Running with Sherman

by Christopher McDougall

  I wasn’t sure how to divvy up the donkeys, until I realized we had no choice. I had to take Flower, since if anyone was going to get dragged around or booted, it should be me. That meant Mika would be out front with Matilda to keep things moving, leaving Zeke with the Wild Thing. I hated inflicting Sherman on any first-timer, least of all someone who was dealing with mystery issues of his own, but so be it; ya play the card ya got.

  Mika doled out fistfuls of horse treats to Andrea and Zeke. The donks must have gotten over their past separation anxieties, because instead of doinking around and dodging us, today they surged right to the gate and let us slip on halters and ropes while they gobbled treats out of Zeke’s and Andrea’s hands.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s see how far we get. Andrea, take ’em out.”

  Andrea was so excited, she ignored both her own back pain and everything I’d said about walking and instead took off at a run. I waited behind with Flower, figuring she’d be easier to handle if Sherman and Matilda showed her what to do, but Flower had plans of her own. She was off before Matilda even had a chance to start, trotting so briskly that when Andrea glanced over her shoulder, she was looking straight into Flower’s eyes. “Oh!” she exclaimed, startled. “Hello, missy.”

  It was kind of crazy; Flower followed Andrea so obsessively that every move Andrea made, Flower mirrored. The big donkey slowed behind Andrea on the uphill, sped up when she crossed the road, and even buttonhooked when Andrea turned around to check on the others. A few yards behind us, Matilda seemed a little miffed to find Flower out front and was steaming hard to catch up, forcing Mika to nearly sprint. Farther back, Zeke and Sherman seemed to be doing nicely. Zeke was making the rookie mistake of leading Sherman instead of driving him, but that was a simple fix. Out of everybody I somehow ended up with the easy job; all I had to do was hang on to Flower’s rope and leave the heavy lifting to Andrea, who was panting hard but hanging tough.

  But when we were still a good thirty yards away from the gravel road, Andrea began slowing down. “Looking good,” I encouraged her, while mentally yelling Go, go, go! I didn’t want to goad Andrea into hurting her back—not out loud, at least—but this was the worst possible place for her to stop. Flower would hit the brakes, just the way she did when the Amish gang dropped us on the Full Moon Run, and I’d be stuck on a blind curve with three unmovable animals. If Andrea couldn’t run any farther, there was only one thing for me to do: it was time to try the Growl.

  Barb Dolan had this thing she’d do whenever her donkey slowed down. A rumbling growl would gather in the depths of Barb’s innards and slowly roll up through her throat like thunder across the prairie, ending in a sharp bark of command. Even I snapped to attention the first time I heard the Growl. Back then, my future goals for donkey running were to never, ever subject myself to that kind of misery again, so it never occurred to me to ask if the Growl was a universal donkey password or strictly a Barb-Dakota thing. I still remembered what it sounded like, though. I got as close as I could to Flower’s flank, sucked in a bellyful of air, and gave it my best Barb.

  “Heeeeeyyyyyyy-yup,” I called.

  Flower’s ears didn’t even twitch. I dialed up the volume and let it rip again. “Heeeyyyy—YUP!”

  Andrea looked back. “Did you say stop?”

  “No. ‘Yup.’ ”

  “Yup?”

  “Yeah, it’s this donkey thing,” I hurriedly explained, but by then, it was too late. Andrea stood there, chest heaving and hands propped on her hips, listening to me babble as Flower froze to a standstill beside her. Behind us, Sherman and Matilda were already slowing to an amble, ready to crowd right on into our huddle, exactly in the kill zone of the blind curve.

  “Do you mind standing over here a sec?” I asked Andrea, pointing toward a thicket of brambles between the road and the barbed-wire fence. “I’m going to try something.” Without even asking why, Andrea stepped into that prickly mess. Quickly, I walked as far behind Flower as I could get, stretching her rope to the limit. Then I ran toward her, flapping my arms and giving it all the Barb I had: “hhhhheeeeeEEEEEYYYYY-YUP! hhhhheeeeeEEEEEYYYYY-YUP-YUP-YUP!”

  Flower edged toward Andrea. I kept coming, barreling into the gap between them, waving my arms like a demented giant seagull. Flower tried pivoting toward Matilda and Sherman, who’d stopped a few yards away to watch this spectacle, but I cut her off. Cornered between me and Andrea, Flower had only two options: she could stampede into me and escape, or turn around and cooperate. Flower backed up two steps, giving herself running room. I gripped the rope tightly and braced as she…

  …wheeled toward the gravel road. Amazing. It actually worked. I stood there, admiring my success, until the end of the rope sliding through my fingers reminded me to shake a leg. I scooted after Flower and soon caught up, positioning myself just beyond kicking range on her left flank. As we ran, I watched for any tells that she might balk while Flower side-eyed me right back. We clipped along that way, eyeing each other suspiciously as we passed AK’s Saw Shop and rounded the shady bend toward the waterfall. “Damn, Flower can move,” I thought, struggling a little to match pace as she picked up speed down the short hill.

  I didn’t dare look behind to see how Mika and Zeke were doing; the last thing I wanted was to remind Flower that her buddies were just a U-turn away. Flower finally skidded to a halt when we approached the Dreaded Trickling Underground Creek, which was fine by me. After that fast quarter mile, I was happy for a breather. I was also curious to see if I could repeat my luck with the Growl and get Flower going again from a standing start.

  “Yeah, Flower!” Mika cheered as she and Matilda pulled up beside us. “You guys looked great.”

  Zeke and Sherman arrived a few moments later. “Man!” Zeke blurted. “He was impossible for a while. Then all of a sudden, he just opened it up.”

  “He was horrified that Flower left him,” Mika said. “He couldn’t even blame it on Tanya.”

  “I think Sherman missed the object-permanence part of his brain development,” Zeke added, which left me scratching my head until some old psych class memories bubbled back. “As soon as Flower is out of sight, he has no idea he’ll ever see her again.”

  While we were talking, Sherman butted his big old head into Zeke’s hip. Without looking down, Zeke continued to chat while absentmindedly rubbing the fur along Sherman’s jaw and scruffing his mohawk mane. I was impressed. Sherman is a master of psychological torture, a true craftsman at driving a dental drill into your last nerve, and if ever there was a time for the Wild Thing to dip into his bag of tricks, feints, and all-around mindmessing, it would be when some stranger—a nervous college kid, no less—was trying to boss him around. Sherman made it clear from the start that the rope in Zeke’s hand didn’t necessarily mean he was in charge. Yet by the time they reached the waterfall, something between them was starting to click.

  “So what do you think?” I asked Zeke. “Had enough, or should we keep going?”

  “Oh, yeah. Let’s go,” Zeke said. “I’m really getting the hang of it.”

  “You don’t know Sherman,” I warned. “The best part of your day may already be over.”

  I prepared to repeat my Attack of the Growling Seagull performance, but as soon as I walked behind Flower and raised my arms, she automatically broke into a trot, almost as if the whole time we’d been talking she’d been waiting for me to shut up already and get back to running. Matilda and Sherman lurched off behind her, and the six of us cruised down the gravel road. We made it another quarter mile to the wooden bridge before Flower (of course) had to hit the brakes and thoroughly sniff it over in case some dramatic structural weakness had suddenly appeared since the last time we’d crossed it. Mika and Zeke didn’t wait; they led their donkeys around Flower and quickly clattered across, inspiring Flower to follow.

  Once Flower was safely on the other side, she towed me past t
he other two donkeys and surged off into the lead again. “See ya, suckas,” I yelled as Flower and I vanished down and around a hilly curve. Maybe we’d underestimated Flower all along; rather than a twitchy baby who needed someone in the saddle to control her, she might be the best natural runner in the crew. I kept waiting for the trapdoor to drop and discover that, nah, it was all a fluke and we were now stranded a mile from home with a 400-pound block of cement, but except for her usual phobias, Flower seemed to be loving the opportunity to cut loose and leg it. The faster we ran, the harder Matilda and Sherman pushed to keep up with us, which could mean…

  Which could mean…

  I could feel the idea before I understood it, as if I’d spun the dial on a safe and heard tumblers clicking into place with no idea what was locked inside. Somehow I’d cracked the combination without even trying, and it took me a few more minutes of running down the road with Flower before I finally processed what we’d done:

  We’d hacked Sherman’s brain.

  For months, we’d been struggling to train Sherman as my running partner, but maybe there was a simpler fix. Instead of changing Sherman, we could change the world around him. If Flower was a natural runner with fear issues, and Matilda was a fearless runner with abandonment issues, then maybe all we had to do was combine their strengths and weaknesses into one big Swiss Army knife of a support system. Whenever Flower was afraid, Matilda could step up. When Matilda lagged behind, Flower could set the pace. We had three weird donkeys on our hands, but together, they could give one another—and especially Sherman—all the help each of them needed.

  I couldn’t wait to put my new Donkey Multitool Technique to the test, so Flower and I stopped at the end of the gravel road for the rest of the gang to catch up. Flower was running out of her mind, and Sherman was doing fine with Zeke (according to Zeke, at least). So why not push on and see how far we could go if we switched the formation whenever one of the donkeys got finicky? As soon as I talked myself into it, though, Tanya’s voice in the back of my mind talked me right back out again. “That’s your version of a good idea?” I could hear her saying, her left eye puckering with the pain of pointing out the obvious. “What happened to ‘End on an up note’? Forget that?”

  The beginning of a beautiful bromance: Zeke meets Sherman.

  We also had a bigger problem: I still didn’t know what kind of trouble Zeke was in. There was no way that straight-A, straight-arrow Zeke would suddenly abandon college unless he was in a serious jam. Had he gotten sick? Arrested? Was that mental-health issue from high school flaring up again? Any one of these possibilities was enough to make donkey running a terrifically bad idea. If Zeke was ill, stressed, or under house arrest, the worst place for him was somewhere deep in the Southern End, wandering for miles over lonely backroads with a feisty donkey and no cell-phone reception. Before I let myself get too excited, I needed to get Andrea by herself and find out what was going on.

  “Okay,” I told Mika and Zeke when they caught up. “Let’s spin it here.”

  The donkeys frisked around, greeting one another with snorts and playful nips, but they straightened right out when they realized we were going home. Flower was so happy to be heading back to her pasture, she caused only a little kerfuffle when we reached the wooden bridge and snapped immediately back into a fast trot after I led her across. I thought about slowing her down when I saw Andrea walking toward us, but we were having such an inspired first run, I didn’t want to leave Flower with any discouraging associations.

  “You good?” I called to Andrea.

  “I’m good!” she said. “I’m very good.” She was beaming, and gave me a big thumbs-up. Only later, when I finally heard the whole story, did I find out why: for the first time in a frighteningly long while, Andrea had a feeling that her son’s life might be out of danger.

  17

  It

  A few weeks earlier, Andrea had been dead asleep when her phone rang at around eleven o’clock at night. She could barely understand the voice on the other end of the line. It was a young woman, very upset, saying something about Zeke. He was in the campus medical center at Penn State because he’d—what was that, cut himself? Yes, but it was more than a cut…

  Andrea was wide awake now. She realized she was talking to Susan, a Chinese student who’d become friends with Zeke the previous year in their freshman chemistry class. Zeke had slashed his arm, Susan said, and then tried to hang himself from a rod over his doorway. Luckily, the rod broke loose from the wall in time, tumbling Zeke to the floor while he was unconscious but still breathing. He didn’t know how long he was passed out, but when he finally came to, he remembered how horrible it felt to slowly choke to death. I’m no good, he thought. I’m such a loser I can’t even kill myself. He called Susan for help.

  Andrea lunged out of bed. She called her daughter, Ashling, then a junior at Penn State, and her husband, Andy, who was a five-hour drive away at work in upstate New York. Susan stayed in Zeke’s apartment with him until Andy got there and took Zeke to the emergency room. Andy expected Zeke to be checked into Mount Nittany Hospital, which had a lot of experience helping Penn State students, but the mental health ward was full and the only available bed was in a secure facility more than three hours away. Because Zeke had threatened his own life, he was now in the custody of the state and had to be transported by the local constable. Zeke arrived for processing at five in the morning, exhausted and alone. His clothes were taken away and he was given hospital scrubs and assigned to a bed. After he had slept for only two hours, a hand banging on the door woke him up: time for group therapy.

  Zeke stumbled out and groggily took his seat, wondering what had happened to him. The day before, he’d been a star science student at Penn State, majoring in physics and biomedical engineering with a specific interest in the mathematical modeling of brain circuits. This morning, he was locked in an institution somewhere in Reading, Pennsylvania, slumped in a plastic chair and surrounded by strangers who, one by one, were telling the saddest stories he’d ever heard in his life. The longer group therapy went on, the worse he felt. Zeke’s fellow patients had been crushed by true horrors, tortured by abuse and addiction and imprisonment. And Zeke? He was well off and extraordinarily bright, a superb athlete from a fun-loving family who would do anything for him. What did he have to feel sad about? Instead of easing his depression, the session made Zeke feel spoiled and useless.

  Afterward, he trudged back to his room to get some rest but found his assigned roommate was an older man with schizophrenia and sleep apnea who snored and “chewed tobacco like a beast,” as Zeke put it, filling cup after cup with his mentholated tobacco spit. The room was so noisy and smelly that Zeke couldn’t sleep, leaving him sluggish and withdrawn during the daytime activities. Zeke was desperate to get out, but his doctors, who didn’t know about Zeke’s involuntary all-nighters with the dip-chawin’ snorer, saw only a suicidal young man who was still ominously quiet. They refused to sign his release.

  Zeke’s parents weren’t giving up, and kept pushing their version of a plea bargain: Andrea was a licensed nurse, so if Zeke were allowed to come home, she promised she would treat him like any other patient and personally guarantee that he’d take his medication, attend daily outpatient treatments, and meet with a recommended therapist. After three days, the doctors finally agreed.

  But the Zeke who came home wasn’t Zeke. What had happened to the rambunctious dynamo who devoured books and double burgers, who had watched Richard Feynman physics videos for fun in high school and lived all summer in the backyard pool? All his curiosity and playful goofiness were gone, leaving behind a moody loner who didn’t want to leave his room. Andrea and Andy didn’t know what to do. If they pushed Zeke back toward his old life, would he try to end it again? And as a medical professional, Andrea had to take a hard look at herself and wonder:

  Was this all her fault?

  * * *
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  —

  From the time her three kids were young, Andrea had worried about the risk of brain damage from contact sports. She knew that heading a soccer ball could rock a child’s skull with nearly as much force as a helmet-to-helmet tackle, so before Ashling, Zeke, and Kelly were even old enough for Pee Wees, she was steering them away from fields and into the pool. When Zeke was in third grade and his older sister, Ashling, was in fifth, they were already swimming competitively year-round.

  For an eight- and a ten-year-old, it was a grueling schedule. They had practice after school every day, with double sessions twice a week: on Tuesday and Thursday, they’d get up at four thirty in the morning; swim from five to six thirty, scarf down breakfast in the car on the way to school; and be back in the water for more laps before dinner. At night, they tackled their homework, then collapsed into bed. Kelly was only six years old, so she was mostly along for the ride, bundled into the car to go back to sleep while her brother and sister were churning out miles of laps before the sun came up.

  The only ones busier than Andrea and Andy’s kids were Andrea and Andy; when Andrea wasn’t shuttling the twenty miles back and forth to the YMCA twice a day, she was working a full shift as a school nurse and attending night classes at the University of Delaware for post-grad degrees in nursing, health promotion, and health coaching. Andy, meanwhile, was commuting more than an hour each way to his job as a packaging engineer while simultaneously earning a master’s in packaging science and strapping on his tool belt every evening to build out an upstairs rec room over the garage. Whenever Penn State had a home football game, the whole gang drove three hours to Andrea’s beloved alma mater to tailgate. That’s the way the Cooks operate: family first, full calendar, fully committed.

  And for Zeke, perpetual motion was just what he needed; the pool was the only thing keeping him out of hot water. “I don’t think he’d be a juvenile delinquent, exactly, but if it wasn’t for swimming, he’d have gotten into more trouble,” Andrea would reflect. Zeke and Ashling were both extremely bright, but Ashling, at least, managed to make that a virtue. Zeke was the kid who pestered the teacher with questions about chapters that hadn’t been assigned yet, and waved his arm in the air while she was explaining the math problems to announce that he’d finished already. In medical terms, Zeke was a classic proctalgia fugax: a major pain in the ass.