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.