Running Home

by Katie Arnold

Lesley is seventy, fit and trim, but the last time she went running was a decade ago. The time before that was the first annual Fodderstack, in 1978, when she hyperventilated on the crowded starting line and had to duck into someone’s driveway and put her head between her knees so she didn’t pass out. “I didn’t even make it out of Flint Hill!” she giggles now in her high-pitched, self-deprecating, tee-hee-hee British way.

  Huntly Stage in springtime comes rushing back to me: the sweet smell of Dad’s freshly cut grass, new foals, mountains sloping in the distance, all that green.

  “I’ll run it with you!” I blurt, without thinking. It will be my first race since I broke my knee. To return to the place where running began for me and to begin again with Lesley is too good to pass up. The race is in two weeks. I’m going.

  When I tell Pippa, she says, “I want to run, too!” She’s six and she’s heard all my stories about the Fodderstack, seen my prize pottery cups. “How far is it?”

  “Six miles,” I tell her, trying to feign nonchalance. One mile for every year she’s been alive. Though the interminable agony of my first race has long since faded, it sounds crazy for a girl in first grade who’s never walked alone down a road, let alone run.

  She smiles brightly, nods. “Okay, I know. I want to try.”

  I think, That’s my girl!

  I say neutrally, “It’s totally up to you.”

  I keep it casual, with no expectation or pressure on either of us. I know there’s a decent chance Pippa will change her mind; I expect it will depend on the day, the weather, her mood. There’s not even one tiny part of me that wants to push her into running, to displace my own complicated ambitions onto her willful little self. Maybe because my own Fodderstack debut had been such an accident. Dad wasn’t trying to foist his aspirations onto me. He just made a chance suggestion and then let me make running my own.

  Lesley tells me that her two friends named Jennifer are going to walk with their friend Jeff’s ten-year-old daughter, Barney, and that if she’d like, Pippa is welcome to join them. I agree immediately. Now I can strike “Six-Year-Old Kidnapped During 10K Race” from the worry reel in my head.

  Before we hang up, Lesley clears her throat, as if she’s been saving up something important to say. “The woman who won the seventy-plus age group last year finished in 1:15. I know I can beat that.”

  * * *

  —

  The plane makes a long, gradual descent over western Virginia, banking turns above the Blue Ridge Mountains. Beside me is Pippa, the same age I was when we left Washington, almost thirty-seven years ago to the day. Big enough now to understand what has been lost and what it means to return.

  Far below, Skyline Drive is a twisting ribbon of asphalt through the mountains, the Shenandoah River curling like a snake through the valley. Forests and farms give way to subdivisions, my father like a ghost shadow of the plane beneath us, crossing office parks, parking lots, power lines, rippling ponds.

  Part of me still hopes to find Dad at Huntly Stage. In his basement, in the photographs on his desk, in his dusty camera lenses and the crinkled Post-its dangling from his computer screen, in his barn and in the fields. But he’s not there. I sense this before our plane even touches down at Dulles, the ground rising up to meet us. The land, like all land, is impervious and huge, extravagant in its abundance. It has forgotten him, swallowed his memories, freed him. This is okay. This is what the world is supposed to do.

  Gone, too, is the anticipation of seeing him in the airport, how this had always been for me a source of a steady gladness, not quite excitement, but a constant happy dependability. Bracing for his silly gags, the hiding behind pillars, the jumping out. The wide-eyed, exaggerated Boo!

  Huntly is greener than I remember, the mountains gentler, more beautiful, and so full of life. Lesley’s three friends, the Jennifers and Jeff, live on neighboring properties and are gregarious and funny and always popping by for a visit. They convene weekly for a formal sit-down dinner that rotates from house to house. It’s Lesley’s turn to host, and we drink wine in the dining room, and they teach Pippa the polite British way to say she’s full: “Thank you very much, I’ve had an elegant sufficiency.” But on her lips it comes out “elephant epiphany.” The pall of loss has lifted and I see that Lesley is happy, and this makes me happy.

  The next morning, after Lesley finishes her barn chores, we go for a walk. “Did you ever think when you bought this place that you’d still be here thirty years later?” I ask her. It’s 8 a.m. and the sun is just cresting the hill to the east, dew heavy on the grass. My running shoes are soggy.

  “No,” she says, laughing. “We had this plan that Yerdad ended up forgetting all about. We were going to buy the house, fix up the basement, and then sell it. This wasn’t the kind of place you’d stay in. It was impractical in every way.”

  I look around at the trees and grass, the taupe house and the tall barn, the improbable outcome of their life together. I have the oddest feeling that I’m seeing the farm for what it’s always been, even when I didn’t know it: home. This plot on this hill where Dad rooted in and down, learning, maybe, from this hillside how to give himself all the way, in his own way, to us.

  * * *

  —

  The night before the Fodderstack, I dream that the racecourse is underwater and we have to swim it standing up, in slow motion. The water is so heavy and viscous, I feel like I’m jogging in custard. Partway through the race, another runner swims up to me and hangs on to my arms, like she’s trying to drown me. I wake up in a tangle of sheets and sweat and reach for Pippa, who’s sound asleep beside me.

  In the morning at the starting line, it’s damp and chilly, and we’re all nervous for different reasons. Lesley because she wants to make it out of Flint Hill without asphyxiating, because she wants to win her age group. Pippa because she has never run so far in her life. And me because I’m scared for my knee, and for Pippa, who, like me thirty-seven years ago, has no idea what lies ahead.

  I don’t hear the announcer yell Go! through the megaphone; I just feel a surge of energy around me and am swept up by the other runners. The first straightaway, up the gradual hill, past the post office. Right on the Fodderstack Road, all the turns familiar. At mile 2, a woman with white hair, holding a stopwatch, calls out, “13:01.” Legs on autopilot, mind constantly assessing: the hills, the slope, the legs, and will they hold? Tight hamstring. Lungs. How is my breathing? Never out of breath, but a steady effort. Do I think I might puke? Not yet. Mouth dry and sticky. Where is the woman with the yellow shirt and armbands who looked like a contender? Don’t look back, never look back. It takes too much energy. The rubbery slap of soles on pavement growing fainter behind me.

  Soon I see houses on the outskirts of Little Washington. A state police officer has paused from his traffic duties to take a picture. Spectators call as I round the first corner into town: “There she is!” and “Bring it home!” Turn right through the last bend, the finish chute comes into view. Now I take a good long look back, a real look. The road behind me is empty. The policeman is in front of me now, stopping traffic so I can cross the intersection. I’ve run free of it all at last, even the reflexive, split-second urge to scan for Dad.

  Two people shout and string a red tape across the line and I break it.

  * * *

  —

  When we get home from the race, I go down to Dad’s basement. I’m not looking for anything, really, just trying to feel whatever’s left of him. At the foot of the stairs is a pile of things Lesley has set aside for me to take home. On top is the stack of small black notebooks. I sit on the bottom step and pick up the first one, tracing the bumpy red embossing tape with my fingers: LISTENING TO MYSELF. I open at random to a page in the middle.

  Dad’s notebook, 1975

  August 1975: “Time in Maine ending. Very successful venture. All of us had a good time—and
the kids were introduced to many things: tidal fluctuations, sailing, canoeing, living with ‘Daddy’ ”—the list goes on, thirteen in all. “I feel I have done a good job—no doubts of it.”

  The entries swing between hope and despondency. I can see that, even in his bleakest moments, he’s trying to making a new life for himself—with us, and apart.

  To have the girls get this far without knowing the specialness of music is one of my least contributions as a (mostly absent) father. In a way it’s almost my most punishable offense.

  That was the worst thing? Worse than his leaving?

  Once, this would have devastated me. Now I just think, I got the music, Dad. It just sounds different from yours. Not a bow on strings but feet on dirt, the cadence of words moving through me as I move.

  I was very happy to see the kids Friday evening. We went to the store to buy hot dogs. At times I felt as though I would like to be responsible for them always. I feel that my affection for the kids is one of the more constant things in my life….I think we all have fun together much of the time.

  But.

  There were moments when I felt tense. I had fixed their breakfast and was trying to eat mine and read the newspaper and they kept interrupting me in spite of an admonishment. And there was a mess of toys, sleeping bags, crayons, and drawings on the living room floor. I remember feeling then that they might really destroy my “world” in my apartment.

  I keep reading, flipping forward and back through the pages. I’m no longer afraid, only curious. All his contradictions, his crooked, tangled story, require a detachment I didn’t have when he was alive.

  What crushes me now is the children. The problems now because I am tired and discouraged seem insurmountable. But perhaps if I love them minute by minute in all our times together it will add up to something.

  Dear Meg and Kate, good people, your daddy loves you.

  My head spins. He’s speaking to me now, his grown daughter, forty years later. As though by writing into the future, he would write his way out of his heartbreak, and ours.

  Oh, Dad, I think. You and I. We’re so alike. We’re so different.

  I wish I could have told him to hang on. That the mess would get better and that he’d get used to it or that he wouldn’t and he’d get used to that, too. That he could go away and come home again. Like he’d done on the Talitiga, the way Steve and I try to do.

  Dad left us because he felt stifled by parenthood, but running is teaching me the opposite: Just because you become a parent doesn’t mean you’re no longer free. You can keep doing what you love, and encourage your children to live this way, too, outside in the fresh air, without being afraid every single second—or being afraid every single second and doing it anyway. It isn’t world politics or human rights. I don’t know if Dad would think it is Important. But I can’t ask him. I don’t need to anymore.

  This. This is what I’ve been running from. And running toward.

  Running has always held a purity and simplicity for me, existing outside of ego or expectation, at the same time it has always been rooted in ego, a way to seek and find validation, from others and from myself. A way to stand apart and come together. A sign of strength and unending vulnerability. A way of letting go of things lost or no longer useful. A way of being wild on my own terms. A way of leaving. A way to stay.

  Both sides now.

  * * *

  —

  Upstairs in the kitchen, Pippa’s and Lesley’s voices drift through the floorboards, the low thrum of conversation punctuated by laughter and the clatter of dishes. Philip and Merrill, Jeff and Barney and the Jennifers will be over soon for a victory lunch. I’m filled with longing: I want to be upstairs with them, not down here anymore.

  All this time I’ve been looking for one thing. The moment when Dad says, Wait, I made a mistake. I want to come home. But I won’t find it—I know this now—because he didn’t say it. He was too proud, or too conflicted, and Mom was too tired, and their ruined union became a footnote to a bigger story spinning on without them.

  You make your choices.

  I had been mad at him all this time, my anger buried beneath the layers and unconformities, deep in the basement rock. Not because he died. Not because he didn’t fight for his life. But because he hadn’t fought for us the way I’d wanted him to.

  He’d fought for us in his way. With adventures and plans, packing lists and wish lists. Lincoln Logs, punch-out books, barber shears, raincoats + boots. Camping: $3.50. Haunted house! Sheep and ducks, beef, cattle, horses, colts. He built his life with us the same way he’d built his barn: one piece, one board, one step at a time.

  I leave his letters where I found them, in boxes on the shelf. I don’t need to read them anymore. The accounting—if such a thing is even possible—will always swing more toward what he gave us than what he took away. But his notebooks, his dreams and schemes—those I will keep. I pick up the stack of them and, next to it, a spiral-bound travelogue from one of his cross-country road trips. I turn to the last page; Dad’s been driving for weeks and is nearly home.

  Tall grass grows to the edge of the road. Now I see a sign for HUNTLY STAGE.

  I ease off the gravel road onto a two-track drive, stone walls close on either side. Lights from the house at the top of the hill shine at me. There’s evidence of the grass having been recently cut. But not terribly evenly. It can be fixed.

  Top of the drive. Engine off, the car falls silent, leaving only the rumble of the road in my ears.

  At the door, there’s just one more question to ask:

  —Anybody home?

  * * *

  —

  I’ve stopped looking for Dad. He’s not lost anymore.

  He’s here in all of us, in the way we run, separately and together.

  At the thirty-seventh annual Fodderstack 10K Classic, Pippa brings her own strategy: Run what you can and walk what you can’t. When I double back on the road to find her, she’s just cresting the mountain, running straight into my arms, smiling and screaming, “Mama, Mama, did you win?”

  She and Barney ran the first two miles, walked the middle two. Together we alternate jogging and walking side by side the last two miles into town, but at the bottom of the final hill into Little Washington she takes off, running as hard as she can, arms pumping, leaving me behind. Around the last corner, down the last straightaway. She is six and I am seven and I know this feeling, only today it’s all hers. I’m behind her and she finishes fast and on her own, in 1:38, the youngest runner of the day.

  Lesley destroys the seventy-plus age group, in a time of 1:08.

  And I win the women’s race in a personal best of forty-one minutes.

  Afterwards, Lesley, Pippa, and I are presented with an award honoring three generations of Fodderstack runners. Posing together for a photo, I wonder if Dad would ever have imagined this. It had all started as such a fluke. Who could have possibly known where it would lead?

  The racecourse was just as I’d remembered it. The winding asphalt and stone walls, brick farmhouses and black barns, farmers sitting in lawn chairs at the ends of their driveways. The rolling hills, nearly constant, one short climb after the next—welcome, really. This is the secret to hills: They make running easier. Run the inclines and then roll through the downhills, building momentum. Keep it flowing and the energy will carry you onward and upward again, flying down the far side. Don’t stop. Keep going. Keep rolling through, one after the next. The hills will carry you home.

  EPILOGUE

  Ghosts

  2015

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Meg and me, Washington, 1974

  There’s one last thing I find.

  A box of cassette tapes, pushed into the back of a cupboard in Dad’s office, embossed with the same bumpy red letters as his notebook
s. I shove them into my duffel and fly home to Santa Fe, where I stash them in my loft and forget all about them.

  A few months later, I remember. I’m going on a road trip, five hundred miles from Santa Fe to Wyoming to write and run for two weeks. I don’t have a tape deck, but my thirteen-year-old Subaru wagon does.

  I drive alone through the Utah desert, doing eighty with all the windows down. It’s ninety-five degrees, and the air-conditioning is broken. Just over the Colorado state line, the interstate joins the Colorado River, glittering in its canyon. I want to dunk my feet in the water, but when I pull off the exit and drive past strip malls, I make a U-turn and drive straight back to the highway. If I stop for too long, I’ll lose heart.

  I’m stuck in between. Here, not here. It’s too late to turn back, but it seems an impossible feat to keep driving. Three hundred miles, three states. Harder by far than running.

  Now it’s night. I’ve left the interstate for a much smaller highway. I’m tired and my eyes are bleary. Through the windshield, something is wrong with the moon. It’s as fat and orange as a tabby cat, but part of it is missing. It’s being gnawed away by the night like the flesh of an apple, losing bits of itself by the minute.

  I blink, remember. It’s a supermoon eclipse, a total eclipse on the moon’s closest approach to earth, the rarest of the rare. All along the rural two-lane road, the animals are going crazy, spurred by the strange calamity in the sky. Elk stalk the roadside, rearing up in my high beams. Deer jump out from fences, flick their tails, bob away. The moon is on fire. I squint into the night. One mile at a time. Just like running.

  When I lose the country station out of Craig, the car’s too quiet, so I fumble for the bag of cassette tapes on the front seat. In the faint green glow of the dashboard, I can just make out one label: MAINE 1976. I push it into the cassette deck, hoping it won’t get chewed up and spit out in a tangle. It clicks into position, whirling miraculously to life.