by Katie Arnold
Blame works just as well as shame, and soon enough I am silently berating Steve. He shouldn’t drink two cups of coffee before running—what was he thinking? He should have known not to eat an extra helping of lentils for lunch the day before the race. He should have trained more and run faster, dammit!
Eventually, my petulance begins to bore me, so I try to shut down my mind and look around instead. Someone’s hung funny signs on piñon trees every fifteen or twenty feet along the trail. YOU KNOW YOU’RE AN ULTRARUNNER WHEN… reads the first one. Each sign continues the theme: YOU NEVER HAVE A COMPLETE SET OF TOENAILS. I can feel myself start to run faster, just to get to the next one and the next. YOU DON’T THINK TWICE ABOUT EATING FOOD DROPPED ON THE GROUND…YOU MEASURE YOUR TRAINING RUNS IN HOURS NOT MILES…YOU LOOK FOR A BUSH WHEN THE LINE FOR THE BATHROOM IS TOO LONG.
Then, at last, I’m in the shade of tall ponderosas, descending into Los Alamos Canyon. A couple hundred yards before the final aid station, near mile 30, is another sign hung in jest, this one advertising free tequila and a mirror to fix your hair for the finish-line photos. I don’t want either, but I do need salt, and I want to know what the last two miles to the finish line are like.
“It’s a climb, right?” I ask a volunteer, thinking back to the spiky, evil contours of the course profile I studied online the week before the race.
“Nope, just rolling!” she replies with false cheer, refilling one of my bottles and pressing three mini pretzels into my palm. “Just rolling!” she says again, as if she can tell I don’t believe her. Aid station volunteers are preternaturally kind, upbeat, and results-oriented, and they will lie straight to your face to help you reach the finish line.
The trail isn’t “rolling,” not even by my warped standards, but whether from the lure of the finish or the salty pretzels, I snap out of my delirium and pull myself together, surging up the last rocky ascent and onto the mesa top. A small crowd of spectators lines the finish chute, clanging cowbells. When they see me, they cheer, “First female!”
I’ve done it. I’m the first woman across the line, in five hours and fifty minutes, and eighth overall. Dazed, I strip off my damp T-shirt, shoes, and socks and lie back in the grass to wait for Steve. When he finally appears, about an hour after me, he still has an agonized look on his face, but then he sees me and tries to smile. “Well, that was a nightmare,” he groans. He’d had an upset stomach for miles and spent a long layover in the bathroom at the ski lodge. By the time his stomach cramps abated, his knees had begun to hurt. Still, he’d finished his first 50K in twenty-ninth place, in a highly respectable sub–seven hours.
There’s free beer and a barbecue, and, a little while later, an awards ceremony. The organizer calls my name and hands me a small clay pot made by a local Jemez Pueblo artist. “Under six hours—that’s one of our fastest women’s times!” he exclaims, clapping me on my back. I remember this feeling from my Fodderstack days—of being swift and strong, of proving something specific and measurable to the world. Of winning. How quickly I could get used to it again.
My calf is cramping, my feet are blackened with dirt and soot, and my toes are chafed. I know I ought to savor the moment, but my victory was so unexpected, it almost doesn’t seem real. I got separated from Steve, babbled to myself like a maniac, and whipped in and out of aid stations, panicking about who was behind me and how close. Yet even when I was out of my mind, I was in my body, flying on fleet feet, skirting the edges of ragged canyons, inhaling the scorched summer smells, riding the waves of my breath up and over ridges and down valleys. I was running from the inside, from the certainty that anything is possible if you just keep going.
* * *
—
The next day I call Mom. “I won!” I cry.
“Oh?” she asks. Incomprehension drips from her voice. She has no idea what I’m talking about.
“The race! My ultra!”
“Oh, that’s right. Fantastic,” she says unconvincingly. “How many other runners were in it?”
People often ask this question after an ultra, as though there’s a chance the answer might be two.
“A couple hundred,” I say.
“You’re eating enough, aren’t you?” This has been her refrain over the past few months whenever I tell her about my running. “You were looking quite gaunt last time we saw you.”
I want to tell her she’s mistaken, that I wolf down food like a starving polar explorer after I run. But I know she’s picturing me at eighteen, the year I went to college and ate Ben & Jerry’s ice cream two meals a day and had soft, rounded New York Super Fudge Chunk cheeks—before I moved to the desert and got lizard skin and squint lines. I haven’t looked like that in twenty years. There are so many reasons I run, some of which even I don’t understand, and staying thin is the least of them.
But I know that it’s her job as a mother to worry, because I’m one now, too, and that worrying is another way of loving, so I just nod into the phone.
“Yes, Mom.”
A couple of days later, Natalie and I meet for a walk. My legs are still sore, but the euphoria from the race hasn’t worn off. We start slowly up our mountain.
“I knew you’d win,” she says proudly, “because you didn’t care about winning.”
19
Practice
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Dad outside the M Street Deli, Washington, 1980
In 1980, Dad traveled to France to take pictures of the Seine for National Geographic. For weeks, he followed the river from its source in Burgundy, through Paris, to the sea. In one photograph, a young boy on a barge peers through binoculars. He has clipped brown hair in blunt bangs and bare feet. I remember seeing that photograph in the magazine and thinking for a moment that it was me, and, when I realized that it wasn’t, feeling jealous of that boy who’d captured my father’s attention and held it long enough for him to compose a picture. Dad had made so many photographs of us over the years, but always I wanted more—more time with him, more proof that he loved us. And I remember being ashamed of my envy. I’d grown accustomed to being apart from my father. Shouldn’t I be over it by now?
In mid-June, three weeks after the Jemez 50K, I fly alone to a farm in France to write for ten days. Maisy and Pippa are about to turn two and four, and this will be the longest and farthest I’ve been away since they were born. I cry the whole way to Albuquerque, sad, guilty mama tears—I love you, I miss you, I hate to leave you, I can’t wait to get away. I’m sorry. I’m not on assignment. I don’t have a deadline. I’m going away to work in silence on the novel I’ve had in my mind for years, even though, in the bedlam of motherhood and anxiety, I can barely remember what it is.
I got the idea on a trip Steve and I took to Florida to visit his parents, before the girls were born. It came at me in a torrent, and I filled a notebook overnight. Then I ran out of steam and put it away, promising myself that someday I’d go back. I hadn’t learned to pace myself. Maybe now it will be different. Maybe by training my body to run for hours, I will have conditioned my mind to sit in a chair and write for hours, so that when I’m ninety-five I won’t still be talking wistfully about the novel I once wanted to write. I’ll have written it.
The night before I left for France, I went looking for Dad’s watch. I wanted to bring something of him with me, but I hadn’t seen the Timex for months. I’d worn it all through that long first winter after he died, even though it dwarfed my narrow wrist and spun around so that the buckle was where the face should be and the face was where the buckle should be, rubbing on tables, the kitchen sink, the rocky ground when I bent to tie my sneakers. It was getting scratched, and I worried that the leather band—the old arc, the memory of Dad’s wrist—would break.
Eventually, I took it off and put it into a drawer. I was grieving Dad and my own mortality and my babies getting bigger all at the same time,
and I didn’t need any more reminders that time was passing.
Every so often, I’d retrieve the watch to check that it was still ticking. Sometimes I held it to my wrist, imagining it wound around Dad’s, his skin mottled with age spots. As long as the Timex was still ticking, Dad’s death was still fresh and my sadness still acceptable, even reasonable. I worried that when it stopped, Dad would be gone all over again, for good this time. Even as I put it to my ear to hear its steady ticking, like a heartbeat, I knew this was arbitrary, the kind of fanciful logic that takes over in the upside-down aftermath of death.
How do we measure grief? In seconds, minutes, hours? Days, months, years? Like love, it can’t be quantified. There is no time limit. It’s not linear but cyclical. It bears down on me in the darkening days of winter and lifts with the strength of the springtime sun. I’m beginning to predict its comings and goings. It’s growing sluggish, as I am becoming quicker and more nimble. Most of the time now, I can stay just out in front, the fear and sorrow trailing behind me with outstretched arms, trying to keep up but falling further and further behind.
It’d been so long since I last looked for Dad’s watch that, for a moment, I wasn’t sure where I’d left it. But there it was in the top drawer of our bathroom vanity, under an old bottle of hot pink nail polish. It had stopped. I wasn’t surprised. Ever since the intern undertaker had handed it to me on a velvet tray at the funeral home, I’d known this day would come. Instead of sadness, though, I felt a faint relief. Dad’s watch had finally caught up with him.
I did not press the watch to my ear or bend the band around my wrist or inspect the face for scratches, wondering which ones were mine and which were Dad’s. I clasped it only briefly in my hand, and then I put it back into the drawer.
* * *
—
My first day in Paris, I walk for hours through Le Marais, Les Halles, Luxembourg Gardens, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Seine, back to Saint-Germain. I walk twenty miles or more, thinking of my father, wandering these same streets thirty years ago.
From Paris, I ride the train two hours to a village of two-hundred-year-old stone houses surrounded by green fields. All the houses have cornflower-blue shutters and window boxes spilling over with orange geraniums. Even the cows—the fattest and healthiest I’ve ever seen, Jerseys, as big as oxen, with cinnamon hides and newborn calves—are exquisite. Poppies grow straight out of cracks in the rock walls. I write at a narrow desk in a second-story farmhouse room with yellow walls. My bedroom window overlooks a church steeple and a small pond with iron-red water, where I swim in the afternoons.
Momentum buzzes through my body, like a motor beginning to hum. I’m hungry all the time, writing like mad, burning with so much energy I can barely sleep. Is it jet lag or insomnia? Separation anxiety? No. It’s the silence. No one to talk to, no one crying Mama, Mama, no phone calls to make or take. How much energy we expend by talking, by spewing words into the world! The silence is addictive. It’s a performance-enhancing drug—free and legal—fueling my body and mind. When I’m not writing, I run or walk alone, before breakfast, after dinner, at sunset, before writing and after writing, in the full sun of high noon. I fold a crinkled map into my shorts pocket and set off in a new direction: long, looping routes past hay meadows, along lanes lined with magenta foxglove and daisies. The roads are pebbly and coarse: predictable, monotonous, delicious asphalt. I don’t have to watch my feet. I can look straight ahead and swing my arms by my side. It’s just after the summer solstice, and it’s light so late that the farmers stay out on their tractors, cutting hay, until 10 p.m.
In the mornings, I wake after four hours of sleep with voices in my head. They are my own words, wanting to write themselves. The church bells chime six. Five clothespins and my bathing suit dangle on a piece of string I tied across the open window; a dove’s wings beat the frame. The sky is a bright, shocking cobalt. Every fiber in my body is firing. Maybe this is what running a hundred miles feels like: run, eat a little, run, run, run, walk, sleep a very short time, run some more, walk some more. Writing, like running, is an endurance sport. Keep moving or you’ll atrophy.
This is the way time used to feel in the long, empty, drawn-out days before babies. Mornings were the dreamiest. I would sit in the garden and feel the sun on my arms and write a few lines. I didn’t know then how much time I had. It was endless, really. I’d had a job, but then I left it and my time was my own and nobody was expecting me, only my words, and I could write them whenever I wanted. I miss this, I want this again—not all the time, not every day, but once a year maybe. This exact room in this exact village: maybe this one time, ever.
For the first time, lying in my narrow bed, I can see how Dad might have left. He didn’t leave for yellow walls in France or for wooden shutters that opened to a steeple and a pond shrouded in mist; he left for another woman, but that woman was an excuse. He left for silence and spaciousness, for freedom, and the idea of it, for staying in bed as late as he pleased. Having this now, I can see how easy it would be to want more.
* * *
—
In Eastern religions, practice means something you do regularly, without concern for results or, as the Buddhists say, “a gaining idea.” This is the opposite of the usual Western definition, which I grew up with and which implies a persistent striving for improvement, for significance. “Racquet back!” Ron would call to me every single time he thwacked a tennis ball to me at the city courts in Summit; I practiced my ground strokes almost every day the summer I was nine. “I can’t go out to play,” I’d tell Mom in fourth grade, “until I practice my multiplication.”
Sitting meditation, or zazen, is the central practice in Buddhism, but anything you do regularly and attentively, without gaining idea, counts. “It’s what you do no matter what,” Natalie explained as we hiked down the mountain a few weeks before I left for France. “You don’t get tossed away. Continue under all circumstances.” This is what her Zen teacher, Dainin Katagiri Roshi, had taught her about zazen, but really it applied to anything. Everything. The first winter we hiked together, Natalie would often email or call first thing in the morning, saying, “It’s twenty degrees outside! Should we still go?!”
“I’ll pick you up at nine,” I always wrote back. Then I’d bundle Maisy in two layers of down bunting and we’d go. Whatever the weather, we met the mountain where it was.
Writing was practice, too—a way to study your mind. “Write like mad,” Natalie told me that day on the trail. “Let it rip on the page, puke your guts out on paper. Then sit.”
I did it differently. First I ran, and then, when my body was calm and my mind quiet, I wrote. I had a project I hadn’t told anyone about except Steve: I was writing a poem every day for a year. By the time I arrived in France, I’d been going for almost six months. Like ultrarunning, it had started as a lark. I wasn’t a poet and harbored no illusions of becoming one, but I liked poems. I liked how when I read them I might understand only an iota of what the poet was trying to say. The poem was a mystery I could not fully grasp, but it grasped me.
My own weren’t quite so mysterious. I wrote them every night before bed. I didn’t belabor them—I could whip out a poem in ten minutes, sometimes less. I did not go back and fix them or even reread them. It didn’t matter if they were good or bad—they were for no one but me, the way running had been for me when I was little. The poems were a way of paying attention, looking for lines in my day as though I were fishing and didn’t know what I might catch: the hallucinatory scent of saltwater in the desert; a cowboy riding a horse along the Winsor Trail, tipping his hat to me; an old man on the sidewalk stooping over a cane, the man my father might have become. I was all of those people at once and also none of them, and I gathered them in my net as I ran.
Some days I didn’t want to write a poem, just like some days I didn’t want to run. “Write what’s in front of you,” Natalie told her stu
dents when they got stuck. What was in front of me was a blank screen, my own deafening doubt. You are the worst poet in the world. Practice was writing one anyway. It meant showing up for the good days when running felt effortless, zanily optimistic, and the bad days, when it was sticky and hard and I wanted to lie on the ground and cry. Practice was writing at the kitchen table on Saturday mornings while Steve played Old Maid with Pippa in front of the woodstove, and writing by headlamp, with gloves on, in a camp chair in Chaco Canyon in late November, the girls asleep in the tent. It was all my poems, one hundred and counting, most dashed off, some godawful, others secretly sort of sublime.
And now, here in France, it is writing with my notebook propped on my lap in a cobblestone courtyard, for the simple thrill of discovering something unfolding as I put it down. Practice is staying in the muck, the back and forth, the transcendence and the torment.
* * *
—
On my last morning in France, the sky is spitting drizzle, a mist so gentle it’s hard to decipher individual drops. I walk past the pretty cows and a red clay tennis court, over narrow bridges. I go slowly, trying to memorize it all. Already I miss my superhuman energy; already I feel it dissipating. Already I feel my feral squirrel girls rising up to meet me, their sweet, soft skin, babies still, but not for long.
The meadows are so green, as green as the fields in upstate New York last spring when we buried Dad. It had been raining for weeks when we arrived, and I could not believe the grass. How thick and tall it was! I had forgotten Dad’s slavish devotion to his fields, how they had been his burden and his pride. His grass was like fatherhood in the early years, when Meg and I were very small: something he loved and tended but also resented. He hadn’t figured out that there was discipline and virtue in staying with the mess. That it was a practice, too. A clean line through the chaos. The grass grows like crazy all week in the rain, shoots up. You mow it. You get on your tractor and you cut it. You ride, you walk—any way you can, you do it.