Running Home

by Katie Arnold

  Now, as I run along the railroad tracks, my thoughts drop away. The tracks stretch on as far as I can see. The tracks become my breath. At the far end, there is a door. I will get there when I get there, or maybe not. It doesn’t matter. I’m here.

  Eight miles from my starting point, the suburban adobes with their swing sets give way to ranchettes with Tuff Sheds and horse corrals. The dog walkers and the Kenyan runners usually don’t come out this far, and I see few bikers on this section of rutted, washed-out track. Though it’s not nearly as wild as my mountains, the flatness of the landscape makes it seem bigger and emptier.

  When I get to my turnaround point, eleven miles from my car, I’m baked by the sun, hungry, and completely alone. I unwrap half a sweet potato, still warm and mashed in its bag, and eat it in one bite. I’ve curved so far around the back side of my mountains that they don’t look like my mountains anymore. I’m a boomerang at the far end of my reach, about to make the long arc back, but not before I hang in the air, feeling far away.

  * * *

  —

  After Dad died, I dreamed about him. Unlike when I ran, I could see him, and I held on to the sight of him, almost greedily. In the first dream, he said nothing; he just sat there, one leg crossed over the other, ankle on his knee, his khaki pant leg pulled up slightly to reveal his thick ragg sock. Balanced on that knee was an object, held lightly in his clasped hands. I couldn’t see what it was—wine, an egg, or a glass of eggnog, stiff and creamy, like he always drank at Christmastime—but it didn’t matter. What I noticed was how he held it: still, with confidence, quietly, as though poised in mid-thought, listening intently to what the rest of us were saying.

  In another dream, he was tall and fit, with his flinty hair and strong cheekbones, still healthy but not for long. We were in Africa to see the lions, and I could feel his anxiety rising off him like steam on the lake on a chilly morning. He was waiting for results from his doctor, something about skin. He stood in profile and worried the way he used to, without saying anything, a pinch in his cheeks. I recognized that look; I’d seen it on my own face in the mirror. In the last dream, we rafted down a narrow swooshing river that was also, illogically, a roller coaster. I was in the seat in front, Dad behind, wild and unafraid, brazen even, ways I hadn’t known him to be, ever. We made it through without wrecking, and at the bottom Dad stood beside the tracks, the rushing current, careless and laughing. He had never been worried.

  When I woke up from these dreams, he felt close enough to touch, and I walked through the house gingerly, so as not to shake him loose. But he was always gone by breakfast.

  I don’t remember when Dad stopped coming to me on the trail, but running has become a little lonelier without him, even though I knew his visits were only temporary and had always been only temporary. Does he disapprove? Is he busy being reborn into another life, discovering fingers, growing hair, his ancient soul finding form again? He is fading but for those rare moments when I feel his soul saying yes, yes, and mine answering with feet kicking high, and I wonder if his voice wasn’t my voice all along.

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Dad on his New Hampshire bike trip, 1977

  * * *

  —

  In late April, Anna and I drive west to the edge of a golf development past La Tierra and the city limits, where the last of the fancy houses give way to scrubby grasslands sloping down to the Rio Grande. We run seven miles downhill on washboarded Buckman Road, with shot-up signs and cattle guards, to the mouth of Diablo Canyon. Blocky five-hundred-foot basalt walls rise on either side. Rock climbers are inching up the dihedrals above us, their voices drifting down on the breeze. For a moment I envy them, moving methodically up the vertical face—the slowed-down, tactile pleasure of all four limbs, ten fingers, ten toes, two feet, two hands on the earth at the same time.

  After half a mile, the canyon widens into a broad, sandy wash. In three miles we reach the Rio Grande. The arroyo ends at the river; on the other side are the steep cliffs of White Rock Canyon. I splash cold water on my face and arms and peel an orange, watching the water rush through a small rapid, the same rapid I’ve rafted on on summer weekends with Steve and the girls. There’s no bridge across the river. I’ve gone as far as I can go.

  We run ten miles back the way we came to Anna’s car, where we part ways. She’ll drive back to town and I will run another twelve miles home on a mix of singletrack trails and pavement. On the final stretch of road, I see a car coming toward me. It’s a dark-blue dented Toyota sedan, pulling away from a stop sign. Sticking out of the trunk is a wooden box, long and yellowish, made from unfinished pine. It’s unmistakable: a coffin. There’s no ceremony in the way it’s slung into the dingy car, as though the driver had just come from Home Depot with a sack of nails strewn about the backseat. The trunk hasn’t been properly tied shut and bounces open and closed on top of the casket.

  On another day, I might have taken the coffin as an omen. I might have wondered who is dying or dead inside, or who might die next, whether it will be me or someone I love. But not today—not after I’ve plinked stones into the river and run thirty-two miles and followed my own feet, the mountains slowly growing larger above me, pulling me in. I wasn’t training; I was traveling. I ran to the river, and now I’m running all the way home.

  * * *

  —

  When I run, I long for my children. The yearning comes over me when I am absorbed by the effort, high above the tree line, hours from a trailhead. It comes over me even when I crave solitude and time to think, or not think, after I’ve rewritten stories in my head and felt the ideas emerge and when I have crossed over into stillness, empty of thoughts. Sometimes it’s a lonesome feeling, but it’s hardly ever sad: I have daughters at home. Knowing this is what pulls me through the lows at mile 9, 17, or 35. It’s what anchors me to the endeavor and helps me go the whole way.

  PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD

  Pippa and Maisy, San Juan River, Utah, 2015

  Four weeks before the Angel Fire 100K, I go down in mileage and up in elevation. The high point of the race is eleven thousand feet, but I will have to climb it four times in sixty-two miles. A few times a week, I run thirteen miles to the 12,600-foot summit of Santa Fe Baldy and back. It’s early June, and the wildflowers are already blooming—blue sky pilots and yellow cress, impossibly tiny and delicate for such a harsh alpine environment. The damp forest is clear of snow but still smells like fir boughs and frost, the creeks surging high with runoff.

  I feel the altitude in the first, steep mile, but then I relax into my legs and my breath, running steadily to the broad saddle at 11,700 feet. Fat marmots wobble their heads out from granite boulders, whistling as I pass. It’s just as fast to hike the steep shoulder as it is to run, so I practice jogging all the gentler grades, even if it’s just a few strides, and walking the rest. On the summit ridge, the trail is a narrow ribbon of dirt through stubbly amber grass that looks more like Scotland than New Mexico. A cornice of sun-rotted snow, at least five feet deep, curls over the edge, a last holdout of winter. Five hundred feet below, Lake Katherine is frozen and chunked with miniature icebergs. To the north and east are forests, some clipped by recent fire, others chartreuse with baby aspen leaves. And to the west, the terra-cotta desert, rumpled and worn, the lumps and mesas and ridges, the low, brown buildings of home.

  The altitude always catches up with me on the way down, and I get klutzier and dumber on the descent. I’ve been running for three hours above ten thousand feet, the wind whistling in my ears. Depleted of oxygen, my head feels foggy, my reflexes sluggish, as though my body’s been burning through brain cells the way it burns calories, and my feet are ten steps in front of my brain, leaving it behind.

  Half a mile from my car I stumble over a rock and sail through the air, narrowly missing a tree and landing hard on my left side. Stunned, I sit i
n the dirt, wiping blood from the large scrapes on my collarbone, thigh, and palm. The race is in two days. Nothing’s broken; I’m just bruised and shaken. Eyes closed, I try to breathe the loneliness out of me. It feels like a precipice, this business of breathing. If I allow my mind to stray, I’ll slip off the edge. Then I remember: I don’t have to be perfect, or even good. I just have to try.

  * * *

  —

  The last time I saw Dad healthy, it was November, a year before he died. He and Lesley and Meg and her family flew to Santa Fe to spend Thanksgiving with us. The grass didn’t need mowing, so it was a good time for him to get away. I knew Dad was excited, because a month before he arrived, he emailed me with an idea: Meg and Lesley would invent a fictional premise upon which he and I would make up our own short stories. “Not a plot, just a kernel, a jumping-off place,” Dad explained. He loved Updike and Cheever and had always dreamed of writing fiction. “We’ll each start there and see where we end up.”

  By the time they arrived, though, I was three weeks pregnant and Maisy was a pinto bean worming queasily around inside me. I lay on the couch, feeling sleepy and seasick. Dad’s idea hovered, unacknowledged, between us. I wanted to try, but I was so tired. And scared. Writing felt too intimate, even more so than talking. What would he reveal about himself? What would I? We played board games and talked about music and books, like we always did, but we did not talk about our stories, nor did we write them. We both thought we’d have other chances.

  The day after Thanksgiving, we drove out to the cliff dwellings at Bandelier. Dad wore his blue jeans and red down vest and held Pippa’s hand, walking slowly as they searched for broken bits of eight-hundred-year-old pottery. Once you saw one, you saw hundreds. Shards littered the ground, with faded black and ocher designs. We turned them over in our hands and then put them back where we’d found them.

  The year after Dad died, I was cleaning out our freezer when I found a container of frozen cranberries left over from that Thanksgiving. As I poured the whole hardened chunk of them into the garbage disposal, it dawned on me that Dad had eaten those very cranberries, with a turkey we’d bought at the farmers’ market. I wanted the cranberries back. I felt like I was throwing away Dad’s tongue or his taste buds, some part of him that had stayed too long in a freezer-burned Tupperware, ignored. The sadness that came over me as I watched the last reddish bits disappear down the drain was so complete, it seemed to contain everything: love, fear, rage, regret, disappointment, tenderness, shame, surprise, anguish, even awe. For a moment I understood. I had felt it after all. Grief is all of these things and more, a big, messy wad of emotion. It is beyond category, as fathomless as desire, as luminous as joy. It will break your heart and fill it up again.

  * * *

  —

  The Angel Fire ultra is a small, local event, with only a hundred people registered in four distances: 50K, fifty miles, 100K, and one hundred miles. Held at the Angel Fire ski resort, east of Taos, it won’t be an especially competitive race, and I feel no pressure to perform. I’m not even especially concerned about my time. It’s a new distance for me, my longest yet, and I just want to finish.

  At 5 a.m. on June 21, the longest day of the year, the night is still black, save for a faint, hopeful brightening behind the ski mountain. But twenty minutes into the race, I’ve clicked off my headlamp and am jogging through the first light of the first day of summer. Unlike in previous ultras, I feel none of the loneliness that often overtakes me when I realize how far I have to go, all on my own.

  For the first time, Pippa and Maisy are here for the whole race. For two years, I’ve been trying to keep my two lives—running and mothering—separate. I didn’t want my running to define our family life. I’d go off alone while the girls were at school, and when we came back together I could give them all of me, because I’d just given everything to the run. Balancing the two balanced me. As much as I loved and craved trail running, coming home was still the best part of every run.

  But as I trained for the 100K, my worlds diverged even more. The farther I ran, the more seriously I trained, the more I missed them and the more my running suffered. By separating the two, I’d given myself too much time and space to think about running. The more I fretted, the more distracted and impatient I was at home and the more exasperated Steve became.

  “Remember, it’s just a race,” he’d say, and I’d nod, chastened, and lace up my sneakers anyway and ease guiltily out the door. Steve never once told me not to go, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was running through my girls’ childhoods, and my marriage, missing out on the best of them.

  On the two-hour drive to Angel Fire, Pippa and Maisy sang “This is an annoying song! This is an annoying song!” over and over. It was annoying—so annoying that it distracted me from the inconceivable, horrifying prospect of running a hundred kilometers. In the hotel room after dinner, they jumped like maniacs between the beds as I filled my hydration pack and pinned my number to my running skirt. When we turned off the light at 9:30, they lay in their bed chattering while I shoved earplugs into my ears and prayed for them to go to sleep so—please, God—I might do the same before my alarm went off at 4 a.m.

  * * *

  —

  The 100K course consists of a sequence of two separate, repeating routes. One is a rolling 10K loop that I will run four times, and the other a nineteen-mile climb up and over the ski mountain that I will complete twice. At the end of every section, I will pass through the base area aid station, where I’ve stashed a drop bag crammed with gels and bars, a rain jacket in case it storms, salt tabs, and extra socks—most of which I know I won’t ever touch. Drop bags are a safety net. You want to cover all possible contingencies—blisters, sour stomach, lightning, and hail—but hope you won’t need any of them. It’s here that Steve and the girls plan to greet me every few hours.

  In the first six miles, I deliberately hold back. I let other runners, and other women, take off in front of me. All four races start together, and it’s hard to tell who’s racing my distance. The ambiguity works in my favor: I have no urge to push my place in the pack, since it may not be my pack I’m pushing.

  This was my plan going in: to be calm off the start, because I hadn’t been in California and because sixty-two miles is so far that anything can happen at any point. But mostly because I want to see if it’s possible to race simply to run, not to win. And if I run this way, will I win?

  All spring, I tried different methods to break my runner’s block. I tried to run free of ego and competitive zeal. I tried to run for joy and flow, with humility and confidence. Now, though, I want to empty myself of all expectations—good and bad—and run for nothing.

  In Buddhism, ridding yourself of preconceived notions and habits is called emptiness. Natalie had explained this to me once, a few years earlier. I pictured a whole universe with nothing in it, an empty home, all the furniture gone. The dog, too. It didn’t sound very nice. It sounded lonely.

  “Is emptiness a good thing?” I asked her.

  We’d come to the point on the trail where we always stop talking and start climbing in silence. We had to follow our rules. Nat, slightly out of breath, pulled over to let me pass. The rubber sole of her shoe had come loose and was flapping up and down like a piece of skin. It was making walking difficult, but Natalie didn’t stop; she just kept going.

  “Oh, absolutely,” came her voice. “It is it.”

  A few days before Angel Fire, we went walking along the Santa Fe River. She reminded me of something she often told her students: “Let writing do writing.” Now, as the miles tick by slowly and steadily, I tell myself, Let running do running. The words, repeated in my head, trigger a visceral sensation in my body, as though my mind is stepping aside on the trail and out of my body’s way, to let my legs run free and the race unfold as it will.

  * * *

  —

  The
trail to the top of Angel Fire ski resort climbs through a fir-and-aspen forest, switchbacking so often that the pitch is never onerous, almost pleasant. The last half mile, however, is so steep and gravelly that I have to walk. That’s when I notice that runners ahead of me are pointing and shouting at something. It’s a bear. Black and shaggy and huge. A hundred yards away, maybe less, so busy chomping bushes that it doesn’t even raise its head.

  The course follows a rough dirt road all the way down the other side of the mountain. The aid station at the turnaround is a beat-up VW bus with its pop top up. An older man with a broad smile hands me a salty boiled potato on a toothpick. I pop it in, swig some Gatorade from a cup, and am gone. My legs are made of wind, and I sail back up the way I came.

  This is how it goes all day: up and down and all around. I thought the course might grow tedious with its repetition, but surprisingly, I like covering the same ground over and over; I like knowing what’s around the bend, how steep the next hill is, when to conserve energy and when to charge. And most of all, I like knowing that Steve and the girls are nearby. Sometimes they’re waiting for me in the base area, cheering me through M&M-smeared mouths. Sometimes they’re not, and I worry: Have they gotten lost? Did they crash their bikes and get hurt? But I know myself well enough by now that it would be weird if I didn’t worry. Maybe, finally, I have made friends with my fear.