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.