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

A MURDER OF CROWS

"They're all ... headed ... east" I huffed as rows of crows paralleled our first bare-legged run of the spring through a neighborhood along the Raritan River in Piscataway, New Jersey.

"We'll follow" directed Athena with her jet black hair sashaying across shoulders, bringing a bigger mission to our first official date as a cadaver couple.

________________

She was a petite second year student at Rutgers Medical School doing a stint as anatomy tutor for the first year class in which I was fumbling through my first human dissection. When not reassuring the feckless freshmen, she and the rest of the sophomores were immersed in Sex Week, the annual desensitization experience for soon-to-be doctors.

"How about a nice ... run after class?" Athena proposed with smiling auburn eyes, hopping from one foot to another in her long white lab coat.

"SURE" I grinned up in my green scrubs from a slice through a rather circus-sized male genitalia.

I was hooked when she slugged me in the deltoid and danced on to the next gurney.

_______________

Another mile and we were rolling through corn fields along an old Middlesex County road, drawn by a rising cacophany to a humongous oak just leafing out on the edge of a farmer's field.

"Let's look" she commanded, one smooth and milky white thigh stepping through the barbed wire as I held the top wire up and stepped on the bottom one.

"BOOM, BOOM, BOOM" froze her straddling the barbs and triggered a black rain from the tree.

Three bearded guys in coveralls, shotguns in hand, emerged as we high-tailed it back the way we had come. After a silent sprint in the now chilling dusk, we slowed to our jogging rhythm as the sun set over the river valley.

"Shower time" she laughed, and it was.

...THEREBY HANGS A TALE

In memory of William S. Gray Jr., Ph.D.

"On your mark..." shouted the starter as I made the first mistake of my first 10K race by jostling for a toe on the starting line. The next was taking off with the real runners to cheers of townspeople, fellow students, and the occasional college faculty spectating this first Randolph-Macon Railroad Run in the spring of 1980. One of said spectators was Dr. Gray, an English professor and former LSU Rhodes Scholar at Exeter University.





"Go, David, go!" he cheered with champagne flute in hand and big belly bulging from wrinkled grey suit, imbuing even these simple words with his trademark deep south drawl. 

_______________

Dr. Gray had come to know me not in the classroom but when I had sought out the faculty advisor to my Kappa Alpha fraternity. During the fall of junior year I was struggling with juggling a heavy science course load and an active KA social scene. One chilly Saturday before final exams, I had come home from an evening of physics to a loud and drunken dance hall. Unable to sleep with the house rocking and anger mounting, I escaped out the back door into the frosty night and found the professor stumbling away toward his small cottage on the edge of campus. 

"Can I walk you home, Dr. Gray?"

"It would be my great and everlasting pleasure", he slurred, taking my arm as we passed through the fountain plaza. "Won't you join me for a nightcap?"

"I need some sleep."

"Not in that fraternity house you don't" he reasoned. "I insist, and won't take no for an answer."

Ascending the steps to his second floor flat, we were engulfed in the musty scent of noble and not-so-noble rot as we passed through a tunnel of wine racks and bookshelves into his cramped living room.

"Make yourself at home while I freshen up", he quipped while disappearing into the kitchen, soon to return with an uncorked bottle of Spanish port and two small glasses.

"Do you play the piano?" I asked, observing the beautiful upright Grand tucked against the only wall without old hardcover books or wine.

"Not a lick, but I love pianists" he enthused. "Won't you stay the night with me?"

I should have taken the hints and hightailed it out of there. Instead, I slept on the couch and spent the next year and a half resisting Bill Gray's advances while trying to convince him to get treatment for alcoholism.

_______________

The race proceeded from the starting line at Day Field to the roads on either side of the Amtrak tracks that split Ashland in two, where I made mistake number three. By trying to keep up with the faster runners, I completely lost steam after only three of the ten kilometers, and that was when mucous production kicked in.

"Hey asshole, watch out" spat a passing runner as I turned my head to clear my throat.

"Sorry ... ASSHOLE" I coughed, making a mental note to move to the side of the road before hocking into the wind.

Struggling onwards, I was forced to focus on each slow footfall until breathing finally returned. Then the focus shifted to passing the next asshole up ahead, one-by-one, until the finish line appeared back at the football field. Bursting into a sprint, I blew past a dozen runners to the finish line, where I abruptly threw up.

"David, you did it!" beamed Dr. Gray.

THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH

"It looks to be about five miles" said Dr. Barry Knisley as I started out from the southeast corner of the Wilcox Playa, a large salt flat in a bowl of mountains in Arizona's Sonoran desert. "We'll pick you up at about ten at Marutha Meadows."

_______________

Barry, Mark, and I had driven out at dawn on that last day of field research before returning east in August 1982. We were studying tiger beetle population stratification and speciation in the internal drainage valley that had once contained Lake Cochise. The metallic beetles and their predacious larvae had found ways to survive the desert heat and evaporating lake, from heading underground until late summer monsoons to building turrets over their burrows to get jaws and flies above the surface heat. The site for Cicindela marutha was a patch of dunes on the northern rim of the playa, where the bright green adults laid their eggs into the cooler north slopes of sand mounds. For me, the summer of entomology research right after college graduation was a trial before a final decision on putting my energy into getting into a Ph.D. program or medical school.

I had wanted to hike across the playa before launching into the pre-medical trial back in New Jersey. From the roads around the edge of the ancient sea bed, one could make out hilly landmarks all the way around. It was a different story when I stopped to get my bearings at two miles out. From the center of the bowl, all I could make out was cracked earth in all directions. Steering by the sun, I resumed my trek in what I hoped was the right direction with heart pounding a little faster than aerobic metabolism demanded. 

A piece of driftwood emerged from the haze up ahead. As I approached, it transformed into an old wooden sign reading "UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE". I looked right and left and there were similar signs as far as I could see. It was either go through or go back.

Skirting small hummocks in a steady jog, I soon saw the low hills of Marutha Meadows in the distance. Then I could make out Mark standing on a dune and writing in the field notebook. A little closer and there was Barry squatting to insert a marker beside a larval burrow.

________________

"You made it!" he exclaimed, standing up and squinting into the now high sun. 

"What's up with those warning signs out there?"

"Ah, so that's where the old bombing range is", he pondered. "I'd heard that the airforce used the middle of the playa for target training during World War II." 

"Thanks for the tip", I joked. "Any other advice?"

"Have you heard of osteopathic medicine?"

MAIDEN VOYAGE

The Black Bear Trail usually began with a half-miler up Kate's Mountain, switchback's and all, but on this first cool day after a long October I went backwards, galloping through the cabins and down the dirt path along the creek bottom before turning uphill. 







Then the trail through the Greenbrier State Forest steepened, turning rocky and rutted. Even in the best conditions, each step had to be deliberately placed to avoid turning an ankle. With the trail littered with newly fallen leaves, anything but full concentration on footfalls and balance meant hitting the ground. I once ran a rocky trail covered by three inches of snow with eight of my osteopathic medical students. The four who slipped and fell had only ever been runners, while the other four had been body-contact athletes - soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, basketball. Of course, this proprioceptive memory can also be gained by repeated rocky trail runs.

On the last and steepest of the rises, I shifted into a sprint a la Olympic marathon champion Frank Shorter: "Hills are speed work in disguise." Running on toes with short strides while lifting knees and leaning forward conserves distance energy as it propels you upwards. Finally topping the hill, I heaved a sigh of relief and let the legs return to a lope along a thin trail etched inside the bowl of the mountainside. 

Looking out into a prison window of tree trunks, the workday's worries - course coordinator and department chair frustrations and deadlines - slipped away as I wound my way across the hillside. Into view came my work predicament of being undermined in curriculum integration by a controlling supervisor. I needed to make a change, but into what I couldn't yet see.

Rounding a second rim path, I was brought back to the treetops by the flap of wild turkeys crash landing into a remnant white pine. There I saw a marriage that had slowly slipped into estrangement after a hundred and one too many lonely nights. I needed to make a change, but into what I couldn't yet see.

The mountain gave way as my legs did, forcing a squat at a little triangle of land between two seasonal creek beds before the last downhill stretch. Reaching down to tighten a shoelace, I saw the elegant oval fronds of a maidenhair fern beside my running shoe. A little further down the bank was a blue cohosh, it's tulip-like leaves leaning out from a bluish stalk. Poking up through the leaves beside the dry bed were hoof-shaped leaves of colt's foot. There on the opposite bank were a few fairy wands of black cohosh.

Recharged, I took off down toward the Jeep, skimming over the leaf covered rocks as images of medicinal plants slipped into my consciousness.

POSSUM TROTS

Halfway out Arbuckle Lane my internal review of the day's teaching was already underway when I tripped over a lump in the road beside an old cattle gate. 




A young life of running away from guys trying to knock me down has it's advantages in middle life, and I was able to keep my legs and continue along the greening grassland of the karst sinkholes and ridges of spring in the Greenbrier Valley. At the top of the Lost World Caverns rise, I about-faced and headed back the way I had come, stopping to drag the lump into the brush by it's naked pink tail.

A week later I was hit by a stench of rot as I ran past the cattle gate, swerving to the other side of the road until it passed. On the way back, I toed over a little mound of gray fur and out spilled squirming white larvae from each of the holes. It was a fast sprint back to town.

Two weeks on I was puzzling out how to teach the complex topic of sacroiliac dysfunction when I ran past a little pile of white bones. Squatting beside them, I saw that the sacroiliac joint was straight, shaped like the letter I, while ours is bent like an L. We walk, they don't, end of story...

... until a trip to the Smithsonian mammalian skeleton collection revealed a gradation of sacroiliac angles, from minimal in marsupials and grazers, near 45 degrees in dogs and cats, and closer to 90 in monkeys and primates. Now there was a puzzle!

The next run out Arbuckle Lane found me squatting over those opossum bones. If quadrupeds that don't sit have straight SI joints, canines and felines that sit with or without command have more of an angle, and monkeys and apes that squat to eat, groom, and everything else except locomotion have the most acute sacroiliac angles, why too do we?

I stood up from my squatting revelation and flew home to write it up.

THE KITTY TRAIL

"Ride on the Kitty Trail, Daddy?" asked 3-year-old Jacob as I arrived at our farm house on the bluff from my office at the Charles E. Still Osteopathic Hospital in Jefferson City on a gorgeous Indian summer evening.

I had just been informed that my OMT clinic would be closed as part of a hospital merger despite the practice paying for both itself and my salary after just two years. And Mary was due in December.

So I loaded up our Isuzu Trooper with a jogging stroller, a black and tan coon hound, and a little blond boy about to lose his nursing monopoly, and hit the MKT rail-to-trail along the big muddy river for the last time. As was our wonts, Jacob was soon asleep, Cunie off in the woods, and I wandering through the day's events, settling on a help wanted ad I'd come across: Assistant Professor, West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine

Missouri

No matter how humble your source

trickling from Rocky springs to confluence at Three Forks

or how generous your mouth

still feeding St. Louis long after the French first feasted,

it is neither heritage nor inheritance that define your course

but instead prairie swells side-bending your spine

and plains rains engorging your veins.

An undercut bank capsizes a cottonwood

only to sediment downstream

to be tiled by seedlings.

A kingfisher hovers and dives

scattering gar fry into your murky depths

to commence their immense descent back to sea.

A line of skunks ascend at dawn

bluffing bi-footed bobkittens back into their den

and away from ever oncoming high beams.

What begins as a downhill race

is diverted by circumstance and chance,

muddles, meanders,

and eventually marches

to the rhythm of lives nourished

and the drums of gravity

incessantly rolling you home.

TAKE THE LEAP

I froze mid-stride when three quadruped heads turned toward me in the dark green shadows about a mile ahead on the Lehigh and Delaware towpath. In the deepening dusk, I could only make out their large dusky bodies and pointed ears. With the canal to the right of the path and the river to the left, we had nowhere to go but toward or away. 

A similar decision was looming in my work life. My first practice had landed at the New Hope Center for Acupuncture after completing a residency in osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) in Philadelphia. The picturesque village on a wide stretch of the Delaware River was a regional mecca for the arts, swelling on weekends with various and sundry seekers of good times. During the week, both the crowds and the cash flow dried up - not the best place for a new fee-for-service specialty practice. But before I could say bad choice, my naturopathic physician ex-girlfriend left for greener pastures and the two acupuncturists retired home, one to have a baby and the other to consolidate for the long haul. Left with the building and it's considerable expenses, I moved into the 2nd floor and hired out my services to a suburban rehabilitation practice and the nearest osteopathic medical school. The part-time teaching was good, but it didn't pay enough to sustain the office. The moonlighting practice proved to be a mill for car accident collusion. Every attorney-referred victim had x-rays, MRIs, CAT scans, specialty consultations, and daily physical therapy. The physician owner was happy to add OMT into the billing mix. I needed to get out of there before either I or the place was busted.

Deciding deer over dog, I chose toward while they, deciding hunter over grazer, chose away. They ran in fits and then stopped to graze until my steady movement again caught the doe's cautious eye. I picked up the pace and their spurts shortened as I narrowed the gap. Before long, they were a football field away, signaling my own sprint. They followed suit, the yearlings jostling to keep up with their mother. At fifty yards, she glanced back with eyes wide and mouth drooping open. At twenty-five, they swerved right, then left, then right again. At ten, she ducked her head like a ram and leapt into the canal, landing halfway across as one fawn followed with a splash. The other turned as I stopped, offering it's throat to the wolf with the red shorts. To my whispered "go baby", it did a standing broad jump and doggy-paddled after the others.

A HORSE WITH NO NAME

"Take the horse trail behind the last house" directed the Indian Health Service doctor while handing me a ratty pair of high-top Converse sneakers. "It's probably about 8-miles through the hills to the trail back to Lame Deer."

Take it I did, jogging along the dusty track up through the cedars in the smoky late afternoon haze from the Yellowstone fire two hundred miles due west of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. The problems of the day's patients were brushed off, one by one, by the pungent sagebrush growing out over the path as it steepened and narrowed. Ten-year-old Kayho Magpie with his long braids was defiant toward this red-bearded white man until a gentle tug on his ear and jaw to go with amoxicillin relieved his earache. Cyrus Biglefthand's right elbow had hurt since the piercing ceremony had welcomed him home to the res. A radial head thrust had restored normal movement and started to relieve his pain. Maggie Means' taut shoulders carried the stress of being on the Tribal Council until myofascial release relaxed the tight muscles along with the crow's feet beside her eyes. These were the first osteopathic treatments experienced by the people whose grandparents had followed the buffalo and driven the U.S. Cavalry into the earth with bows and knives at the Little Big Horn.

Soon I emerged onto a high plateau rimmed by the graceful slant of scattered ponderosa pines. The trail spilled into a wide dirt circle, each footfall swallowed by a little puff of dust. Stopping in the middle of this odd high-desert bowl, I pondered my own lost trail. The fields I had been drawn to in the classroom hadn't borne out with rotations. Psychiatry, at first seductive with personality disorders and dysfunctional families, spurned my interest with it's requisite pushing of pills in state mental hospitals. Preventive Medicine sounded good, but, in practice, favored populations over people. Family Medicine had been my fall back until every ventilator patient became my father struggling for air after a botched pneumonectomy that I had steered him into. The way forward was unclear, and the sun was going down both for my residency application deadline and the big Montana sky. That's when my immediate situation hit me like the wet cow pie by my big left foot: Lost trail, free range reservation, bison herd, manure pile. I was standing in the middle of a buffalo wallow at sunset with no idea of which way to go.

A "garumph" over a little rise made me jump. Then I tiptoed slowly toward the sound. Peeking over, I startled a lone black stallion who bolted away through a small break in the pines. I followed and found myself galloping downhill in the languorous prairie dusk, rolling into Lame Deer as darkness finally fell.

A RUN WITH A VIEW

The 6-mile Autumn run across First Watchung Mountain ascended Vossellar Avenue past LaMonte Field where I had played away childhood in Pop Warner, Pony League, and Bound Brook High School football and baseball. That first glance back always set the stage for a memorable run, and this one right after college was that and more.

Crossing Route 22 at the traffic light, the road turned abruptly steep, forcing focus on each toe strike until reaching the summit, winded and spent. Then I wobbled along Hillcrest Road until breathing slowed, legs lightened, and senses returned, heightened for the rest of the crest. 



A sea of red, green, and gold...

...football practice jerseys sacrificed for the greater good of acing both Physics and Organic Chemistry in a game of pre-med catch up. It worked, but the hurt of a senior co-captain abandoning teammates was hardened into lifelong guilt by a coach who refused my request to stand with the team on the sidelines during home games.


The musty scent of decay...

...on the Kappa Alpha dance floor on a Sunday morning traded for late nights in the science building. And, to top it off, my house dog Renaldo, variously known to the brothers as Retardo, Renaldo-Tin-Tin, and Renaldo-Buddy-Dog, had to drop out during his senior year to become Fatty-Flea-Bag at my parents house in New Jersey.



Joyous screams...

...of a pileated woodpecker up in the oaks conjured good friends and wild parties left for two health care jobs and a calculus class to enhance chances for medical school admission. But, if I'd learned anything from first football and now distance running, persistence pays off in the end.



The end of that Hillcrest run came suddenly as I emerged onto Mountain Avenue. Turning downhill, I at first fought the steep grade but then let go and let gravity sprint me back into my hometown for one last push. 

A REAL SPORT

As it turned out, football was to be my path to distance running after all. The next time I tried to do it came after a fractured wrist in my first intra-squad scrimmage at Randolph-Macon College. Let it be known that it's never a good idea to try to stiffarm a guy nicknamed Brickhead. 

With a cast on my right arm, I needed something else to do during contact drills in practice that August. The first few milers along the railroad tracks still left me with a lot of down time just watching the team go through the week's plays. So the next time out I turned off the tracks through Dogtown and headed west out James Avenue into the Virginia countryside. 



Sprinting away from a big-bellied beagle bitch who gave chase from a rundown white frame house at the edge of town, I broke into the late afternoon sunshine under a big blue sky. Soon I found myself bobbing alongside cornfields and up-and-down the rolling hills of the Blue Ridge piedmont. A sweet breeze hinting of the coming Fall cooled my forehead and dried my drenched white practice jersey along with the week's worries: Exams in my death-defyingly boring Economics major; Learning new plays as a freshman tailback behind two amazing African-American upperclass runners; The contradiction of being drawn to friends and parties in a southern fraternity with Confederate sentiments; And, most importantly for my life to come, the gasping breaths that had put a stop to previous runs. I was cruising along acutely aware of only the world around me until a trio of crows swooped past, turning me back toward town. 

Before I knew it, I was back across the tracks and jogging into practice to the sidelong glares of my wrung-out teammates, rejoining them just in time for the last water break before wind sprints. Little did they or I know that I had just found my path to enduring the hard road ahead.

RUNNER'S LOW

The worst runs are when you desperately need it but just can't do it.  








Such was the case on my first attempt to become a runner. It was the late summer of 1973 in Bound Brook, New Jersey, a factory town where tough guys played football. My brother Alan had been a star quarterback and leading tackler. My brother Bob had been an all-state fullback, doubling as outside linebacker. So I had gone out for the freshmen team the previous Fall only to break my elbow in the opening game against Bernardsville, a victim of my own teammate's spearing, the term for tackling by hitting with the helmet. Reasoning that I was too small to play football, I decided to go out for cross country during my sophomore year to stop my brothers from nagging me about not playing a "real" sport. 

Donning Bob's old red and white track shorts and a black t-shirt, I set out toward the cross country course at Calco Field after lunch on a humid August afternoon. My skinny 14-year-old legs felt pretty light going away from home down Tea Street so I picked up the pace under the midday sun. By the other end of the Hanken Road loop I was dripping with sweat and huffing hard but determined to keep going. The summer was nearly over and I needed to start training for cross country tryouts at the end of the month. 

After another hundred yards a stabbing pain gripped my right lower ribs, doubling me over in pain. If I couldn't do this I'd disappoint my brothers, not to mention my Dad who only knew I existed at sporting events or when he needed a tool fetched. So I fought through the stitch, hobbling another few football field lengths before throwing up into the goldenrod beside the blacktop, marking the wretched end to my cross country career. 

That Fall found me smoking cigarettes and riding Louie Dellacave's old Kawasaki 75 up at the abandoned road in the Bridgewater woods across the Middlebrook. The BBHS Crusader football team stretched their two season winning streak to three more games before losing the rest. It wasn't long before I heard one of Alan's friends exclaim "our best quarterback isn't even on the team" as they glanced over at me tightening the minibike's governor to speed it up. 

What I needed to hear: "Keep running, it gets easier every time!"