Running with the Pack

by Mark Rowlands

  The path beneath me is old coral, shattered and withered, laced with the roots of trees, the jungle’s hardened arteries that knot the path together, binding and penetrating the coral. Every twisted root looks like a snake; every new step is a leap of faith. A tropical forest is life in fast-forward. Here, we live fast, die young. This is a forest gorged on life, choked with life, and the hot, wet stench of decay that clings to everything is the mocking response of time, laughing at life’s impatient futility. The forest knows lives as Rimbaud knew lives. They are the worms that crawl on a banner of meat that bleeds, under a sea of silken flowers.

  In Tuscaloosa, the heartbeat of the run was a solid thump-thump into the softened summer tarmac. In Ireland, on the Rathmore Peninsula of Kinsale, the heartbeat was thud-shh-shh-thud-shh-shh, as my steps quickly faded into the enveloping wind. In suburban Miami, it is the whoosh of the cars and the slap and whir of the garden sprinklers. But here in jungle Miami, the beat is utterly distinctive: thud-rustle-pitter-pat-thud-rustle-pitter-pat. Every time my foot hits the ground, an anole — a diminutive but ubiquitous indigenous lizard — scurries away into the deeper undergrowth, its tiny feet tap-tapping on the leaves. You quickly learn the frequency of the anole on the leaves. When the frequency diminishes — a longer rustle, no pitter-pat — then you stop. You stop dead, because that is a snake.

  Hugo is a German shepherd, and on the day of this run he is a little over eighteen months old. On the following page, he is pictured in the garden of our Miami home. The picture was taken earlier this year, just after we had returned from one of our morning runs. He is now requesting that I throw his Frisbee, a laconic canine comment on the feeble four-mile run I was able to offer him. Is that the best you’ve got, old man? Of course, this picture was taken back in the Miami winter. At this time, he had only just matured enough to run regularly, and he hadn’t yet had the pleasure of footing it in a Miami summer. Talk to me again after that, son.

  Hugo is tall for a German shepherd, around thirty inches at the shoulder, and lean — weighing about eighty pounds. He’ll fill out to around ninety when he is fully grown; no more than that I think. His feet are still a little too big for him, which adds a certain ungainly charm to his movements, especially when he switches from canter to sprint. He is dark — his body black, except for the red of his chest, underbelly, legs and feet. Hugo is from Germany — a foreigner like me.

  Not only outsiders, we are minor outlaws. Our little runs are in defiance of the law. Miami is the most dog-unfriendly place I have ever heard of, let alone lived in; although, from what I gather, everywhere is becoming dog-unfriendly (part of a more general unfriendliness, I suspect). One’s every turn is dogged — no pun intended — with a draconian set of laws that require dogs to be leashed in all public places. Except, of course, in the specially designated dog parks — I think there are three in the entire city, tiny faeces-strewn enclosures, where one can barely swing a cat let alone walk a dog. And anyway Hugo needs to run, not walk. And at his pace, not mine — not tied to me like a prisoner. If he can’t run, his soul will die. And so we find ourselves running where we can’t be seen.

  I have grown old and young again many times. When the pack that runs beside me grows old and can no longer run with me, I stay at home and grow old with them. Today I am becoming young again, although that is not how it feels. Growing young again is hard work — harder every time. Once I get my youth back, running will once again be a treat for both body and soul. Today, that’s only half true. If I can keep going long enough for the pain in my knee to subside; if my back doesn’t seize up, or my calf give out on me; if I can just put up with the pain in my Achilles for the first mile or two, it will usually fade after that; if I can just get enough air into these ageing lungs, get this ancient and cloudy blood gushing through stiffening arteries — then maybe once again my body can have a little party on the endorphins. But that’s unlikely on today’s run with Hugo in snakeland. I have only recently started running again with Hugo, after a long, long lay-off.

  This lay-off was the result of two things. When we first moved to Miami, I tried running with Nina and Tess — just once, because it was clear they couldn’t do it any more. So they stopped running and consequently I stopped running. It was the guilt: I couldn’t deal with the reproachful looks every time I tried to leave the house in running gear. Why aren’t you taking us? What have we done? Tess passed away in February of last year. She was ten years old. Nina was twelve when this happened and a very old, very frail dog. I really didn’t see just how old and frail. Nina hung on for three weeks after Tess died, rattling around the house looking for her old friend, and then suffered massive organ failure. I’d just returned from a speaking engagement in the Netherlands — a long-standing commitment I couldn’t get out of — and I’d been away for three days. Emma told me that Nina was a little off-colour, but I put it down to my absence coming so soon after Tess’s disappearance. My diagnosis was apparently confirmed when she perked up on my late-night arrival, and we split a small pizza. The next morning when we came downstairs, she couldn’t stand. I carried her into the vet, just as I had done for Tess three weeks earlier. It was awful for us that they went so close together, but without any doubt the best for them. And I’m happy it turned out that way.

  After a while, we acquired Hugo as a tumbling eight-week-old puppy — a first-birthday present for our son, Brenin, was the spin I put on it. And, it is true, Brenin had known Nina and Tess since he was two days old — his first word was ‘dog’ — and he missed them when they went. That was around a year ago — you should not run with a big dog until he’s at least a year old; his growing bones are just not ready for it. Putting together the absence of a dog that needs to run and the night-after-night of sleep deprivation that goes hand in hand with a restless and demanding baby boy, I just could not manage to persuade myself to run. At least, not regularly — and if I don’t do it regularly, running becomes a deeply unpleasant slog: work not play. And so I stopped running completely.

  So it has been a long time — two years all told — and this is the first time I’ve got back to running regularly since we moved to Miami and since I became a father. I have become a fat and slow father. With the run of today, I’m slowly working my way back and the former experiential perquisites of the run just haven’t started happening for me yet. When I am in better shape, and the rhythm of the run holds me in its spell, my thoughts will dance in a way they never seem to do when I am not running. But that will not happen today. The thoughts that come today are slower, languid, like the gentle rustle of snakes in the undergrowth. These are thoughts that come from exhaustion without rhythm. Perhaps these are thoughts that would not appear — thoughts my brain would not allow — when I am in a less weakened state. Meditation through mortification of the body: an ancient tradition that lives on in this little part of south Florida where Hugo and I run today.

  I hope Hugo enjoys these runs. I think he does. His young life is certainly impatient enough to be on the road in the mornings. But perhaps he understands that the longer I dally at my computer, recording and inspecting whatever ideas the night has offered up, the more the growing heat will make us suffer. Perhaps he wants to be out and safely back home to the swimming pool before the snakes come out for their midday bask on the paths and boulders of coral that a younger sea has sprinkled through the forest. If so, I share these sentiments.

  Hugo presses on. When we are in the woods, he must run behind me. The woods are alive with snakes. If I’m bitten, it’s going to smart, but ultimately I’ll be okay, probably. If he’s bitten, then the prognosis is less clear. A bite to the legs or snout — he’ll probably survive. A bite to the torso — his chances are not so good. But he is young and impatient, and he wants to see what life has in store for him further up the trail. He presses at my heels, nearly tripping me up. ‘Back!’ I snarl, gesticulating with my thumb, but smiling inwardly at this echo of years gone by. He dutifully drops a few paces back, a resolution tha
t he will soon forget.

  For obvious reasons, I’m teaching Hugo to fear the snake. It’s not hard: I fear the snake. And one thing we parents are very good at is transferring our fears to our children. I’m not as bad as Emma. She has a general-purpose, context-independent, turned-to-stone terror of snakes. You merely have to say the word ‘snake’ and she blanches. Once, a number of years ago on our first holiday together, we were eating at the Hard Rock Cafe in Key West, and a man — a street performer — appeared with his boa constrictor. ‘Would you like a photograph with my snake?’ It took every ounce of my powers of persuasion to convince Emma not to throw up in her lap (and I had to pay the snake-handler to move along a few blocks). I once told her about Sam, the snake of my childhood, and she nearly left me. Here in Miami, there’s a black racer that lives in our garden — residing in the shrubbery at the north-east corner of the property. We have been living in this house for two years, and I still haven’t told her about it. If I did, I suspect we would be on the next plane back to London.

  My fear is more bound to context. When I’m running with Hugo, I rationalize. There are forty-five species of snake found in Florida, only six of which are poisonous. So I tell myself, with admittedly sloppy logic, the chances are 13—2 against any snake we encounter on our run being venomous. Actually, it is better than that — there are only four species of poisonous snake in this part of south Florida. And within each species, the numbers of venomous snakes are relatively sparse compared to the non-venomous ones. So the odds are heavily slanted in my favour anyway. I know this. In addition, most snakes in the vicinity, poisonous or not, will hear my leaden-footed thudding and skedaddle off into the undergrowth. I know this too. If I do manage to get myself bitten by a poisonous snake it may inject little or no venom. And even if I get the full monty, it’s overwhelmingly likely that I’m going to survive. I know all this. But when I hear the tell-tale rustling of a snake that is somewhere nearby but I can’t be sure quite where, then all that I know evaporates before my eyes, disappearing in a little puff of irrelevant smoke.

  When I was growing up in Wales, in addition to Boots, I had another companion: a garter snake who hailed from the US and whom I, accordingly, baptized Sam. Boots was not entirely enamoured, but I liked Sam, and so I tended to give him the run of the house. Sometimes he would disappear for days on end. When he reappeared, it would almost invariably be at my mother’s expense — she’d be doing something like rooting through the cupboard in search of a can of something or other, and out he would spring (or so she alleged). My mother was actually quite fond of Sam too. But when a snake pokes his little head out at you as you are rummaging through a cupboard, then your heart rate is going to shoot from seventy to seven million and there’s nothing you can do about it. No matter how much you suspect Sam is going to be there — no matter how much you rationalize the situation — when he does appear, something basic and biological takes over; and it really doesn’t care about your rationalizations. That is how I feel about snakes. When the high-frequency pitter-pat rustling of a lizard on the leaves gives way to the languid rustle of a snake, my scrotum attempts to beat a rapid retreat up inside my abdomen as if to say: take the husk, but spare the gene line. Spare what is immortal in this body. And then all I am aware of is fear — visceral, irrational and overwhelming. That is what I have done my best to bequeath Hugo.

  After about a mile or so of generally low-grade anxiety (occasionally escalating to soaring panic), the forest opens out into grassland. Here is a small lake where Hugo can cool down, after I’ve checked for gators and moccasins. Both are ubiquitous in south Florida, and you always have to keep a wary eye open. But I’ve never seen any at this particular watering hole, and I think the definite danger of overheating has precedence over the potential danger of a passing reptile. So Hugo wades around in the water — I won’t let him swim here — while I scan the surface for movement; tense, on my toes, ready for action. A few minutes later we are on our way again, Hugo reinvigorated, bounding ahead of me as he knows I will now allow him to do. There is an old road here, and I can — usually — see far enough along it to recognize the outline of any snake that might be sunning itself.

  We see snakes here almost every day, but most are harmless. Black racers are everywhere. There is a big orange ratsnake we sometimes glimpse in the dead grass that lines the trail. And there is an improbably long and thin coach-whip we occasionally find basking on the cracked and faded tarmac. That snake is an admirably phlegmatic character — once, when I first discovered this place, in the twilight days of Nina and Tess, I wasn’t looking out as carefully as I should and Nina walked right over the top of him. But when he does decide to move, boy is that snake fast! I doubt I could catch him, even if I tried.

  Encounters with poisonous snakes are, thankfully, rare. There are the moccasins I’ve already mentioned: sometimes known as the cottonmouth — when alarmed, it opens its jaws wide and the inside of its mouth is pure cotton-white. Moccasins are a species of pit viper — so called because of the hole or ‘pit’ that can be seen between their eyes and their nose, which contains the heat detectors that these vipers use to identify and locate prey. In this part of the world, you will find no shortage of people ready to regale you with stories of just how aggressive, almost diabolical, is the moccasin. I suspect this has much to do with the fact that they just look so utterly evil. There are no beautiful markings, as on some of the other local venomous serpents. Their bodies are black and fat, almost bloated looking if the snake is healthy, and the head is often a lighter shade — like a brown skull. I have not yet seen a moccasin in south Florida, but I saw plenty when I lived in Alabama. There, they could be a little problematic during breeding season — April and May — soon after they have woken up from their hibernation (in south Florida, they don’t hibernate). But in general, at least in my experience, they were relatively placid. Also, while they have been known to travel miles from water, it is quite unusual for them to do so. So while I have to keep a keen eye open for them when Hugo goes swimming, once we have left the lake behind there are other snakes more worthy of worry.

  Here, everyone is afraid of coral snakes, largely because they are members of the cobra family. Brightly banded in red, black and yellow, they are easily mistaken for the harmless kingsnake. You have to look closely at the order of banding: red touching black, friend of Jack; red touching yellow, kill a fellow. Of course, with my markedly failing eyesight, I suspect that the inspection needed to identify this information would have to be done from uncomfortably close range and, all things considered, I think it would probably be better to just run the other way. The venom of the coral snake is neurotoxic — it attacks the nervous system, and death is the result of asphyxiation — whereas the venom of all the other poisonous serpents of Florida is haemotoxic — it attacks the red blood cells. Neurotoxic venom is more deadly, but does not come with the wish-I-would-hurry-up-and-die sort of pain associated with haemotoxic venom — or so I am told. If you’re bitten by a coral snake, Floridians tell me, you’ll be dead in thirty minutes. In fact, this is exaggerated. First of all, death is by no means guaranteed. It all depends on where they bite you, how much venom they inject and how long it takes the nearest anti-venom team to reach you. Secondly, for poorly understood reasons, it can sometimes take hours for the symptoms of coral snake envenomization to occur. The first symptom is a sore throat, followed by an inability to keep one’s eyelids open — not because you can’t stay awake but simply because your eyelids won’t do what you tell them. If this happens, you need help fast — but as long as you get it your chances are still very good.

  Pygmy rattlers actually worry me a lot more than coral snakes or moccasins. There are no timber rattlers this far south, but its smaller cousin — they rarely grow beyond two feet or so — the pygmy, or dusky pygmy, rattler is an aggressive little sod, the Napoleon of the snake world. They don’t move aside when they hear you coming; and they are useless at warning you of their presence — a rathe
r unfortunate combination. Their rattle is small and often so faint that it sounds more like a cricket than a rattlesnake. The venom of their bite also belies their small stature. Their bite is unlikely to be fatal, at least not for me, but is nevertheless extremely painful.

  But today’s run is going to be special. We are going to see something that we may well never see again. On the road in front of us, sunning itself, unconcerned, in the morning heat, is perhaps the most singularly impressive snake in North America: an eastern diamondback rattler. Diamondbacks are truly beautiful animals. Their name comes from the pattern of wedges that runs all the way along their body, forming a latticework of diamonds, dark brown around the edges and beige inside — brown and beige, the colours of the 1970s, my childhood, my home. Hugo and I stand and look, just for a while, and then run on.

  This is a story of snakes, and fathers, and of a home to which I can never return. There is a reason why Satan chose to appear to Eve in the form of a serpent. There is a reason he did not choose to appear as a rabbit or a bird, a squirrel or a bug.

  In the beginning there was darkness on the face of the deep and the world was without form and void. But then God the Father said, ‘Let there be light!’ and there was light. And He saw that it was good. A neat trick, you might think, but how did He pull it off? Light is, of course, energy, and in creating energy, God — our ingenuity has subsequently allowed us to discover — employed two principles: the first and second laws of thermodynamics. According to the first law, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, merely converted from one form into another. According to the second law, any closed system tends towards the maximum disorder.