The spell begins to break with the distant whirring of
a plane’s engine. As the season’s first
significant snow begins to fall in ernest, seemingly captured in the small,
silvery globe of my headlamp, I remain awed.
Each flake seems to chime off the bare branches, echoing onto the dried
leaves on the ground. The moment’s magic
becomes ephemeral as my watch buzzes to tell me I’ve been gone for an hour. It’s time to make my way home.
- - -
What does it take to bring
300 runners out on cold Friday night, in the middle of December, 99% of them not sporting form-fitting tights or a
technical t-shirt? A movie about running
(although if you had reasoned free food, that would be completely
understandable). December 13, Trail
Animals Running Club stalwart (and my erstwhile travel/racing companion) Michael
Tommie McDuffie organized a screening of Joel Wolpert’s film, In the High Country (a movie filmed
largely at 14,000 feet above sea level), at the New England Aquarium’s IMAX
Theatre (a setting literally sitting on the sea). As McDuffie introduced the film, he
eloquently stated how there seem to be two types of running: the kind we practice
individually, moving within a landscape and our bodies and minds; and, the kind
that brings us into a larger community of runners. So often our larger community only comes
together at races, a very distinct form of communion, that seeing a huge number
of friends “out of context,” and being reminded of this communal spirit was as
distinct a pleasure as the film itself (honestly, there were a couple of people
I had to do double-takes with because I did not recognize them with hair
coiffed and jeans on!). It was all the
great energy of a race, minus the nerves and anxiety about the task at
hand. People simply were there to enjoy
each other’s company and the IMAX’s massive screen, which even though it was
not in true IMAX-size, from where I sat in the first row, definitely made the
film’s two stars (the Rocky Mountains and Anton Krupicka) seem larger than
life.
In the High Country is, ostensibly, about the epic runs and journeys that Tony takes. Journeys that easily spark envy in runners – high
mountain summits and alpine lakes, sinewy single track, an onlooker marvelling,
as Tony crests the summit, “Did you run
up here?” The film inspires a sense of
wanderlust, that sense of freedom and adventure that a new trail, or route up a
mountain, can inspire. Yet the film
drives home a deeper point, a point espoused by both the filmmaker and star. It does not seem that Tony reaches for a summit
simply, as George Mallory stated, “because it’s there.” The drive to run to
these peaks is more about the desire to find one’s place in the physical
landscape. To feel a part of the
physical world, to feel familarity in the practice of being exposed to it, and
still be awed by its changing colors, seasons and temperments. In essence to connect and feel “at home.”
Before the screening, a
number of Trail Animals took Tony on a tour of the Blue Hills, just south of
Boston. Between skyline views and
hopping ice, the conversation ranged from trends in running gear, to our group’s
oddly color-coordinated attire, to training methods, to race plans for the
coming year, to our collective addiction to electronic devices and media, to if
said addiction is altering our neural pathways, thus making us less
intelligent, to the remedy for such devolultion (it was agreed that running in
the woods is a fine place to start!), to David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon
College commencement speech (alas, four years after Liz and I left) This is Water. In this speech Wallace suggests “. . . learning
how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and
what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you
pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” And this is what In the High Country drove home for me. A connection to place does not necessitate the
grandest vista or the steepest climbs.
It necessitates a choice in each of us to be aware enough to notice the
landscape, be it physical or human, and to choose how we will experience this,
both externally and internally.
- - -
As my watch’s delicate reminder of an hour’s passage stirs
me from my wonder, I remember that sixty minutes ago, I dreaded this
experience. I was warm. The thermometer was reading fourteen
degrees. Snow was falling. I've been fighting a cold all week. Rest is good.
Do I really want to wear a headlamp? Is it worth it if I just go for 10 minutes? I donned
my gear, and headed into the building tempest, chiding my own foolishness. Slowly I become aware of place. Each turn felt familiar, but strangely new. The hard-packed snow from earlier in the week
had changed the landscape. The falling
snow made the path different within the
hour I was in the woods. How long had I
just been standing there, listening to the snow fall? Four minutes?
Two? Thirty seconds? I was not standing on some remote peak, above
the clouds. I was in a one-hundred-twenty
acre parcel of conservation land, just minutes from my door. As I began the last few minutes of running
home, noises brought me back to my neighborhood. A snow blower clearing a driveway. A pickup, plow attached, its diesel engine rumbling
to life. Two kids laughing in their
yard. My footsteps making that perfectly
muffled sound that only the first slight layer of snow can create. Forty-two seconds from where the trail meets
the road. I’m home.
