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!"