The Empathy Exams: Essays

by Leslie Jamison

  It’s probably a misnomer to talk about getting lost at Barkley. It might be closer to the truth to say you begin lost, remain lost through several nights in the woods, and must constantly use your compass, map, instructions, fellow runners, and remaining shards of sanity to perpetually un-lose yourself again. First-timers usually try to stay with veterans who know the course, but are often scraped. “Virgin scraping” means ditching the new guy. A virgin bends down to tie his shoelaces, perhaps, and glances up to find his veteran Virgil gone.

  The day before the race, runners start arriving at camp like rain-bowed seals, sleekly gliding through the air in parti-colored body suits. They come in pickup trucks and rental cars, rusty vans and camper trailers. Their license plates say 100 Runnr, Ult Man, Crzy Run. They bring camouflage tents and orange hunting vests and skeptical girlfriends and acclimated wives and tiny travel towels and tiny dogs. Laz himself brings a little dog (named “Little Dog”) with a black spot like a pirate’s patch over one eye. Little Dog almost loses her name this year, after encountering and trying to eat an even smaller dog, the skinny one from Iowa, who turns out to be two dogs rather than just one.

  It’s a male scene. There are a few female regulars, I learn, but they rarely manage more than a loop. Most of the women in sight, like me, are part of someone’s support crew. I help sort Julian’s supplies in the back of the car.

  He needs a compass. He needs pain pills and No-Doze pills and electrolyte pills and ginger chews for when he gets sleepy and a “kit” for popping blisters that basically consists of a needle and Band-Aids. He needs tape for when his toenails start falling off. He needs batteries. We pay special attention to the batteries. Running out of batteries is the must-avoid-at-all-costs-worst-possible-thing-that-could-happen. But it has happened. It happened to Rich Limacher, whose night spent under a huge Buckeye tree earned it the name “Limacher’s Hilton.” Our coup de grâce is a pair of duct-tape pants that we’ve fashioned in the manner of cowboy chaps. They will fend off saw briars, is the idea, and earn Julian the envy of the other runners.

  Traditionally, the epicenter of camp is a chicken fire kindled on the afternoon before the race begins. This year’s fire is blazing by 4:00 p.m. It’s manned by someone named Doc Joe. Julian tells me he’s been waitlisted for several years and (he speculates) has offered himself as a helper in order to secure a spot for 2011. We arrive just as he’s spearing the first thighs from the grill. He’s got a two-foot can of beans in the fire pit, already bubbling, but the stars of this show, clearly, are the birds, skin blackened and smothered in red sauce. As legend has it, the chicken here is served partway thawed, with only skins and “a bit more” cooked.

  I ask Doc Joe how he plans to find the sweet spot between cooked and frozen. He looks at me like I’m stupid. That frozen chicken thing is just a rumor, he says. This will not be the last time, I suspect, that I catch Barkley at the game of crafting its own mythology.

  At this particular potluck, small talk rarely stays banal for long. I fall into conversation with John Price, a bearded veteran who tells me he’s sitting out the race this year, waitlisted, but has driven hundreds of miles just to be “a part of the action.” Our conversation starts predictably. He asks where I’m from. I say Los Angeles. He says he loves Venice Beach. I say I love Venice Beach, too. Then he says: “Next fall I’m running from Venice Beach to Virginia Beach to celebrate my retirement.”

  I’ve learned not to pause at this kind of declaration. I’ve learned to proceed to practical questions. I ask: “Where will you sleep?”

  “Mainly camping,” he says. “A few motels.”

  “You’ll carry the tent in a backpack?”

  “God no,” he laughs. “I’ll be pulling a small cart harnessed to my waist.”

  I find myself at the picnic table, which has become a veritable bulimic’s buffet, spread with store-bought cakes and sprinkle cookies and brownies. It’s designed to feed men who will do little for the next few days besides burn an incredible number of calories.

  The tall man next to me is tearing into a massive chicken thigh. His third, I’ve noticed. Its steam rises softly into the twilight.

  “So that whole frozen thing?” I ask him. “It’s really just a myth?”

  “It was one year,” he says. “It was honest-to-God frozen.” He pauses. “Man! That year was a great race.”

  This guy introduces himself as Carl—broad and good looking, he’s a bit less sinewy than many of his fellow runners. He tells me he runs a machine shop down in Atlanta. As best I can gather, this means he uses his machines to build other machines, or else he uses his machines to build things that aren’t machines—like bicycle parts or flyswatters. He works by commission. “The people who ask for crazy inventions,” he sighs, “are never the ones who can afford them.”

  Carl tells me that he’s got an ax to grind this time around. He’s got a strong history at Barkley—one of the few runners who has finished a Fun Run under official time—but his performance last year was dismal. “I barely left camp,” he says. Translated, this means he ran only thirty-five miles. But it was genuinely disappointing: he didn’t even finish a second loop. He tells me he was dead-tired and heartbroken. He’d just gone through a nasty breakup.

  But now he’s back. He looks pumped. I ask him who he thinks the major contenders are to complete a hundred.

  “Well,” he says, “there’s always Blake and AT.”

  He means two of the “alumni” (former finishers) who are running this year: Blake Wood, class of 2001, and Andrew Thompson, class of 2009. Finishing the hundred twice would make history. Two years in a row is the stuff of fantasy.

  Blake is a nuclear engineer at Los Alamos with a doctorate from Berkeley and an incredible Barkley record: six for six Fun Run completions; one finish; another near-finish that was blocked only by a flooded creek. In person, he’s just a friendly middle-aged dad with a salt-and-pepper mustache, eager to talk about his daughter’s bid to qualify for the Olympic Marathon Trials, and about the new pair of checkered clown pants he’ll wear this year to boost his spirits on the trail.

  AT is Andrew Thompson, a youngish guy from New Hampshire famous for a near-finish in 2004, when he was strong heading into his fifth loop but literally lost his mind when he was out there—battered from fifty hours of sleep deprivation and physical strain. He completely forgot about the race. He spent an hour squishing mud in his shoes. He came back every year until he finally finished the thing in 2009.

  There’s Jonathan Basham, AT’s best support crew for years, at Barkley for his own race this time around. He’s a strong runner, though I mainly hear him mentioned in the context of his relationship to AT, who calls him “Jonboy.”

  Though Carl doesn’t say it, I learn from others that he’s a strong contender too. He’s one of the toughest runners in the pack, a DNF (Did Not Finish) veteran hungry for a win.

  There are some strong virgins in the pack, including Charlie Engle, already an accomplished ultrarunner (he’s “done” the Sahara—which, in this world, means running across it on foot). Like many ultrarunners, he’s also a former addict. He’s been sober for nearly twenty years, and his recovery has been described as the switch from one addiction to another—drugs for adrenaline, trading that extreme for this one.

  If there’s such a thing as the opposite of a virgin, it’s probably John DeWitt. He’s an old man in a black ski cap, seventy-three and wrinkled, with a gruff voice that sounds like it should belong to a smoker or a cartoon grizzly bear. He tells me that his nine-year-old grandson recently beat him in a 5K. Later, I will hear him described as an animal. He’s been running the race for twenty years—never managing a finish, or even a Fun Run.

  I watch Laz from across the campfire. He’s darkly regal in his trench coat, warming his hands over the flames. I want to meet him, but haven’t yet summoned the courage to introduce myself. When I look at him I can’t help thinking of Heart of Darkness. Like Kurtz, Laz is bald and charismatic, leader of a m
inor empire, trafficker in human pain. He’s like a cross between the Colonel and my grandpa. There’s certainly an Inner-Station splendor to his orchestration of this whole hormone extravaganza, testosterone spread like fertilizer across miles of barren and brambled wilderness.

  He speaks to “his runners” with comfort and fondness, as if they are a batch of wayward sons turned feral each year at the flick of his lighter. Most have been running “for him” (their phrase) for years. All of them bring offerings. Everyone pays a $1.60 entry fee. Alumni bring Laz a pack of his favorite cigarettes (Camel filters), veterans bring a new pair of socks, and virgins are responsible for a license plate. These license plates hang like laundry at the edge of camp, a wall of clattering metal flaps. Julian has brought one from Liberia, where—in his non-superhero incarnation as a development economist—he is working on a microfinance project. I ask him how one manages to procure a spare license plate in Liberia. He tells me he asked a guy on the street and the guy said ten dollars and Julian gave him five and then it appeared. Laz immediately strings it in a place of honor, right in the center, and I can tell Julian is pleased.

  All through the potluck, runners pore over their instructions, five single-spaced pages that tell them “exactly where to go”—though every single runner, even those who’ve run the course for years, will probably get lost at least once, many of them for hours at a time. It’s hard for me to understand this—can’t you just do what they say?—until I look at the instructions themselves. They range from surprising (“the coal pond beavers have been very active this year, be careful not to fall on one of the sharpened stumps they have left”) to self-evident (“all you have to do is keep choosing the steepest path up the mountain”). But the instructions tend to cite landmarks like “the ridge” or “the rock” that seem less than useful, considering. And then there’s the issue of the night.

  The official Barkley requirements read like a treasure hunt: there are ten books placed at various points along the course, and runners are responsible for ripping out the pages that match their race number. Laz is playful in his book choices: The Most Dangerous Game, Death by Misadventure, A Time to Die—even Heart of Darkness, a choice that vindicates all my associative impulses.

  The big talk this year is about Laz’s latest addition to the course: a quarter-mile cement tunnel that runs directly under the grounds of the old penitentiary. There’s a fifteen-foot drop to get in, a narrow concrete shaft to climb out, and “plenty of” standing water once you’re inside. There are also, rumor has it, rats the size of possums and—when it gets warmer—snakes the size of arms. Whose arms? I wonder. Most of the guys here are pretty wiry.

  The seventh course book has been hung between two poles next to the old penitentiary walls. “This is almost exactly the same place James Earl Ray went over,” the instructions say. And then they say: “Thanks a lot, James.”

  Thanks a lot, James—for getting all this business started.

  Laz has given himself the freedom to start the race whenever he wants. He announces the date but offers only two guarantees: that it will begin “sometime” between midnight and noon (thanks a lot, Laz), and that he will blow the conch shell an hour beforehand in warning. In general, Laz likes to start before dawn.

  At the start gate, Julian is wearing a light silver jacket, a pale gray skullcap, and his homemade duct-tape chaps. He looks like a robot. He disappears uphill in a flurry of camera flashes.

  Immediately after the runners take off, Doc Joe and I start grilling waffles. Laz strolls over with his glowing cigarette, its gray cap of untapped ash quaking between his thick fingers. I introduce myself. He introduces himself. He asks us if we think anyone has noticed that he’s not actually smoking. “I can’t this year,” he explains, “because of my leg.” He has just had surgery on an artery and his circulation isn’t good. Despite this he will set up a lawn chair by the finish line, just like every year, and stay awake until every competitor has either dropped or finished. Dropping, unless you drop at the single point accessible by trail, involves a five- to six-hour commute back into camp—longer at night, especially if you get lost. Which effectively means that the act of ceasing to compete in the Barkley race is harder than running most marathons.

  I tell him the cigarette looks great as an accessory. Doc Joe tells him that he’s safe up to a couple of packs. Doc Joe, by the way, is really a doctor.

  “Well then,” Laz smiles. “Guess I’ll smoke the last quarter of this one.” He finishes the cigarette and then tosses it into our cooking fire, where it smokes right into our breakfast. I am aware that Laz has already been turned into a myth, and that I will probably become another one of his mythmakers. Various tropes of masculinity are at play in Laz’s persona—bad-ass, teenager, father, demon, warden—and this Rubik’s cube of grit and edges seems to be what Barkley’s all about.

  I realize Laz and I will have many hours to spend in each other’s company. The runners are out on their loops anywhere from eight to thirty-two hours. Between loops, if they’re continuing, they stop at camp for a few moments of food and rest. This is both succor and sadism; the oasis offers respite and temptation at once. It’s the Lotus Eater’s dilemma: hard to leave a good thing behind.

  I use these hours without the runners to ask Laz everything I can about the race. I start with the start: how does he choose the time? He laughs uneasily. I backtrack, apologizing: would it ruin the mystery to tell me?

  “One time I started at three,” he says, as if in answer. “That was fun.”

  “Last year you started at noon, right? I heard the runners got a little restless.”

  “Sure did.” He shakes his head, smiling at the memory. “Folks were just standing around getting antsy.”

  “Was it fun watching them agonize?” I ask.

  “Little bit frightening, actually,” he says. “Like watching a mob turn ugly.”

  As we speak, he mentions sections of the course—Dave’s Danger Climb, Raw Dog Falls, Pussy Ridge—as if I’d know them by heart. I ask whether Rat Jaw is called that because the briars are like a bunch of little rodent teeth. He says no, it has to do with the topographic profile on a map: it reminded him of—well, of a rat jaw. I think to myself: a lot of things might remind you of a rat jaw. The briar scratches are known as rat bites. Laz once claimed that the briars wouldn’t give you scratches any worse than the ones you’d get from baptizing a cat.

  I ask about Meth Lab Hill, wondering what its topographic profile could possibly resemble.

  “That’s easy,” he says. “First time we ran it we saw a meth lab.”

  “Still operating?”

  “Yep,” he laughs. “Those suckers thought they’d never get found. Bet they were thinking: who the fuck would possibly come over this hill?”

  I begin to see why Laz has been so vocal about his new sections: the difficulty of The Bad Thing, the novelty of the prison tunnel. They mark his power over the terrain.

  Laz has endured quite a bit of friction with park officials over the years. The race was nearly shut down for good by a man named Jim Fyke, who was upset about erosion and endangered plants. Laz simply rerouted the course around protected areas and called the detour “Fyke’s Folly.”

  I can sense Laz’s nostalgia for wilder days—when Frozen Head was still dense with the ghosts of fled felons and outlaws, thick with undiscovered junkies and their squirreled-away cold medicine. Times are different now, tamer. Just last year the Rangers cut the briars on Rat Jaw a week before the race. Laz was pissed. This year, he made them promise to wait until April.

  His greatest desire seems to be to devise an unrunnable race, to sustain the immortal horizon of an unbeatable challenge with contours fresh and unknowable. After the first year, when no one even came close to finishing, Laz wrote an article headlined: “The ‘Trail’ Wins the Barkley Marathons.” It’s not hard to imagine how Laz, reclining on his lawn chair, might consider the course itself his avatar: his race is a competitor strong enough to triumph,
even when he can barely stand.

  He used to run this race, in days of better health, but never managed to finish it. Instead, he’s managed to garner respect as a man of principle—a man so committed to the notion of pain that he’s willing to rally men in its pursuit.

  There are only two public trails that intersect the course: Lookout Tower, at the end of South Mac Trail, and Chimney Top. Laz discourages meeting runners while they’re running. “Even just the sight of other human beings is a kind of aid,” he explains. “We want them to feel the full weight of their aloneness.”

  That said, a woman named Cathie—who looks like an ordinary housewife but is also one of a handful of veteran female “loopers”—recommends Chimney Top for a hike.

  “I broke my arm there in January,” she says, “but it’s pretty.”

  “Sounds fun,” I say.

  “Was it that old log over the stream?” Laz asks wistfully, as if remembering an old friend.

  She shakes her head.

  He asks: “Was Raw Dog with you when you did it?”

  “Yep.”

  “Was he laughing?”

  A man who appears to be her husband, presumably “Raw Dog,” pipes in: “Her arm was in an S-shape, Laz. I wasn’t laughing.”

  Laz considers this for a moment. Then he asks her: “Did it hurt?”

  “Think I blocked it out,” she laughs. “But I heard I was cussing the whole way down the mountain.”

  I watch Laz shift modes fluidly between calloused maestro and den father. “After nightfall,” he assures Doc Joe, “there will be carnage,” but then he bends down to pet his pirate dog. “You hungry, Little?” he asks. “You might have got a lot of love today, but you still need to eat.” Whenever I see him around camp, he says: “You think Julian is having fun out there?” and I finally say: “I fucking hope not!” and he smiles: This girl gets it.

  But I can’t help thinking his question dissolves precisely the kind of loneliness he seems so interested in producing, and his runners so interested in courting. The idea that when you are alone out there, someone back at camp is thinking of you alone out there, is—of course—just another kind of connection. Which is part of the point of this, right? That the hardship facilitates a shared solitude, an utter isolation that has been experienced before, by others, and will be experienced again, that these others are present in spirit even if the wilds have tamed or aged or brutalized or otherwise removed their bodies.