravenous excess was receding into an ebb of immunodeficiency diseases. The new great masquerader, AIDS, was unleashing the old, tuberculosis. It could have been the young woman with a gunshot to the abdomen under a full moon. I had helped to compress her bleeding wound until the surgeon arrived. Or maybe it was that heroin addict in isolation with liver failure and respiratory distress. We talked football, our former sport, until he coughed himself to sleep. Regardless of source I had it, and irregardless of anti-mycobacterials I would always have the possibility of reactivation from that granuloma now showing up on a chest x-ray. A saving grace of sorts was knowing how one would probably die when the time came. Another was a long healing run in the Wissahickon.

__________

I emerge from the green tunnel of foliage after five miles and hit the pavement back out of the steep valley.

"Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred" I chant, breaking the long hill into doable intervals until making it over the rim.

And that's how it will be for the duration - of treatment, of residency, of practice and teaching, of first and last child - doable intervals until an old friend carries me home.

RUNNING HUNGRY

"A second 10K for world hunger?" asked Tim Hewitt after we'd run the 6.2 mile CROP Walk route.



"In these old sneakers?" I moaned, feet burning from the May Day blacktop already bubbling in the early summer at the edge of tidewater Virginia.

__________

Tim was my new running buddy during our late senior year at Randolph-Macon College. A former cross-country star at his Fort Bragg high school, he had watched with interest as I used distance running to make the transition from football to pre-med after my sister's brain tumor and my father's first fatal heart attack.

"Ready to kick it up a notch?" he inquired one lazy spring Sunday after our all-nighters, his at our fraternity's pajama party, mine bent over physics and organic chemistry. 

"No but let's go anyway" I answered. "I need to clear my head before tomorrow's exam."

Tim proceeded to coax five miles out of my coffee-soaked lungs for my first really long run. And to my surprise, the mathematical solutions to end-of-chapter problems were much clearer during that night's session at the science building.

___________

"One step at a time" he coached as we passed the sign-out table.

"Double...or nothing...for Biafra" I gasped, wincing into a plodding jog that would get me through my first marathon.

TWENTY-ONE WINDMILLS

"Out 4 a 5 miler, c u later?" I text to an interesting woman I'd been seeing since the feast of Saint Nicholas.

"Have a good run, the electric blanket's on" she replies.

_______________

It had been a good run since sparks had started flying three weeks earlier. She was wound tight by two absentee courtiers and I was in dire need of unwinding a year after a traumatic marital separation.

"A lonely Saturday without my daughter", she posted on Facebook on a morning that I was feeling the same.

"How about a country drive to a potter's open-house?" I messaged.

"I'm in the shower."

"Be right there!"

_______________

Stretching hamstrings on my mailbox post, I spot the STOP sign in front of her house two blocks away, an inspiration to run fast to get home quickly. 

Setting out down the blacktop, I cut through a meadow where we had walked with her Brittany spaniel on a frosty Sunday morning.

Jogging back into town along Church Street, I try to avoid looking at the little yellow house that her ex-husband still lives in.

Heading out McElheny Lane, I pass the Confederate Cemetery where we had walked on the first white Christmas anyone could remember.

The sun is setting as I lean into the uphill back into town along Route 60. I stop at the western hump above Lewisburg for the 360 degree view of the Greenbrier Valley and surrounding mountains. Standing in front of the Sunset Terrace Motel, where I had slept away those first two lonely weeks after moving out, I spot fiery glints of sunlight on the distant hilltops to the north.

"It's a 21 windmill run" I quickly post onto Facebook before taking off toward town with visions of long slow nights dancing in my head.

"With many more to come" she responds before I even hit the shower.

BLACK WATER

"Old black water, keep on rollin'" sings my new old girlfriend reciting the Doobie Brothers song from our college days as she dips her fingers into the steely Greenbrier River on our May Day run.

_______________

It was her first West Virginia visit and our first public appearance since reconnecting after my heart-wrenching separation from a seventeen year marriage. As 18-year-old freshmen at Randolph-Macon College, she and I had been drawn together like opposing poles of two magnets. Somehow, in the rush of her new friends and field hockey and my football and fraternity, that attraction only sparked an occasional brush at parties. Now our careers and marriages had taken parallel paths but four hours apart. 

The temptation of meeting somewhere in the middle landed us with a dream of a new life in Charlottesville. The only problems I could initially see were two teenagers whose high school lives I'd be leaving by starting over elsewhere. The elder would soon be off to college, but my eighth grade daughter still needed her father nearby.

_______________

The river is still frigid with snow melt from the higher elevations to the north. We turn back south on the Greenbrier River Trail, following the current that is running dark just before the spring algae bloom turns it moss green.

"This is where I almost lost Ella one April" I gasp, pointing out the bluff where her bike had gone head-over-heels to miss her stalled 10-year-old brother. "She was caught by the greening branches on top of that little tree." 

"It's great you were there for her" she soothes, falling into her therapist's voice.

"I still am" I huff. 

On the night she leaves, my middle brother comes to me in a dream:

"Dave, you can never go back." 

I awake the next morning knowing I'm not yet ready for a new life, in West Virginia or elsewhere.

BEAR FOOTIN'

"We missed the downhill trail, now what?" asked Zia when we finally realized our 6-mile ridge run at Sherwood Lake had already gone at least 8-miles.

________________

The run had been confounding from the start when I misinterpreted his call for a short run before the summer solstice picnic with our spouses. Envisioning a shady four miler on the cool hardwood forest trail around the lake, I had neglected to pack food or water. He offered to share so I assented to his diversion up a steep switchback connector to the upper ridge trail. There we ambled through brambles and scrambled over boulders in the midday heat of the highest sun of the year, briefly stopping for occasional sips from his water bottle, nibbles on his trail mix stash, or gorges on low bush blueberries. It turned out we weren't the only ones who had discovered the ripe berries.

Trudging along the rocky trail, we were startled by a blur of dark movement just ahead. Two smaller smudges scrambled through the underbrush to our right. In that life-or-death instant, we both called upon all we had ever learned about bears. We froze until all movement stopped. We crept slowly backward as a big black snout poked up into the air. We moved slowly to stand side-by-side. We spread our arms to enlarge our appearance. We were ready to roar but, instead of charging, the big sow ran toward her startled cubs. They watched her gallop past and then waddled up a semi-fallen log. The thrashing down the ridge soon faded so we tiptoeing past the dark puffballs, their frightened whines just audible over a little breeze. Acting on our collective knowledge of bear encounters had allowed this one to end as a most amazing one.

I was hoping for a similar result for my second go round at department chairmanship at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine. Previously done in by the three bears of a controlling supervisor, contrary faculty, and absentee staff, I could now see ways to get past them unscathed.

The ridge trail started sloping down as we recounted the bear and my administrative encounters. After awhile our legs got heavier again as the path switched back to uphill. Stopping to finish off the water, we soon realized that our good turn on the hilltop had been followed, like so much of life, by a wrong one on the way down. 

_________________

"It's all the way around for a fifteen miler or backtrack for twelve" I groaned. "Either way, it's going to be a dry run."

Sure enough, we'd missed the downhill junction a couple miles back. At first the trail down was cool and easy, winding through stands of mountain laurel along a bubbling stream. Then our feet got waterlogged from criss-crossing the creek. Soon our legs became heavy with fatigue and dehydration, and there were still three miles to go. 

It was tempting to walk, but somehow I was able to shift complete focus to each footfall, stringing steps together by silently chanting Ta-ra-humar-a. If they can run a hundred miles in the dry Mexican hills, I can do a half marathon in the West Virginia rainforest. And so I did.

GOING MINIMALIST

"Listen to your feet" was the lesson I was trying to learn after reading Born To Run, Christopher McDougall's groundbreaking book on barefoot running. 

_______________

Life had just taken a minimalist turn in the hot early summer of 2010 when my two teenagers decided to have only one home in the looming divorce settlement. Naturally, that would be where they were already living with my soon-to-be ex-wife in the house we had built a few years before. The three bedroom rental I had created for the kids was suddenly superfluous, so it was time to downsize. Going native in footwear seemed in the spirit of that change. It also made good biomechanical sense that the legs and back should respond to foot sensations by automatically adjusting into a more stable long distance posture.

_______________

"Don't run on gravel" was the first lesson, sent after three runs in my new minimalist shoes on the shady and cool Greenbrier River Trail, the only level surface besides a track in southeastern West Virginia.

"Don't run on hills" was next, learned after two weeks of sore balls from uphill leans and soles from downhill slaps on the steaming blacktop around our little town of Lewisburg.

"Don't go past five miles" came after another month of letting my legs adapt to the painful sensations coming from my feet after long sunset runs on state forest trails or country roads.

After a summer's trial of barefoot running, it was time to get the larger message: A 50-year-old body sometimes needs a cushioned landing.

NOTHING BUT A HOUNDDOG

"Not hide nor hair" drawled the camouflaged hunter to my asking if he'd seen a couple of hounds running loose through the Monroe County hills.

___________________

Cunee and George had been missing for two days since our Fall hike in the Second Creek gorge. Nine-year-old Jacob had run back and forth with the dogs as we walked the muddy streamside trail. 

"Moss, moss" screamed six-year-old Ella whenever she saw green fuzz growing on a rock or tree.

"It must be your spirit animal" I joked as we patted the soft mat.

And then the dogs were gone, a faint yipping from the little Rhodesian ridgenose somewhere on the hillside across the creek signalling the hunt was on. 

We went on to the walkbridge where the kids threw sweetgum balls into the fast moving creek as I huffed into cupped hands with my loudest whistle that had never before failed to bring our tall black-and-tan coonhound running.

A chill descended into the gorge as the sun slipped behind dark clouds so we turned back, stopping for a whistle every few minutes. Then a cold rain started as we gazed across the creek willing our hounds to appear. Two more hours of watching through the windshield wipers and the kids had had enough. 

Three more trips back to the gorge in thunderstorms over the next day and a half and I'd had enough of whistling and waiting. Cancelling clinic for the next morning, I broke out the hydration pack and the Odwalla bars and set out at a trot along the now raging creek, crossing over the bridge near where they'd taken off. After two hours of winding through the rolling hills, I came across the hunter squatting in the brush.

_______________

"Send them down to the creek" I called, turning back toward the gorge by a different drainage.

"Will do" he waved before melting back into the shrubs. 

I got back to the big blue Isuzu three hours after I had set out and there they were, watching me and whining from across the flood. I started back for the bridge hoping they'd follow, but Cunee leapt into the torrent and paddled hard despite getting washed a hundred yards downstream. George was frantic but finally made the leap when he saw the big hound wading out. The poor little guy was swept under a muddy wave, reappearing over a ledge paddling madly with his nose poking up into the air.

"I got you George" I called, leaning off a rock to grab him by the scruff of the neck. 

He just whined, licked my hands, and ran to the back of the Trooper with tail and bottom wiggling.

"Time to go home" I soothed, driving up out of the gorge as they curled up fast asleep in the back.

It was a joyous reunion after school as two dogs bounded out to greet two children climbing down from a yellow school bus, their two day ordeal in the cold rain seemingly forgotten. Forever thereafter, however, two shivering hounds appeared by my side at the first distant rumble.

LIKE A WATERFALL

"Meet back at the top in four hours" directed our Brazil Group Study Exchange leader as five young professionals from Northeast Missouri plotted an afternoon at the Argentinian side of Iquazu Falls National Park.

"It's about six miles, we might make it" I whispered to Scott, convincing him we should hike down to a site called Escaleras a Cataratas Pequeno on the trail sign.

_______________

We had just completed the first two weeks of a Rotary tour of the southern Brazilian state of Parana. Challenged to hoops by each local chapter, we soon became known as the Bad Dream Team in disdain for the first U.S.Olympic basketball team of professional players who had just swept the 1993 winter games. Tired of losing to business owners and their hoops-obsessed teens in the capital city of Curitiba, we'd bribed a Rotarian pilot with much coveted American dollars to fly us out to the world's largest waterfall by volume of water.

_________________

"Two downhill hours, but there it is" I observed to Scott from the top of a thousand step stairway along a clear stream spilling down a cliffside and into the wide Iquazu River still hazy a mile downstream from the tremendous cataract. "If we go down, we'll never make it back in time."

"Fuck it" yelled the realtor and former Northeast Missouri State University defensive end lumbering down the stairs through the dense understory with me in hot pursuit.

Fuck it we did, rollicking in the icy jets until the late summer sun dropping below the canyonside reminded us of the time.

"Either we run back or rock hop to the base of the big falls" I proposed. "There might be a way to the top."

He leapt for the first rounded boulder and then we climbed and jumped for a sweaty quarter mile before the futility sank in.

"Let's float back to the little falls" he urged stepping to the edge of a tan megalith.

"A boat!" I shouted, and we proceeded to wave wildly as first one and then another small motorboat sped downstream.

"Wave these at the next one" I offered, handing over two twenties and keeping two for myself.

Our eighty turned the trick that two crazy gringos couldn't, and we soon disembarked at a ranger's hut four miles downstream. He emerged from under the hood of an old Jeep.

"No maquina" he said with a toothy grin, holding up two oil smeared hands.

"Telephone?"

"No telefono."

"Muchas gracias" I called over my shoulder as we took off up the dirt road.

"For nothing" grumbled Scott trudging along as if in full pads at the end of an August double-session.

After an hour of coaxing the big guy to run, we were only halfway to the top.

"We're late anyway, might as well enjoy it" he reasoned while slowing to a stroll through the lush forest.

That's when we glimpsed a police jeep bouncing down the trail toward us.

"What happened" cried our fearless leader, sweaty and pale in his fear that we had fallen off the cliff.

"We liked that little waterfall" Scott rationalized as I blushed to match the trumpet flowers dangling from every tree.

_______________

Cataratas de Curitiba

     The spring at your source

          gushes into old homes

               rushing out with coliforms,

                    flows into factories

                         running out with chloroform,

                              and trickles into favelas

                              overflowing with the children

                              who will clean the homes

                              and work assembly lines.

- March 1993

CLIMBING MOUNT FUJI

"A wise person climbs Mount Fuji..." quoted the Fodor's guide as we prepared to visit our sister Karen teaching in Hiroshima. Too bad our trail to the fabled volcano at the center of Honshu had been fraught with more foolishness than wisdom. 

_______________

"Parts from the number one engine took out the number two engine" announced the pilot upon landing between rows of firetrucks back at Newark an hour after first takeoff.



"This is a good day to die" quoted sister Karla from the historical novel Shogun as we glimpsed the Arctic ice sheet while flying over the top of the world.



"Tatami for sleep" urged the hostess escorting us into a sparse Tokyo ryokan after a long and sleepless flight.



"Chopsticks?" asked the waiter handing us bowls of green slime with a giant snail floating in the center.



"Oops, wrong side" exclaimed brother-in-law Howard driving down the right hand side of a country road as oncoming cars swerved.



"Saki wa, David-san!" insisted the Matsue restauranteer refilling my ceramic cup for the fifth time.



"Geiging, Geiging" pointed highschoolers as two foreigners biked through their village on the way to a paper making shop.



"No theft in Japan" admonished the police operator when I reported dropping my never-to-be-found wallet containing 125,000 yen ($1000) in a Kyoto taxi.



"Nice of them to provide a well" I marveled, downing a ladle before noticing that the Japanese pilgrims to the Miyajima tidal shrine used it to purify their hands before passing through the torii.



"Last bus two hours" yelled the driver opening the door at the third climbing stage of ten for the two remaining passengers.



"Better run" cautioned Karla as we circled up the cinder trail that wound around the ancient volcano at the center of the main island.



"Last water before the top" observed the bassoon player for the London Philharmonic tramping straight down the glacier in crampons as we sipped the ashen runoff at stage seven.



"Thirty minutes until bus" warned Karla as we slipped and slid around the eighth stage.

_______________

"... but only a fool does it again" I added, turning back for the slog down to stage three.

Fuji-San

With head cloaked with cloud

and foothills shrouded in fog,

ravens pick your ribs.

                                                        - May 15, 1991

SPIDERS AND SNAKES

It caught the corner of my eye as I toed the edge of the dock for a dusk dive after a sunset run. A fat brown and tan banded snake lay coiled beneath a deck chair, black eyes intent on my every move and a large bulge in it's lower belly.  

_______________

The Friday evening run had begun from my cabin on Spring Lake after a long week of teaching and patients. From the gravel drive, I cut across a web-laced trail through the red and yellow woods of my first fall in northeast Missouri. Emerging onto a winding Adair County blacktop with pyramid-backed spiders scurrying off my chest, I headed down to the Chariton River valley and turned north along a dirt road with the growing orb suffusing the big sky in orange. Having finished the shopping and cleaning for a Halloween party the next afternoon, I was basking in the steady rhythm and glow of a ninety degree midwestern sunset. The last rays disappeared into the tallgrass prairie as I cut through a muddy track to the backside of the lake and then around to the dock below my cabin, dropping shorts and tee before stepping to the edge.

_______________

A tongue flickered in and out as I posed for the dive, contemplating what to do about a pregnant water snake with a mean bite on the dock where children would be fishing and swimming the next day. I could try to keep the half dozen 10-year-olds away from the water. Many years before as one of those 10-year-olds, I had seen my mother hack one with her hoe, my father smash one in two with his greasy work shoe. The Department of Natural Resources would recommend removal by bullet, the fledgling internet a burlap sack without a clue how to get it inside. None of these were options in that moment.

Instead, I slowly turned back toward the lake, bent knees and hips, stared into a spot five feet out, raised arms, and dove into the darkening depths. Emerging ten yards out, I turned back and she was gone.

"Kiss the snake"

my sister whispered

in the middle of a writhing dream.

"Yes" I implied with closing eyes

as ripples moved from vapor to viper

and forked tongue flicked willing lips.

                                                        - October 1991