by Katie Arnold
On that day, however, it wasn’t Pippa’s usual nap time. As I walked up the switchbacks to the top of the hill and began descending, her marble eyes flicked open and shut, watching me watching her. I could hear hikers behind me on the trail; the sun was still up but wouldn’t be for long. If I hustled, I’d make it back to the car before it set.
I was a quarter mile from the parking lot when I rounded a bend and saw a man ten feet away, coming toward me. He had a shag of graying hair and wore shorts and a sweatshirt. His legs were deeply bronzed, the kind of tan you get when you live outside all year long and not on purpose. Homeless tan. I recognized him right away—a sixty-something guy Steve and I often saw trudging up the side of the road, carrying a plastic grocery bag in each hand. Shorts Man, we called him. We assumed he bivouacked in a camp on the edge of the forest with another homeless local we referred to as Duster Man, for the ankle-length oilskin coat he wore winter and summer, along with a coonskin cap.
My brain made a series of instant calculations, like a slot machine spinning. Because I’d seen him before, he was familiar, and because he was familiar, there was no reason to be afraid. And because there was no reason to be afraid, I raised my hand in greeting and kept walking toward him.
Only…there was something weird. Shorts Man was missing an arm. One arm was swinging next to him the way arms naturally do, but the other was gone.
Just as my brain struggled to recalibrate, the arm appeared. It had been behind his back. This was a grand, if momentary, relief. He had an arm! And the arm was—
The arm was throwing a rock.
Shorts Man was eight feet away from me. The rock was the size of a grapefruit. It wobbled at first, as though in slow motion, suspended by air and time and disbelief, and then, as my brain adapted, assumed terminal velocity straight for my head.
It hit me right above my left temple. My knees gave out. As I fell, I instinctively pressed my hand to the baby carrier and pulled Pippa toward me. My first emotion wasn’t fear but outrage: I cannot believe this fucker just threw a rock at me. At my baby! On the trail! This can’t be happening.
The blood dripping into my eyes was proof that it was. I lay in the dirt, but I couldn’t stay there because—
He was running toward us.
The slot machine spun. Cherries, oranges, sevens. Fuck, help, stop. Nothing aligned, and then it did. Get up. Get up. Get up.
I staggered to my feet and began to run. Straight uphill, off the trail, smacking piñon branches with one arm, cradling Pippa’s back with the other as he chased me. Someone was screaming so ferociously it reverberated off the hills. The person screaming was me.
I took one fast glance behind me. Shorts Man was nowhere. I’d dropped him. A couple of hikers ran toward me, screaming, “We’re here! What happened?” and staring with horror-movie eyes. I looked down: There was blood splattered across the carrier and the canvas sun hood that covered Pippa’s head. She had not moved a muscle or made a single sound during the attack. Had she been hit, too? I pushed back the flap and there she was, staring up at me without blinking. Unscathed. Like a baby bird in a nest that instinctively knew it must keep absolutely still and silent to survive.
The hikers escorted me down the trail, one on either side, and called 9-1-1. Shorts Man had vanished into the trees. “You’re lucky it didn’t hit your temple. It could have killed you,” the paramedic told me in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, where the ER doctor would give me four stitches and Pippa a clean bill of health.
This is what I didn’t say aloud but couldn’t stop thinking: The rock was the size of Pippa’s head. What if it had struck her instead of me?
* * *
—
A few days later, the man was caught and arrested. He’d been living in a tent in a thicket of trees just off the trail, adjacent to a neighborhood. Residents sometimes gave him rides and glassed his camp worriedly through binoculars from their kitchen windows. On the morning of the attack, he’d suffered a schizophrenic break; he thought his body was on fire and crawled into the creek to put it out. He was hiking back to his camp when he came across me and became paranoid that I was going to hurt him. He pleaded guilty to assault and endangerment of a child, both felonies, and was sentenced to twelve months in the county jail.
After the attack, I stopped hiking with Pippa. I stopped hiking altogether. Even when I pushed Pippa in her stroller on the sidewalk downtown, I flinched when someone approached us abruptly. When I started missing the trails too much, I called friends to go hiking with us.
A year later, in November 2009, I got pregnant for the second time. Pippa was sixteen months old, and so rambunctious she no longer wanted to be cooped up in the carrier, so I hiked alone once more. The man who’d attacked me was still in jail, I reasoned. What were the odds of the same thing happening twice?
I walked up Picacho almost every day, carrying a small vial of pepper spray Steve had bought for me. When I got to the summit, I sat on a rock and looked for ravens. They were my sign that everything was okay: with the baby inside me and the trail that would lead me home. I’d hear them first, their wings whooshing above the piñons, cawing as though through a mouthful of pebbles. Then I’d look up and see them rise on the thermals, onyx against the clear sky, whirling and chortling and dive-bombing one another, but never in malice, and a calm would come over me. They knew nothing of the turmoil on the ground. They dipped and soared, the embodiment of fearlessness and freedom.
* * *
—
There’s a difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is a response to a known threat; it emanates from our cerebral cortex, the center for rational thought and the only part of the human brain able to distinguish between real and imagined danger. Anxiety, however, is dread of a perceived or imagined threat, of what could happen; it is anticipatory, not actual. It originates from the amygdala, which triggers the classic fight-or-flight response, which has kept us alive for millennia. It is the voice inside of us that says that man on the trail doesn’t look right. Turn around. NOW.
During periods of prolonged stress or trauma, the amygdala’s warning system can become too sensitive, overriding the cortex. It’s increasingly difficult to switch off the fight-or-flight impulse and distinguish between real threats and imagined disasters. Flooded with the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, your body exists in a state of constant anxiety, immobilized in clammy terror, battered by intrusive thoughts. The worries feed on themselves, magnifying until you’re locked in a vicious cycle of perpetual alarm.
Running long distances doesn’t erase my anxiety, but it does help me manage it. Caught up in the physical effort, I detach from the circuitous worry in my brain. There are practical hazards that require my attention, like looking for bears and not tripping over my own feet and pitching off a cliff. At night, I no longer lie awake in a state of hypervigilance, convinced I’m dying. I’m so exhausted, I fall asleep as soon as I turn off the light.
And while I still fret about invisible diseases, my body tells a different story. My quads are taut, my glutes more defined. I can run uphill with a friend and talk without huffing too noticeably. My skin is clear and has a healthy glow. The circles under my eyes have faded; the frown creases beside my mouth are less pronounced. Running is both cure and proof of the cure. If I can run twenty miles and come home and take the girls to the park and finish a story on deadline, I can’t possibly be dying of cancer.
* * *
—
From a young age we’re conditioned to suppress fear. This has always been my strategy. I feigned bravery in front of Dad at all costs. I put myself in the crosshairs of risk to prove I wasn’t a wimp. I worked in an office of macho guys, where vulnerability in the wilderness, in writing, and in life was discouraged.
But trying to repress fear is counterproductive. It only makes it worse. Fear itself isn’t good or bad. It’s our resistan
ce to it—our fear of fear, our anxiety—that makes us suffer so. The trick is not to run from it but to follow it. “Make friends with your fear,” Natalie sometimes says. “What’s beneath it?”
This was the same thing, more or less, I’d heard when I went to Utah earlier that winter with my friend Mary. We’d signed up for a skiing clinic led by former world champion Kristen Ulmer, but it wasn’t your typical sports camp: We wouldn’t learn downhill technique; her coaching was all mental—by training our minds to be more expansive and present, we would become more confident on and off the mountain.
On the first day, I rode the chairlift with Kristen and two other participants. She gave us a scenario: Envision our absolute worst fear; close our eyes and imagine it happening. I’d done this so many times already that the image came easily. Losing one of the girls—this was without a doubt the absolute worst thing. As I sat there with my skis swinging above the powdery slopes, I pictured unthinkable loss. I felt it. My eyes stung and I started to cry. It was so painful, but for once there was nowhere to run. I just sat there, sobbing quietly.
Finally Kristen spoke. “Breathe in your worst fear and breathe out the possibility of ever letting go of that fear.” This is not what I wanted to hear. I’d come to Alta to exorcise my anxiety once and for all, to burn it out of me in one go, or, if not, then to squelch it as best I could. Bad idea. “If you ignore your fear,” Kristen continued, “it becomes like a sullen teenager, raging in the basement, tearing the place apart. It becomes anxiety.” She had faced so many of her own fears—perilous couloirs, avalanches, mediocrity, failure. There is never any end to the fears. The trick is to move toward them, not away.
Running is as good a way as any to try. I’m alone with the voices in my head for hours at a time. I can study my anxiety for patterns; I see its ragged, wily persistence. I greet it with a halfhearted wave as I would someone I’ve known a very long time but am not entirely happy to see. Oh, you again. Some days my worry is more acute and sometimes less, but it’s always part of the package: inescapable, chronic, not so very different from love itself. The crux is to live as big as you can, to love it all even when you stand to lose it all.
* * *
—
On the first of April 2011, my cellphone rings. “This is the Santa Fe County Adult Correctional Facility,” a woman’s voice says.
I cannot fathom why she might be calling me. I think, Is this some kind of April Fool’s joke?
She says, “I’m calling about a case that may be of personal interest to you.”
Great, I think, my confusion turning to irritation. Who got arrested? Steve?
She continues: “I’m notifying you that Bill B___ was released today.” She explains that my attacker is free to go where he chooses, that his psychological treatment has ended, and that if I have trouble with him in the future, I can file a restraining order.
I know he probably has no memory of the attack and wouldn’t be able to pick me out of a crowd. “Thank you for letting me know,” I reply, and hang up. There’s nothing else to say.
Now Bill is back in the world. Some days I pass him in my car on the street. He is browned by the sun, still limping with his stiff-legged gait, still carrying his grocery bags. He is favoring one bad ankle, and he looks older, less threatening and more vulnerable. Sometimes I see him skulking along the perimeter of the playground where I take Pippa to play. He’s no more than twenty feet away, his eyes lowered, and I recoil instinctively and look away to let him pass. To let myself, and my fear, pass.
I have to recalibrate again. In my new hierarchy of risk, running is safer than hiking, because it is faster. I can get away more quickly. After my terrible encounter with Bill, I understand things about myself that I’ve known but never quite trusted: That I can run. That I am fast. That my body and mind will always know what to do. And that running isn’t something to fear. It could save my life. It already has.
I don’t go back to the trail where it happened. I stay in my mountains, where the slopes are steeper and less accessible. These hills are farther from town and do not border private property, and to some people the remoteness might make them seem riskier, but in my logic, this makes them safer. I learn to count cars at the trailhead. More cars means more people to help me if I need it. But the wrong cars—sketchy vans with boarded-up windows or pickup trucks with little wooden shacks listing on the bed—are worse. I go on instinct. Sometimes when I drop into a hollow by the creek or run off the back side of Atalaya into shadows and something about the light or air feels wrong, goosebumps rise on my forearms and I pick up two small rocks, just in case.
A certain amount of fear in the wilderness is healthy. It keeps you alert. Like your lungs and your legs, courage is a muscle you can train; I have strategies for mitigating risk. I always tell Steve where I’m going. I never run without my cellphone (though I’m often out of range) and my pepper spray. Sometimes I take my friend Blair’s seventy-pound Rhodesian ridgeback, a breed that originated in Africa as lion hunters.
I rehearse what-ifs in my head. If I see a mountain lion, I’ll yell and hold my pack above my head to make myself look less like prey and more like a predator. I will wave a stick in its face; never, ever run; and fight back if I have to. If I come upon a bear, I will back away slowly. If I fall and twist my ankle crossing the creek, I’ll soak it in the cool water and then hobble out to the nearest trailhead. If, on a desolate two-track dirt road where pickup trucks routinely rumble by with gun racks, someone pulls over and comes after me, I know what to do, because I’ve done it before. I’ll run.
I run the same trails every week, committing them to memory, pushing a little farther and higher as the weeks go by. Each time I come home safely, I feel more comfortable. I know this is flawed logic. Animals and people are erratic, and risk factors shift with the weather, the season, the day. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
* * *
—
I have so many scars. The pink ripple on my knee from falling on Atalaya, the nearly invisible x on my forehead where I got rammed by an old-fashioned metal chairlift at a ski resort in West Virginia when I was five. The divot in my chin from when I took a surfboard in the mouth off the coast of Mexico, the pale white line on my right heel from when I was ten and waded barefoot through a river and sliced it open on a rock.
But this scar I can’t see or feel. It’s hidden beneath my hairline. The doctor sewed it so neatly, it may have vanished entirely. The scar that remains is in my mind. I will never again not think about risk. I will never again take my safety in the wilderness for granted. Yet each time I ask the questions—Am I taking too great a chance? Should I keep going?—the answers are always the same. The answer is no. No, I will never give up my trails for fear. That would be an even greater risk.
And the answer is yes. Yes, I still love this world and its wildness, for its wildness. And for mine.
17
What I Carry
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Old Rag Mountain, Virginia, 1983
Sometimes when I tell someone I’m training for an ultramarathon, a look of incomprehension crosses their face. “Oh, God,” they shudder. “What do you think about when you run for so long?”
What don’t I think about? I think of everything, all the most boring, banal things. I think about whether my legs hurt and what I ate for breakfast and if my Achilles are sore and if the pain is real or just imaginary. I think about whether I’m hungry, and the stories I’m writing and people I have to call, and what Pippa and Maisy are doing right that very minute—I always think about the girls. I think about mountain lions and whether I’m pushing too hard or not hard enough and whether my heart is going to beat right out of my chest. I think about grocery shopping and how I wish I were a better cook and about bills I’ve been avoiding and whether our joint bank account is running low on money and if I
need to make dentist appointments for the girls, and am I shirking my duties by running and is Steve’s patience wearing thin? (Probably.) I think about Mom—would she be worried if she knew how much I was running? (Yes, definitely.) And I think about whether I will ever be ready for the race.
The unofficial motto of ultrarunning is “relentless forward progress.” This doesn’t mean that ultrarunners never stop; it just means that when they do, they start running again. Over the course of a three- or four-hour run, I usually pause a couple of times to tie my shoes or eat a snack. Sometimes I stop to pee behind a tree or take a picture or jot a few ideas with the pen and index card I stash in my pack. When I run up the mountain at sunrise, I always stop at the granite ledge on the summit and breathe in the day. I might stretch or do sit-ups in the dirt, but I am careful not to dally for more than a few minutes; otherwise, my muscles might get tight or my sensible thoughts will come rushing back, the ones that say, You’ve gone far enough. Aren’t you bored yet? It’s time to go home.