The Longest Race

by Ed Ayres

  Reading that, I had to wonder if sport, which mimics the language and emotional intensity of war but eliminates the fatal destruction, may be a form of redemption. It not only sublimates that ancient hunting instinct but transforms it into something that can arouse and motivate modern humans as almost nothing else can. The ancient Olympics may have been the first large-scale effort of civilized humanity—whether or not it was the conscious intention at the time—to redirect the war-making impulse to an activity that enabled young men and women to be heroes without having to die. And maybe that, too, was a part of what captivated JFK. In his “Soft American” article, he had alluded almost wistfully to the nobility of that historic experiment. He would not live to see the ugly setbacks that would come with the murders of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, or the jingoist exploitation of Olympic audiences by the broadcast media, or the huge commercialization that would follow (not to mention the US Olympic Committee’s running-shoe endorsement scandal, which made a travesty of Olympic idealism). Redemption is one of those faltering, two-steps-forward, one-step-back transformations that seem frustratingly slow within the blink-of-an-eye moment of our time, but may also be one of our saving graces. The World Cup of soccer, World Series, Super Bowl, NBA championship, Tour de France, Chicago and New York Marathons—and, yes, the Olympics, despite its missteps—along with thousands of less-publicized contests like the one I was engaged in now, together ignite the passions of far more of the world’s population than have any wars since the end of World War II. Many more wars had happened since then, but virtually all were tinged by an aura of hard necessity and regret.

  The world was a very different place in 1861; that year, a crowd of ebullient spectators had traveled out from Washington to watch the Battle of Bull Run (not far from Manassas, where I now lived), and a magazine illustration of that outing was captioned, “Watching the Federal army advance seemed like a perfect Sunday afternoon diversion.” A London Times correspondent who joined the crowd wrote, “The spectators were all excited, and a lady with an opera glass who was near me was quite beside herself when an unusually heavy discharge roused the current of her blood—‘That is splendid, Oh my! Is not that first rate?’”3 Such a response by civilians to the mass killing of humans, even if the killing was deemed unavoidable, seemed unimaginable now. Since the high-speed obliterations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there had been some kind of global transformation in the collective empathy of our species. The crowd I would soon encounter at Antietam would be of the same species (and even some of the same bloodlines) as the spectators at Bull Run, yet it had been fundamentally transformed. Biologically, we hadn’t changed appreciably in a hundred thousand years. But culturally, since Bull Run and Antietam, we’d been changed forever—by two global scorched-earth wars and, arising from them, stupendous leaps in our abilities both to build weapons of quick mass destruction and to more consciously grasp the consequences of such destruction for our humanity.

  At least two of the transformative figures I encountered in my work had turned away from the quick-solution sprint economy to take a path of quiet redemption that—again, to quote Robert Frost—could make “all the difference.” The first was Ted Taylor. The second was Mikhail Gorbachev, last president of the Soviet Union before its astonishing dismantling in 1991. When I first met Gorbachev at a dinner in New York in 2000, I was transfixed by the potentially apocalyptic connection that had once prevailed between him and Taylor—and that had been defused in a real-life, global enactment of one of those movie scenes in which a bomb is defused just as the timing device ticks down: 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

  I knew about the connection between Taylor and Gorbachev in an abstract way, but it had become vividly personalized one day a few years ago when I came across a journal note Taylor had written about an experience he had at the height of the Cold War:

  A 45-year-old memory haunts me still. It was November 15, 1950. And I had been working at Los Alamos on a much more powerful fission weapon than people had previously thought possible, the Super Oralloy Bomb, or S.O.B.

  But now I was at a bar in a Washington hotel, feeling sad and angry because our second daughter, Kathy, was being born that night in Los Alamos. Instead of being with my wife, Caro, I had spent the day at a military intelligence office, poring over aerial photographs of Moscow, placing the sharp point of a compass in Red Square and drawing circles corresponding to the distances at which moderate and severe damage would result from the explosion of different heights of a 500-kiloton made-in-America bomb.4

  Recalling that note, I had to wonder: How could such a contemplative and caring man once have been so coolly calculating in his work? Five hundred kilotons was enough to incinerate thirty-seven cities the size of Hiroshima, and it would have done an apocalyptic job on Moscow. It was not that Ted had become a different person by the time I met him; I felt certain of that. People don’t easily change their basic nature, even when they do have a great change of heart. While we probably can’t do much to change what we are, how we use what we are can make all the difference. What affected me most about Ted Taylor was not his warnings and scenarios, but his complete reversal of direction. His medit tive nature reminded me of the Quaker elders I grew up hearing at Sunday meetings in Plainfield and Summit, New Jersey. Those thoughtful women and men never seemed bitter or angry, even though some of the topics they stood up to address could be infuriating to others. One elder would rise and speak, then sit down. There might be five or ten minutes of silence, then another would stand and add a reflection, or perhaps a quiet counterpoint. At the IR&T office, as Ted walked back and forth, with his hand in his pocket jingling his coins, a lot of his thought involved dreaming about the human future—not a future of conflicting worldviews and war, but of ingenious human interplay with the environment that produced us.

  That, too, had profoundly affected my experience of running. A “Cold War” attitude toward sport might have been to regard my opponents as enemies to defeat, rather than as companions in a great adventure. It took me a long time to learn, but I knew now that the more I could let go of the adversarial reflex, the more energy I’d have for running. Conflict poisons the spirit, and probably the blood. Companionship strengthens the spirit. If I wanted to run my best in this race, I needed to remind myself that Frank Probst and all my rivals in the over-sixty division, and all the Marines and army and navy guys, and everyone else who’d taken off from Boonsboro this morning, were among the best companions for a day—or a lifetime—I could ever hope to have. It might be a paradox that would only irritate an old-school coach, but I knew well that I would run my best by hoping that everyone else ran their best.

  When I met Gorbachev and shook his hand, I felt the same tactile surprise I experienced when I met Muhammad Ali—this was not the iron fist that had once ruled the world. These were gentle handshakes of men who’d grown older but stronger. The dinner had been put on by Green Cross International, the environmental group Gorbachev set up to help redirect global priorities from the madness of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction by nuclear holocaust, as depicted in the movie Doctor Strangelove) to a restoration of the planet we’d been abusing. What transfixed me was the realization that this was the man who’d been at the very center of Taylor’s crosshairs that December night in Washington.

  I was passing mile post 69, which would mean I was at about the marathon mark, although there was nothing there to indicate so. At twenty-six miles, an ultrarunner can’t afford to feel the way he or she would feel at the end of a marathon, since there’s still almost another marathon to go. I focused on the fact that I was just a mile from Antietam, which is a kind of psychological landmark: You are now well past the midpoint of the race. I dared to wonder whether the friendly crowd I’d meet there—with not a hint of the bitter divisiveness of their ancestors—would be not just another manifestation of the denial that had crippled our country, but a sign of the healing I could still hope for. Maybe people who could forego a Saturday morning of watching TV
sitcoms to go out and cheer for their kids or spouses or friends who were running fifty miles for no discernible purpose or profit or fame were—whether or not they thought of it this way—enjoying something that really was redemptive.

  The wind continued pushing, and again I felt that tension—that “cognitive dissonance,” as my psych professor at Swarthmore had called it—stemming not only from the companionable closeness of bitter legacies with friendly spectators, and war with sport, but also of frantic speed with stillness. And it was not just that the monuments of a long-ago war now flanked this course in silent stillness; the whole countryside around here was like that. For all the horrific and world-shaking events that had occurred here, it was now pastoral and peaceful wherever I looked. I knew enough about ecology to recognize that this was by no means wilderness, and was in many ways disturbed and destabilized. The towpath and canal were artificial structures, sections of which had been destroyed by hurricanes several times and would someday be destroyed again—perhaps to an extent that they could not be rebuilt. But the river and woods had adapted in their own ways; stately beech and rust-hued maple trees flanked the towpath, and a couple of months ago on a segment of the canal that still contained water, just upstream from Georgetown, I’d seen painted turtles sunning themselves on a half-submerged log. It was a peaceable kingdom I was running through; this whole region was.

  Two days ago, driving from our home in Manassas up to the JFK headquarters hotel in Hagerstown, I had decided not to take the quickest route, Interstate 270, but to follow a more pastoral route through Loudoun County, Virginia—through the little town of Hillsboro (with a population of one hundred), where every structure dated from the late 1800s or earlier, then out through the rolling Virginia wine country, across the Potomac at a point that put us in Maryland just a mile from Weverton, and up Rohrersville Road along the valley parallel to the South Mountain ridge on our right, to Boonsboro. We drove past fields and scattered farmhouses and small graveyards and splashes of late-fall orange and yellow foliage, all of which made me think of a Grandma Moses painting. And then we traveled from Boonsboro to Hagerstown, where a thousand runners were gathering.

  On the drive we passed very few other cars. Once we left the outer Washington suburb of Leesburg, we saw hardly any people at all—even when passing through the old towns of Hillsboro and Boonsboro. A faint scent of apple cider hung in the air, and it took me back to my college days forty years ago, when a group of us cross-country runners would take a Sunday run, bare-chested, through the quiet countryside of the Quaker state. Throughout the trip, the prevailing feel was of stillness. It calmed my troubled soul and both steadied me and psyched me for the run. When the running is good, there’s nothing like it.

  8

  Killiansburg Cave

  Becoming a Persistence Hunter: The Long Day of Tracking, the Grateful Kill, the Celebration

  Heading north from Antietam, the towpath seemed to get wilder—the trees larger and more gnarled, the canal to my right more tangled with overgrowth. The last sounds of the spectators faded, and, after a period of silence that could have been either five minutes or the hundred years it takes for a Quaker kid to sit through Sunday meeting, I found myself glancing left and right, the way I’d been taught as a teenager to drive a car—keep your eyes moving, don’t get fixated on the road straight ahead. Maybe that was a vestige of the hunter-gatherer’s need to read his surroundings. Paul Shepard noted that many indigenous peoples can identify as many as two thousand plants in the wild, and that there’s a tribe in Colombia whose members can distinguish between two hundred different species of a single genus by sight and name—and by their respective medical, nutritive, ecological, and utilitarian uses. Those of us who live in the consumer culture? We can identify hundreds of brand-name products made from the exhumed remains of plants that died four hundred million years ago and have been recently turned into plastic.

  After a while, across the canal to my right, I began to see cliffs where hikers had discovered a number of caves. Accounts of that “bloodiest day” at Antietam record that the battle continued sporadically for another two days, and during that time some of the residents of nearby Sharpsburg took refuge in what is now called Killiansburg Cave. They remained hidden there until Robert E. Lee and his decimated Virginia militia retreated over a shallow Potomac crossing called Pack Horse Ford. The ford would be somewhere downstream from here, down the heavily wooded embankment to my left.

  Retreat to caves and canyons, whether to escape ice-age storms, predators, or other humans, has been a survival strategy for humans for millennia, at least since the last glacial maximum thirteen thousand years ago, and possibly since our long-distance-walking Homo erectus predecessors roamed the planet a million and a half years before that—and has continued to be used right up to our own time. The Tarahumara escaped the guns and swords of the Spanish Conquistadors by disappearing into the vast Copper Canyon four centuries ago, relying on their long-distance running mobility much as their South American brethren, the Incas, did. The Incas deployed their long-distance relay-running couriers, the Chasquis, to carry messages over the rugged roads of the Andes faster than the Spanish could communicate around the coasts by ship. Centuries later, in the American West, the Apache rebel Geronimo and thirty-eight of his warriors, the last holdouts of the Indian Wars, evaded the hot pursuit of eight thousand US and Mexican Army soldiers and a thousand armed vigilantes by disappearing into the Arizona mountain canyons without a single one of them being caught. And historically, both the good guys and the bad had used canyons and caves this way. Even now, as I ran, Osama bin Laden was apparently hiding somewhere in the caves of Tora Bora, in Afghanistan. As of the 6 o’clock news last night, which I watched before turning in early, I hadn’t heard any news of his having been caught.

  Of course, we now knew that the caves of the prehistoric “cavemen” were not only refuges but, for some, places for home and hearth and evidently even a vivid form of storytelling. Recent research has established that the stereotypical image of cavemen I’d grown up with was mistaken. Maybe that image of hulking, slope-headed, hairy brutes with clubs could be traced to the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who famously wrote that the life of a human living in a state of nature, before civilization, was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”1 Or, as further condensed in more recent, more hurried times, just “nasty, brutish, and short.”

  Hobbes’s comment underpinned what was to become an almost never-questioned premise of human history: that the advent of agriculture, with its abundance of farm fruits, grains, and livestock, had liberated humans from having to hunt and gather to survive, and had been the launch of the civilization we now enjoy. Lester R. Brown had been one of the first students of agricultural science to question that view, in his research at the US Department of Agriculture, and then in his groundbreaking book, The Twenty-Ninth Day. When I first went to work for Brown at Worldwatch, I was overwhelmed by the emerging evidence the institute’s researchers were gathering, that the pleasures of the foods we now enjoyed had come at staggering costs. The view of the mainstream historians was that agriculture—the transformation of wild plants and animals into domesticated crops and herds—had been the greatest chapter of the human story.

  The historian Jared Diamond, however, would offer a radically different assessment. In an article he titled “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” he wrote: “Recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step to a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”2 The standard view of history was that we modern humans obviously live far better than the miserable serfs of the medieval times did, and that medieval people of course had lived better than the cavemen had. That view was called progressivist because it assumed that human history is always a story of continued progress. A big part of it, I knew, was the assumption of mainstream economists that a “strong” economy must be a perpetually
growing economy, quite regardless of the fact that we have become an exploding population on a planet of finite size and limited resources.

  In his challenge to that view, Diamond cited newly discovered evidence that the life of prehistoric humans had apparently not been at all what Thomas Hobbes and the progressivists thought. The evidence included both forensic studies of ancient human remains and anthropological studies of the few hunter-gatherer societies that still thrived today. Particularly notable were the findings of paleopathologists that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was five feet, nine inches for men and five feet, five inches for women—about the same as they were for men and women at the start of the twenty-first century.

  Of course, those were also the approximate average heights of the very healthy and fit men and women in this JFK race. Contrary to traditional belief, prehistoric humans had evidently not been stunted by dietary deficiency.

  The contemporary evidence confirmed it. Researchers, to the surprise of almost everyone, had found that so-called primitive peoples, such as the Tarahumara in Copper Canyon, the Kalahari Bushmen of southern Africa, and the Hadza nomads of the Rift Valley in Tanzania, were not worse off than farmers in either their access to food or their hours spent working. Contrary to our long-held assumptions, these modern hunter-gatherers spent only twelve to nineteen hours per week to obtain enough food from the wild to live well, including whatever time was needed to chase down wildebeest or deer. Interestingly, the number of hours they spent hunting and gathering was about the same as the number it takes to train for a marathon or ultra. A significant result: the contemporary hunter-gatherers had more time than we of the sprint economy do to relax, spend time with their families, engage in recreational or artistic pursuits, and maybe even reflect on the meaning of their life on this planet. The downside is that they didn’t have fighter jets.