"I was vividly reminded of running down grassy hills as a child, perhaps a bit ungainly, lacking the disciplined coordination of my adult body, but not without a natural grace."
Unassimilated Stories: "No Through-Road Runners Club"
Dear Reader,
I present to you, the first installment in my Orion, the Hunter, story. . .
Sike!
I had a really good time at Fall Creek Falls State Park this past week, and I got inspired to write something specific to my adventures there. So here it is, I hope you enjoy.
And I’ll most likely release the first section of the Orion story next week.
Success,
Charles
No Through-Road Runners Club
I’m like most people.
If you make a good decision easy to make, I’m more likely to make it.
Years ago, when my dog was young and overeager, and necessary exercise was just a step out my apartment door, choosing to go for a run: to get in shape, to be healthy, to reap the countless benefits of exercise, was an easy-to-make good decision.
Not every place I’ve lived since has made those healthy decisions quite so frictionless. But I am learning that state park campgrounds have that same quality of lubricating good decisions. There are two qualities that stand out: setting and infrastructure.
The positive impact of setting is simple. You’re in a beautiful, unfamiliar place, its only right that you get out and explore. But beyond that, there’s a more subtle magic at work. This place isn’t home, and thats a good thing. None of the bad habits or important responsibilities of home are present to burden you into inaction.
As motivation comes with the setting, so lubrication comes with the infrastructure. The thing I’m coming to love about these parks is that they offer layers of ease. At the barest minimum, the campground roads are pedestrian friendly, and just like my old city apartments, they’re just a step out the door. But for the more adventuresome, there are scenic roads with low traffic and there are well developed trails. Add the fact that there’s no cell service and no cable line, and viola!, no distractions to create friction and keep you from getting out and getting moving.
I need the extra motivation and lubrication. I’ve probably run fewer miles in the past three years combined than in any single year of the thirteen before that. I’m not bent out of shape about it, I’ve been lifting weights more consistently and wrestling a lot. The mature, self-accepting portion of me advocates that this is not only normal and acceptable, but in fact, a good thing, that the alternative, insisting on doing it all, would result in burnout or injury or some other failure.
But I still love to run. . . and I even still do it on the occasion when the decision to tug on my shoes and hit the road is made easy for me.
It was early afternoon on October 13th and I knew I needed to go run.
I had spent the past few days participating in the Tennessee Urban Forestry Conference at the Lodge at Fall Creek Falls, and while it was a lovely event with lovely people in a lovely pace, I had become a bit overwhelmed. I am a bit ashamed to say I’m more easily overwhelmed right now than I have been at various other times-past. Its tough to answer the question of “What do you do for a living” when the answer is “Cross my fingers and hope to not fail as a writer.” (I tried the joke of “Recovering Arborist and Aspiring Writer”. I didn’t like the way it tasted. . .) Or the other, even tougher question, “What have you been up to since I saw you last, we haven’t heard much from you on the board lately?” Oh, you know, “Just trying to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Wondering how I got to this low place when I thought I was doing everything right. Trying to decide if anything I’ve been working towards for the past 6 years is worth keeping. . .”
So yeah. I knew a run would be nice. I’ve run enough miles in my life to know that it functions like an automatic car wash for your hormones. Before the run, your skin is buzzing with anxiety and your thoughts are biting their tails with intent to maim. But something like 15-30 minutes down the road and that pumping action: foot to hip to lung to mouth; hand to shoulder to heart to guts. It gets the blood flowing over everything like a hurricane driven storm surge at the monthly peak tide. Your prior frame of mind will not stand against the flood. Get yourself to 45 minutes and you can count on those results sticking for a few hours. And if you have the fortitude and the muscle tone to make it to my coveted 90 minutes, then you can count on this new state of being sticking around for the rest of the day and then some. (I’ve never been a distance runner and stop having fun shortly after the 90 minute mark.)
I thought I wanted to hit the trail. It was the obvious choice given that the state park has, I think, fifty-something miles. I started down toward the lakeshore, but less than 5 minutes in, I had already felt two painful impacts, and I knew it just wasn’t meant to be. I have a plantar wart that is apparently the antarctic variant and thus far has shrugged off my feeble attempts at freezing it away. Since I prefer thin soled shoes, the stones on the trail proved too violent for this tender spot on the ball of my foot.
This turned out to be an un-looked-for blessing.
I popped back to the camper, which was a nuisance, but not unmanageable. I was already committed to the idea of this run, so it was going to take a lot more than an unwelcome wart and a stony trail to stop me now. Swapped shoes. Put on my hi-vis. Headed out to the starting point of what turned out to be the best road run I’ve done since I left Oregon in 2017.
In fact, this run was so enjoyable that I have in my mind, the kernel of a new road running philosophy/ethic/method (to be explored and unpacked in greater detail some other time). But the working title is No Through-Road Running. The idea is simple. Any road that isn’t a through road will have inherently less traffic than the opposite and likely better views or at least a more human-centered aesthetic. Let me be blunt, I don’t care to share the road with cars any more than I must, (understanding full well that I’m the interloper). Even when drivers are polite or considerate or even encouraging, its a physically awkward exchange at best that disrupts the flow and the aesthetic of the run. There’s something inevitably offputting about not being able to see the driver’s expression or body language due to the glare on the windshield. The smile of a car grill just wasn’t engineered to inspire trust.
I needed a road to run.
I broke out my park map and saw the scenic loop road connecting Fall Creek Falls to Piney Falls via a drive along the ridgeline complete with multiple rock outcrops serving as naturally occurring opportunities to gain unfettered views out over the gorge. Target acquired.
As soon as I got on the road, I already wanted to quit.
Its a testament to the unwelcome grip that anxiety has gotten upon me in recent times. So many things that shouldn’t be hard have become so. It probably doesn’t help that my legs aren’t really conditioned for running right now. So the tendons at the top corners of my knee caps did their best to grief me into quitting before I’d even really started, and in my vulnerable mental state, I was more tempted to heed their complaints than I’d have expected.
I couldn’t enjoy the scenery. I couldn’t enjoy the act of running. I couldn’t stop feeling bad. Just, simply, undefinably, indescribably, bad. Uncomfortable in my own skin. Uncomfortable in my own mind. Uncomfortable with my place and station in life.
But. I didn’t stop, didn’t heed the internal complaints. I know better.
Life experience is a blessing, hard won. Fifteen years ago, if I felt the way I felt at the beginning of this run, I’d have gotten back in the car and just opted to mope.
Life experience has taught me about fortitude. One of the classical Greco-Christian virtues, fortitude is necessary in times like these. Simply defined, fortitude is the quality of deliberate endurance. You endure the burden or the trial which besets you, not because you have no other choice, or don’t know any other way, but rather, you endure deliberately, purposefully, knowing full well what you are doing and why and how.
As a person of fortitude, going a little further down the road wasn’t necessarily easy, but it is what I chose to do.
Much to my excitement, after the first overlook at the park’s namesake falls, the loop road became one-way. The road grew narrower, the shoulder less pronounced, the surrounding forest began to encroach in a welcome embrace. (Recall the budding new road running ethic that eschews roads where cars might go. Half the lanes means half the cars!)
Where fifteen-or-so minutes prior, I had felt like an out of place, uncomfortable person, deliberately enduring the discomfort and anxiety, now I felt like an animal properly seated in his skin, an extension of the spirit of the surrounding land, loping along loosely.
The road began to wind uphill and I gratefully, joyfully leaned into the challenge, feeling my weight shift forward over my toes, hinging deeply at the hip and countering the contraction with a lengthening through my spine toward some imaginary point out in front of my smiling face. My heart and lungs lept to the task of not simply keeping my pre-incline pace, but kicked themselves into higher gear and gleefully drove me to something just short of a sprint, surfing the absolute edge of anaerobic threshold, testing to see how long this pace could be maintained before too many mitochondria started tripping fire alarms.
I was vividly reminded of running down grassy hills as a child, perhaps a bit ungainly, lacking the disciplined coordination of my adult body, but not without a natural grace. How fast could I run downhill without running overtop of my own base of support? I’d get going, and I’d surf the edge, trying not to get my head too far out in front of my feet and begin to tumble, but principally unwilling to pull my head back and put on the brakes. The only solution to the problem of “How do I not fall on my face?” Move my feet faster!
I’m still playing chicken with myself and the hills after all these years. The rules have changed, but the spirit of the game remains.
Breathing like an old coal-fired locomotive, I came upon a discreet parking area with no signage and a small trail through the trees toward the bluff. My kind of scenic view. No signage to tell me where to look and how to think (I can’t stand to watch movie trailers either. Not knowing what to expect is an underappreciated gift in this world of micromanagement and master plans.)
No sign could have foretold what I found down that trail anyway, because no sign would have known all the past experiences I’d bring with me.
I forgot to mention before now that it has been raining this whole time. Rain has never deterred me from running. In fact, I enjoy running in the rain. There was a period of time when I lived near San Francisco that I ran almost exclusively in the rain. The rain became the signal that it was time to go for a run, and if there were a few dry days in a row, I’d almost forget to think of going for a run.
Today’s rain was what some outdoor enthusiasts will, only partially ironically, call a “drying rain”. Rains such as these are akin to being in the cloud as the suspended moisture is blown around by the internal wind currents.
My outcrop really brought this feeling home. Out on the exposed rock, having left the protective corridor of the tree-enclosed road, it was elemental, primordial. The stone jutting out beneath my feet. The cloud filling the gorge in front of me, graywashing everything with a swirling overlay. The water collecting on the pine needles as they reached outward from the shelter of the stone, on the tip of my nose, on lashes of my eyes, in the folds of my ears. And last but never least, the sky. Below me, not above as experience would lead me to expect.
With the cloud pooling and swirling overtop of me and the sky stretching out into the river gorge below, it took little imagination to see myself as crouched upon the edge of an inverted, steaming ocean, clinging to the stony shore looking out over a captive sky held in by an irregular dome of trees roofing of this imaginary world.
Without warning, the last of the tension just flowed out of me in one great, involuntary breath. I didn’t plan it, didn’t expect it, it just happened. As the breath flowed out, the memories came streaming in. Memories of the many, many high places I’ve sat upon in my life.
I remembered the three young peregrines conducting their own Top Gun academy on a bluff in North Cascades as a coworker and I sat upon the edge with our feet dangling in the vast void, dreaming of stooping alongside them. We had been in the field for days surveying plant communities and we didn’t even have a survey point up on the bluff, but we saw the mountain and knew we couldn’t not climb it.
I remembered the Columbia Gorge, having passed to the north bank by way of the Bridge of the Gods and hiked up to where even Beacon Rock, larger than any man made lighthouse, looked small below. Duke scrambled up the rocks beside me, collecting beads of water all over his coat as the fog roiled and crashed up our outcrop. He glittered in the occasional burst of sunshine through the clouds, his golden fur refracted endlessly through the jeweled net the clouds had overlain upon him.
I remembered the goat trails strewn about the alpine lake in Patagonia and the need to get to the far side for a pick up on this final day of a 10 day journey. But the outcropping rocks seemed endlessly stacked and overlain on top of one another like scales covered in shrubby foliage and for every foot we traveled closer to our destination, we doubled back thrice. We slept upon those ledges with no room to set up tents, just laid our ground pads right on top of the heather, climbed into our bags, and I prayed that no one would roll off the cliff to their doom in their sleep. Bundled up against the wind as I was, I’d never be able to reach out and grab them in time if they got to sliding.
Upon waking from reminiscence and returning to the road, the groove of the run had been well and truly established. Between the physiological effects of the miles already invested, and the psycho-emotional effects of the majesty of nature present and past, I could have been content to never leave that road.
But it was a loop, and in due time, as planned, I returned to where I began. Also as planned, I left some of that bad-mind out there on the pavement. Before long it will be washed over the bluffs by the rain and down into the valley below. Neither the slow churn of the tree roots against the rocky substrate nor the lightning fast mycelial networks are likely to be encumbered by the left-behind loss and regret of a single human