by Katie Arnold
Of all adventure sports, trail running is the simplest. Unlike triathletes, runners don’t need a carbon-fiber road bike or a wetsuit. It’s not like mountaineering, which requires a rack of gear and a partner on the other end of the rope. You don’t need a gym membership or the latest moisture-wicking nylon shorts. You could be the person running down the side of the road at noon in a black track suit and a Rocky scowl, sweating profusely through soggy cotton, and this would be fine. Because all you need is the willpower to go out the door on the days when the last thing you feel like doing is going out the door. All you need to do is start wherever you are and take the next step and then the next, a few more every week.
But there’s a limit to going light, even in running. The farther and longer you go, the more you have to carry.
Ninety minutes is widely considered the threshold for how long an athlete can perform moderate aerobic exercise without eating and drinking. Our bodies store glycogen in our muscles for fuel, and most runners typically have enough in reserve to go for an hour and a half before their energy flags, their muscles fatigue, and their brains become fuzzy—in the endurance world, this is known as bonking. Beyond the ninety-minute mark, the typical runner needs approximately two hundred calories an hour; every body is different, of course, and how far I can run without refueling depends on the day, the weather, the trail conditions, and what I’ve eaten in the past twenty-four hours.
I experiment with carrying different foods. Sports bars pack a lot of calories in a small package, but they can be chewy and hard to digest when you’re trying to eat on the run (and forget about winter, when they freeze solid and practically rip your teeth from your gums). Energy gels belong to a category of food product—emphasis on product—that, as an endurance athlete, you can’t live without but desperately wish you could. The first time I squeezed one into my mouth, I thought I was going to barf it right back up. It had a sickly sweet vanilla flavor, a translucent tint, and a gloppy consistency. The tiny plastic packets contain a few squirts and about ninety calories of almost pure sucrose. I want to hate them, but the sugar goes straight into my bloodstream like a jolt of electricity.
Most of the time, I stuff a couple of Gu gels down my sports bra for easy access. (It helps to have the chest of a thirteen-year-old.) When I get home, my mouth is slathered with a thick, sugary film, and I have to peel the crusty empty packets off my bare skin. This is a little-known hazard of ultrarunning: You will get into the best shape of your life, but you will rot your teeth out in the process.
Hydration is a trickier formula. I carry water in four ten-ounce plastic flasks in a nylon waist belt. The belt has a tiny front pouch in which I can fit my car key and maybe an extra Gu. In two of the flasks, I drop an effervescent electrolyte tablet, which helps replace the sodium and potassium lost when I sweat. The third and fourth flasks I fill with plain water. On my longest runs, I carry two iodine pills in a plastic baggie, in case I run out of water and need to refill from the stream; the iodine gives the water a grimy, metallic taste but kills parasites like giardia that could make me sick.
I carry a bear bell attached to my pack and my pepper spray, and often I clip my iPod to my pack and thread my earbuds under my T-shirt so the cord doesn’t slap my face. There are some in the trail running community who frown upon running with music, but for me it’s a trifecta of happiness, the ultimate mood boost. When I’m outside, moving through nature, listening to songs I love, I become more, not less, attuned to my senses, my surroundings, and the physical sensations in my body. I’m not fussy: I’ll listen to almost any song with a good story and a steady beat. Slow, fast, pop, rock, rap, folk, Bob Dylan, Alicia Keys, Lucinda Williams, Eminem, Ryan Adams, the Boss, even deep cuts from Dad’s college jazz album. Country songs are the best for the long, grinding middle miles: Someone’s always down on their luck and clawing their way back.
I carry all these things, and I carry my body: five feet five inches and 112 pounds. The body I’ve always had, except during my pregnancies, when my hips vanished for four years. Both times, my body came back to me as I came back into my body and began to run again. My waist slimmed, my hips reemerged, my shoulders and chest narrowed, and my quads and calves became leaner. Even my feet, which had grown half a size during pregnancy, got smaller as the muscles in my arches grew stronger.
It is not a burden to carry my body, because my body also carries me. This is the way it has always been. And I carry love and fear and the cancer that killed Dad, his regrets and mistakes, his loyalty and his infidelity. And always the wondering: Why?
* * *
—
Now, when Meg and I talk about Virginia, we no longer say “When are you going to Dad’s?” or “We should book our flights to Dad’s.” By mutual agreement, undiscussed, of course, we say “Huntly.” It isn’t his anymore.
In late April, we fly to Huntly to clean out his office. Outside, everything is alive again: dogwoods and cherry blossoms blooming pink beside the house, the fields a carpet of green. This is the busiest time of year for Lesley’s horse-breeding business, and the day we arrive, a new foal is born, a gangly chestnut who suckles her mother and paces skittishly in her stall. I don’t feel the raw agony of grief as much as the dull ache of loss. Dad’s absence has a permanence now, like a lump in the throat that won’t go all the way down.
He’s been dead for sixteen months, but his basement looks like he’s just gotten up to get a cup of coffee—still disheveled, only dustier. Lesley has to walk through the room every time she does laundry and, though she’s been patient, I can tell it’s beginning to weigh on her. More than once she’s reminded us that his papers and memorabilia are ours for the taking. “Yerdad”—this is what she’s always called him in emails or notes—“wanted you to have everything.”
First we have to finish his photo archives. Before he died, Dad estimated that he’d cataloged 90 percent of his pictures, and we promised him we’d try to track down the remaining images. They could be anywhere, in any form: contact sheets in the dozens of white binders on his bookshelves; black-and-white prints in his filing cabinets; negatives in plastic tubs in his old darkroom; digital files on his thumb drive in his safety-deposit box, the key to which has gone missing.
We follow clues around the room like we’re on one of the scavenger hunts Dad used to make for us outside, trying to think as he would have. When we get stuck, all we have to do is look and the answer is there in front of us: on a Post-it note scrawled with obscure explanations—sticky notes from the grave!—or in an email to Jenna, an assistant who’d been helping him with his archives right before he died. The synchronicity is so eerie it’s almost funny. When in doubt, choose the obvious, he seems to be telling us. The answer is in front of you if you open your eyes and slow down. Even in death, Dad is half a step ahead of us. We leave nearly everything where we found it, like a crime scene investigation. It seems reckless to dismantle the room, lest we trample the trail of crumbs he’s left for us.
After a while, Lesley clears her throat and says loudly, “Well, I’ve got work in the barn,” and gets up to go. I know the foal is mostly an excuse to leave us alone with Dad’s things. Meg and I sit on the floor, opening file drawers filled with family memorabilia and speckled black-and-white photographs. From the back of one I pull a leather-bound baby book. Pressed between the pages is a wallet-size parchment-paper envelope containing a lock of fine black hair.
“Oh, my God,” I say, holding it up gingerly for Meg to see. It’s the first hair of my newborn father and the very last remnant of his physical self. Fingering the silky strands is like touching a ghost, the invisible soul of someone I never knew: Dad as an infant, his original self, blinking and yawning, wet head and clutching hands, the baby who would become a man, my father, and someday die.
I put the baby book back in its file and wander into Dad’s old darkroom. When he and Lesley bought Huntly Stage, he set it up in a small
walk-in closet next to the laundry room, but after a while he stopped using it. Cameras were going digital, and it was easier to get his prints made at Kmart in Front Royal, like everyone else. Eventually he converted the darkroom back to a storage room. The shelves at eye level are stacked with wrapping paper, gift boxes, and old family photo albums I’ve seen before, but lower down are dozens of plain plastic containers I haven’t. I open one. It’s stuffed with eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs in white envelopes. Many are landscapes—wintry hills and deserted college campuses—but there are whole folders of young women: close-up portraits in profile, serious eyes, demure smiles, glossy dark hair swept back to one side.
In 2004, when I called Mom about Dad’s letter, she told me about their first year of marriage, when they were living above a carriage house in Connecticut and Dad was taking pictures for The New Era and building his portfolio. On the side, he made portraits of women. It was all still innocent, Mom insisted, but I thought I could detect a trace of uncertainty in her voice. Now, seeing their eyes stare back at me in the half-light of Dad’s basement, imagining them staring back at my father, it seems like the start of something.
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Dad, Wittenberg, Ohio, 1958
Below the plastic tub is a carton labeled BETSY. Inside are dozens of letters, hundreds perhaps, exchanged in 1962, the year my mother and father were courting, each penned on thin sheaves of stationery. In girlish blue handwriting, Mom writes about engagement parties and wedding plans. Dad’s earnest replies are typewritten and many pages long.
Beside it on the shelf is another box, and another and another, each one labeled neatly with a name. Names I don’t recognize: Laura, Mary Lou, Nancy, Pam.
I know who they are: the women Dad loved before he loved us and the women he loved after. And maybe even while he loved us.
The goodbye boy.
I feel my cheeks redden for my father; for myself, for discovering his most intimate writings; for Meg, in the next room, who doesn’t know; and for Lesley, upstairs, who probably does. It would be so easy to snap the lids back on and walk away.
“Meg!” I call, before I change my mind. “Check this out!”
She comes in and rifles through the cartons for a long time without saying anything.
“Did you know?” I ask, afraid of her answer.
Meg nods. “Since college. Dad told me when we were driving somewhere. I didn’t want to hear it when he was telling me, and afterwards I wished I didn’t know.” Twenty years she’s known, and she kept it to herself. I’m not mad, just surprised, though of course I shouldn’t be. We are expert stuffers, she and I, raised by the best.
“Do you think Lesley knows?” I ask.
“I don’t know. She must. How could she not?”
The boxes are a map through a minefield, and the letters are the mines, tidily organized and left for anyone to trip.
* * *
—
I go where I always go when I need to breathe: outside, in bare legs and sneakers, letting gravity pull me down the hill. I smell Dad in the sweet scent of spring grass, growing anyway, without him. I imagine him pulling away in his pickup, feeling content, distracted, overburdened, but alive. Maybe he would feel his aliveness, or maybe, in his haste, he would take it for granted. But this also would make him alive, and human. How I wish he had one more afternoon, one more chance to choose.
At the bottom of the hill, without thinking, I veer off the driveway, climb over the split rail fence, and cut across the tall grass. My instinct is to walk, and, rather than push through my reluctance like I usually do, this time I gladly give in to it. My body registers where I’m going before my brain does. I’m trying to find the old footpath through the woods to a grove of pines on the hillside. We followed the trail as kids, scavenging along in hot pursuit of the clues Dad set for us, one slip of paper leading to the next. The pine tree grove was the lone clump of green in an otherwise colorless winter skyline, and though it consisted of only six or seven trees, when we stood beneath the boughs, looking up, it felt much bigger. In summer it was harder to find, as the entire slope was awash in green, and you could traipse in circles, looking, and when at last you found it, it was as though you’d chanced upon a hidden, magical place.
I angle across a low slope, scanning the edge of the forest for signs of the path. In my distant memory, Lesley buried her black dog, Jason, in a grave on this hillside after he’d been shot by deer hunters. I walk slowly, following a damp creek bed uphill, beating my way through barberry bushes, scraping my shins on brambles, looking for any trace of footprints or indentations on the ground or trampled leaves—anything.
Nothing.
The longer I search, the more insistent I become. Years ago, Dad carved a sign and hung it from a tree in the woods. He inscribed it with a quote by Stephen Vincent Benét: When Daniel Boone goes by, at night / The phantom deer arise / And all lost, wild America / Is burning in their eyes. Dad would regale us with stories about the wandering woodsman as we walked, and the sign seemed to rear up out of nowhere, and never in quite the same place as I remembered it. I found this mystifying and a little spooky, as though the ghost of Boone were still out there, flitting between the shadows in his coonskin cap, somewhere just beyond sight.
When I get to the pine grove, or what I think is the pine grove, my shins are bleeding. It’s not a grove of trees but a pair, and they are shorter and spindlier than I remember. It’s been two years, at least, since Dad walked these woods and thirty-five years since I did, and the trail, wherever it was, has long since grown over. I keep walking downhill, toward the pasture, knowing I won’t find the sign. It’s been reclaimed by the trees, or maybe it never existed. Maybe I’d imagined it.
At the meadow’s edge, I slop across the creek in my sneakers, rinsing the blood from my ankles, and duck beneath the thick cover of persimmon trees. I feel Dad in the space between sun and shade, where the sunlight strafes the branches, filtering through the narrow openings in the trunks like tuxedo stripes. There are so many questions I want to ask him. Talk to me, Daddy, I whisper. But the only sounds are a gust of wind lifting the leaves and my blood drumming in my ears.
* * *
—
When I get back to the house, I leave my shoes by the back door and tiptoe guiltily down to the basement alone, as though I’m snooping where I’m not supposed to. Everything’s so neatly organized and labeled, I know Dad wanted us to find it, but what, if anything, did he want us to do with it? There’s no answer scrawled in his handwriting, just all the boxes beckoning.
Sitting on the floor, hugging my knees, I skim a few of the letters. There are letters to and from the girl he’d known when he was younger, with whom a relationship would have been, for countless reasons, taboo. His first true love in high school, with whom his parents feared he was too serious—the one who got away, the one he pined for on and off for fifty-five years. The college girlfriend in Ohio, with sultry eyes, who’d gone off and married someone else. The red-haired temptress in Washington. “A.” from Idaho Ave., for whom he’d left his marriage but who, in the end, he couldn’t love.
The correspondence is enthusiastic and erratic. He’s saved not only the women’s letters to him, but copies of his letters to them. He’d done the same with his letters from his parents, Uncle Phil, and his college bandmates. I’d seen the folders on his computer with all the emails he’d batted back and forth with Meg and me over the years. He wanted to capture both sides of the conversation, the whole picture.
With some of these women, there are long periods of silence and then contact resumes, sometimes many years or decades later. Occasionally, there is the suggestion of a meeting—never, seemingly, fulfilled—but just as often the talk is of grown children and grandchildren, music playing and charity work. These women had creaky knees and retired husbands. Why did he feel such fo
ndness for them? Had he told them he was sick, or did they think his silence was another unexplained chapter in their sporadic communication? I wonder briefly if I should write and let them know, but even as I’m composing the email in my head—I’m David’s daughter. I’m sorry to inform you that he passed away. I found his letters to you—I know that I won’t. Not because I don’t want to hurt them, but because, if I’m honest with myself, I do. Let them wonder now.
Only one of the women he’d loved was my mother, and he had loved her imperfectly, disloyally, and he had been afraid to stay and afraid to go. So in the end it had been her decision. Mom had wanted me to know this, when we talked about Dad’s letter. She didn’t sound recriminatory, but she wanted to be clear: She had chosen.
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Mom outside the carriage house, Essex, Connecticut, 1963
It was the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, May 1974. Meg and I were sitting on the front steps of the house on Legation Street, waiting for Dad to come home from work. We were singing, When Daddy comes marching home again, to the tune of the Civil War ballad “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” We sang this song so often for him that we knew the words by heart. Over and over we belted out the chorus, the volume and force of our Hurrahs! becoming ever more insistent because Daddy was late and the long weekend stretched before us. The dogwoods and azaleas bloomed riotously beside the front door, and we pressed our bare knees together, and we sang and we watched until finally his dark green Triumph convertible rounded the corner on 32nd Street and slid to a stop at the curb.
We are tapping our bare feet in time with the tempo. I remember the beat, low and slightly mournful at first, then rising steadily to a hopeful crescendo.