Up the street from the trailer park, I jog past the Seventh Day Baptist parsonage. The pastor’s car caught fire once. Total loss, but we kept the fire out of an overhanging pine tree. Next door to the parsonage, a small green house. We’ve been there several times to treat a toddler having seizures. Two doors farther down, the house where I fought my first chimney fire. I’d been in town only a few weeks, and when the siren went off, I ran to the hall, thinking, Please let me not do anything stupid. I’ve always been one for setting the bar low. I was an awful basketball player in high school, and was flooded with relief when I went to the foul line during a game and missed the shot, but hit the rim. Anything but an air ball, I remember thinking. I jumped in the brush rig with Mack Most, a department veteran, and, bless his heart, he popped the clutch and blasted out the garage door, forgetting the battery charger hooked to the on-board pump. The charger hit the floor with a screech and a clank, and I felt the same craven relief as I had on the free-throw line. Veteran screwed up, pressure’s off. Once we got to the fire I mostly hauled buckets of ash and cinder. Tony Barker reminded me to leave the hose nozzles cracked on nights this cold so the water didn’t freeze, and he showed me the trick to popping the heavy lantern out of the charger rack on the pumper. Little bits of knowledge to be squirreled away. Last month we responded to an alarm at the new high school and I found one of the new guys fighting to get the lantern loose. I reached over his shoulder and popped it right out. Now he knows. Off to the right I see the banker’s house. Never been there on a call, but in grade school, his daughter hit me with a dodge ball and chipped my two front teeth. I never got them fixed. When I muse, I mouth-breathe and poke at the divots with my tongue.
To the stop sign now, the one marking the end of East Street where it tees with County Road AA. There’s a little house out here, stuck out away from the rest of the town. Used to be yellow, and one night we went there because a woman thought she was having a heart attack. I believe what she was having was her seventeenth beer. I gave her a sternal rub, this thing they teach you that is the equivalent of giving someone a chest noogie, and she didn’t even flinch. At some point, that family moved on, and now Lisa (the firefighter who went into the trailer with me) lives there with her boyfriend. He’s a master electrician. They’ve fixed the place up nice—new siding, sturdy garage. They’ve got a nifty kennel setup on the back of the garage, where they keep half a dozen coon dogs. When I turn right at the stop sign and head west past the house, the dogs howl and bay. I haven’t been coon hunting since high school. It’s a pleasure listening to the dogs work, to hear the change in their tune when they switch to barking tree, and I liked stumbling through the woods and swamps after dark—so familiar by day, so foreign at night—but I never quite got used to the part where the treed coon was transfixed in the light and shot. When the coon hit the ground, the dogs set upon it in a fury. A coon will rip a dog up good, and given water enough, will drown a dog by dunking its head, but I was never comfortable with the coon hunt denouement. These days, a coon skin isn’t worth much, and you can’t run the land the way you used to, what with all the newcomers and smaller properties, so coon hunting is on the fade. Lisa and her boyfriend have taken to running bear. Another stop sign. I look left, right, left, and head across old Highway 53.
I try to stay in shape for the usual reasons, but also because it makes me feel better on fire and ambulance runs. You’ll notice your average volunteer firefighter isn’t always in fighting trim. If my heart has to pound—and it does, every time—I’d like it to pound strong. Although I do fear the Jim Fixx curse. Fixx was one of the forefathers of the jogging movement. Kept himself in tip-top shape. And keeled over dead at the age of fifty-two, while running. The comedian Denis Leary speculates he was discovered by a pair of smokers on their way to the 7-Eleven for a pack of Lucky’s. It will be a matter of no small irony if my beer-bellied brethren drag my carcass off someday, thanks to some anomalous disruption in my QRS complex. Or thanks to my getting smacked by a turkey truck while taking my aerobic constitutional. I feel good when I’m in shape, though, and so I put down the Ho-Hos, drag myself out of the chair, and run the loop.
I am across the old highway now, across the railroad tracks, and leaning into the easy uphill curve of County Q. I was chugging along here last fall when I was forced to the shoulder by a pack of Amish youths cruising down the hill on RollerBlades. There is really no way to prepare for that sort of thing.
I’m a little loath to write about the Amish, because I am not an expert on their culture and beliefs, and it seems that most folks are. You’ll notice that people who wouldn’t know the Pope from the Reverend Sun-Myung Moon will jump to set you straight on the Amish creed, rattling on at great length and detail about what it is exactly that the Amish will not eat, snort, wear, do, or drive. I have a friend who has researched, lived with, and written about the Amish for years. When she lived with an Amish family for a week and wrote about the experience for a popular magazine, it seemed that half of her mail was written by hair-triggered autodidacts questioning her authority because they had spied a telephone wire in one of the accompanying photos. The truth is that the Amish spin off splinter sects as prolifically as every other group organized around religion and lifestyle. “Our” Amish, apparently, are OK with the in-line skating.
I worked on a building crew with a local Amish fellow one summer. His name was Levi, and I gave him a ride to the job site every day. He tended to hog the power tools, but other than that we got along fine. I once interviewed a man who drove the Budweiser Clydesdales at the World Series, and it turned out that he was lapsed Amish. As lapses go, that’s world class. He said several of the drivers were lapsed Amish, a fact he attributed to the diminishing number of young people in America raised to drive horses. One of the Amish neighbor boys used to go deer hunting with us. He wore a red satin ribbon around his neck to ward off nosebleeds. Today my mother and his trade food and baby-sitting tips.
There have been Amish families in the area for years, but lately the influx has increased. Most are not your postcard Amish. In addition to the skating, they cuss and smoke cheroots. Several of them live in slapdash trailer houses. I have hung with them at auctions and they say rude things about particular women. One night when I was on my way to take the night shift on the Chetek ambulance, a horse and carriage pulled out from the convenience store parking lot ahead of me. We were only about 300 yards from the Highway 53 on-ramp, so rather than pass, I just settled in behind. I was kind of relishing the cross-cultural moment when my Amish brother leaned out and slung a Popsicle wrapper into my headlights. An Amish litterbug. It was like seeing Santa Claus hawk a loogie in the mall.
It would appear that what we have here—and appropriately so—are your redneck Amish. I’m all for it. The friend who wrote the magazine piece tells of how a loud bejeweled woman in a Lincoln once reported a picturesque Amish man to the local tourism board because he wouldn’t stop plowing and pose for a snapshot. I’d like to think that if she’d tried that with our Amish, they’d have skated her down, made rude comments about her pantsuit, and stubbed out their Swisher Sweets on her Valino-grain Landau vinyl roof.
At the crest of the rise in Highway Q, I cross the Highway 53 overpass. If it’s daylight, a trucker might blow his horn or a motorist might wave, but mostly everyone is preoccupied with pell-melling one place or the other, bound for home or the cabin up north, or hammering off to Wal-Mart to buy yet another plastic storage bin. In the summer, you’ll see a lot of Illinois plates. Saturday afternoons you’ll see battered stock cars on trailers being towed to the dirt track races up north. There are times—the Friday night before opening day of deer season, for one—when the northbound flow will be steady late into the night, a river of taillights. The whole works reverses itself late Sunday afternoon. Mostly, though, traffic is spotty. From up here along the bridge rail, you hear the hiss of the tires more than the engines.
Sometimes condensation will form up beneath the overpass, a
nd if it’s cold enough, an ice slick forms. One night, a van pulling a horse trailer hit the ice and flipped. When the page came in, I was setting up a tent in my living room and eating venison jerky. I was leaving for Central America the next day. When I ran out of the house, I had a piece of the jerky stuck in my teeth. I sucked and probed at that thing throughout the whole call. Drove me nuts until I got back to the fire hall and flossed it loose with a piece of paper torn from an envelope. It was face-numbing cold and snowing out there. We were dispersing to check for victims when we heard this buzzing sound, so low it didn’t register at first, and when we turned, a car was pinwheeling toward us. The buzz was emanating from the snow tire treads as they slid across the ice. The car whizzed right through our little group. It was one of those moments where you just exchange glances knowing you are alive only by luck and by inches, shake your head, and go back to work. Twenty-four hours later, I was in Belize City, sweating under my backpack and fending off a street hustler. We function under cosmic whims.
By the time I make the overpass, I can tell what sort of run it’s going to be. My heart rate is up, the sweat is flowing, my breathing has settled on an in-and-out groove. Lately I’ve been able to push the pace below seven minutes per mile, but I reckon my days as a sub-five miler are gone for good. Advancing age, for one thing. A maturing aversion to elective suffering, for another. A stretch of several years spent racing bicycles left me with the heavy quads and glutes of a sprinter, sans the speed. And any runner will tell you there are times when you feel like your feet are set in concrete, no matter what shape you’re in. But some nights—through the aggregate voodoo of biorhythm, the alignment of the Crab Nebula, and the angle of approaching weather fronts—I feel as if I am in my little Trojan top, heading into the last turn, trim and kicking it a little, with no one between me and the finish line.
Almost immediately after the overpass, I turn right, heading due west again, down Tarr Road, named after Charles Tarr, the man who surveyed and platted our village in 1883. There is a machine shed and a set of grain bins on the corner here, always kept neat as a pin by the farmer who owns them. He was transferring some liquid fertilizer last spring when a coupler broke, and he took a pretty good dose to the face. I drove the ambulance so that the two Bloomer EMTs could work together in the back, flushing his eyes and keeping close watch on his respiratory status. We got him to the hospital in a hurry, and it was good to see him back on his tractor later that week.
Just past the grain bins, the land opens and falls away north in a gentle, expansive draw. A good chunk of the village is visible from here, and you can form a picture of how the area looked when David Cartwright arrived to set up his sawmill in 1875. I enjoy erasing the buildings, trying to imagine the view as it was in the days of the Sioux and Ojibwa, the timber so thick snow clung to the north side of hills through the end of summer. When the logging crews stripped the trees, sunlight went straight to the earth, and the growing season expanded by ten days, or so a local history book claims.
From this perspective you can understand what the state highway designers saw on their topographical maps, how they designed the four lanes to sweep up the draw, skirting the south and west sides of the village in a wide curve. Old Highway 53 ran right up the gut of the village, and when the highway moved out of town, it stripped those guts out. Like countless other villages in similar circumstances, New Auburn is creeping out toward the newer interchange, but progress has been slow. We don’t get enough traffic to keep the Gas-N-Go open after midnight.
Onward now, past Dave David’s dairy farm and his archetypical red barn full of archetypical Holstein milk cows. Through the 1970s, this country was studded with one-man operations like Dave’s. Today his setup is rapidly approaching museum status. During the holiday season, he strings the tall face of the barn with blue Christmas lights in the shape of a giant Star of Bethlehem, visible to all the southbound cars on the freeway. When I run past it at night, it makes me feel small and steady.
I tend to run at night. The idea of running in the morning is repulsive, and I retain strong reservations about anyone who launches their day with briskness of any sort, let alone an alacritous jog. I’ll run before dinner sometimes. That seems civilized, and the metabolic boost is a friend to digestion. But the best running is after midnight. Especially in the frozen heart of winter. The earth is still, and the air is liquid ice. Every breath is a purification. I’ll have been writing, I’ll be all tanked up and humming on black coffee, but by the time I hit Tarr Road, everything is recalibrated. The ratio of breaths to footfalls fixes itself in my head (again, the compulsive counting) and becomes a mantra. Four footfalls in, four footfalls out, usually. Down a stride or two on hills. When I reach this state, the running becomes autonomic. Mind and body separate. The bone-and-muscle machine churns along, all kinetics and mechanics, literally a body in motion. The mind, focused by rhythm, settles into a placid state of cogitation. It is fascinating to contemplate the unspooling of thought amid all the corporeal overrevving. I have unstuck many an essay while running Tarr Road. The tangential associations that lead from one thing to another seem to reveal themselves, flushed from cover by the hydraulics of pumping blood. Sometimes the sorting is personal—I have arrived at signal decisions (re-finance the house; tell her we need to see other people; paint the old International dark green and the rims black) on that little westbound stretch.
If the night is particularly black, the road will be indiscernible at my feet, and despite that fact that I am bundled and bulky, the invisibility of the blacktop heightens the sensation that I am running lightly. I trust my feet to find their way, to read the road as they hit it, to share the information with my gyroscope head and make the perpetual split-second adjustments required to keep the body upright. One deep-freeze night, I ran the loop at about two A.M., under weak moonlight. The road was patchy with pack snow and exposed blacktop. White patches and black patches. I stepped on the black patches wherever possible. Just past the barn and the Star of Bethlehem, the black patch in front of me—not six feet away—exploded with a whuff! and went gallumphing away, now a black spot receding across an open field. My heart was going like a trip-hammer. The black spot was a black bear. Another two yards and I’d have been astride the beast. Although I was running into a slight headwind, I can’t understand how I got so close before he bolted. Or why that bear wasn’t hibernating. I navigated the remainder of the course at premium velocity.
By the time I descend Rogge Hill—a meteor once slid from the black sky here at such a vertiginous angle it threw me off stride—and make the right turn onto County M, I am into oxygen debt. Most of the clear thinking is finished. The body reclaims my attention. I have to focus on my legs to keep them driving, focus on the counting to keep the ratios tuned. This is the stretch for mind over matter.
Last spring I spotted the first flowers of the year here. When the snow recedes, it leaves the ditch grass flat, and you’ll spy a lot of little treasures. Lots of trash, sure—your beer cans, your IGA broasted chicken boxes, your foam coffee cups, a bundle of discarded deer legs—but some unexpected goodies now and then. I found a nine-inch adjustable jaw wrench once, and a magnetic door sign from an electric company truck. I switched the wrench from hand to hand the rest of the way home, thrilled to chalk a twelve-dollar victory into the sparse little “things that went my way” column we all keep in our head. The door sign I stuck on my fridge. The electric company had changed names, so I figured they wouldn’t miss it. At one foot by three feet, it is the mother of all refrigerator magnets.
The flowers were in the left-hand ditch, right at the base of the final hill. I’m not a big flower guy—I prefer green to gaudy—but their vivid magenta stood out so against the muddy tailings of the ditch that I was compelled to stop. I bent to look them over and was struck by their delicacy. They had the shape of tiny daisies. Each flower was about the size of a dime, and they were arranged in a piquant little clump. “Yay, life!” they seemed to say. You cou
ldn’t help but get a little boost. I started running again, and sixty yards down the road, spotted another flash of color. A mint copy of Bizarre Letters. Red-letter headlines: “NASTY NIPPLES,” “DIRTY LITTLE PANTIES,” “I WATCH MY WIFE GET BANGED!”
Up the last hill now, a long climb up and around the last curve into town. To my left, a cornfield that caught fire the first year I was with the department. Got it shut down before it made the buildings. To my right, a handful of horses that have a habit of crowding the fence and pacing me up the hill. I look at them rippling and snorting and figure they must take me for a halting toad. The dog at the top of the hill will bark and chase, but he never bites. Around the curve then, and crest the rise to the overpass that takes me back over the four-lane. The town opens up to me here, straight through to Main Street, and once again I can superimpose history. I have seen the photos from the turn of the century—the buildings arranged in a sparse huddle, the long-gone clapboard schoolhouse, the vanished United Brethren Church, the false-front buildings and plank sidewalks, Mr. Tarr’s farm right on Main Street, his rectangular white beehives scattered across a field where the fire hall stands today. If I study the pictures for too long, I am swept with that futile longing we humans seem to have for irrecoverable days. I ache to step into the photo, just have a look around. The best I can do is ignore the asphalt and conjure up the dirt track I see in the old pictures, soft and ribboned with buggy tracks. Two blocks and I am recrossing the railroad. Half a block more, and I am at my porch. If it’s summer, and the sun is still up, I’ll take off my shoes and socks and sit on the stoop with something cold to drink. My body feels flush and my heart feels strong. I rest my back against the storm door, wiggle my toes some, and when someone drives by, I give that little hometown nod.
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