Me.
“You. Big. Stinker,” I grunted. So that’s what you’re doing. Flower wasn’t reacting to something she saw; she was reacting to something she heard. Every time my breathing got raspy, Flower took it as a signal to stop. And why not? Donkeys are survivors, so if that hill was tough enough to kick the crap out of me, why should she take the same risk? Flower is no dummy. She’d tested my leadership and found two flaws: I didn’t have the wind to order her on, and when she tempted me with a chance to rest, I grabbed it. Someone had to step up their game, and it wasn’t Flower.
* * *
—
At the top of the hill, we paused to huddle before entering the maze.
“Be careful you don’t trash an ankle,” I warned. “The first half mile is super scrabbly.” Karl Meltzer, the ace ultrarunner who set the Appalachian Trail speed record, once said that of all 2,200 miles he ran across fourteen states, Pennsylvania had the most punishing rocks. They seem to grow straight out of the ground like fangs, jutting up so you feel like you’re dancing your way through the mouth of a monster shark. Luckily, the maze was that bad only at the beginning; we faced a half mile or so of shark’s teeth before the trail softened into nice, hardpacked dirt.
Flower and I took point. We jogged into the woods, skirting the top of the deep gash left in the hill after hundreds of years of mining it for slate. Nature and neglect had done a magnificent job of healing the place, greening it over so thickly with locust and black walnut and wild pawpaw that I had to backtrack twice before spotting the slit in the trees that marked the entrance to the maze. As I expected, Flower wanted no part of that shadowy tunnel.
“Bring on the ’Tildonkey,” I called.
Mika brought up Matilda, and together the two of them sidestepped us and pushed straight into the brush. Sherman hurried to follow, towing Zeke along with him. In a blink, the four of them were swallowed by the forest. Flower watched them vanish, pacing nervously, before deciding a quick death with her friends was better than a long life with me. She plunged through the gap, tap-dancing through the minefield of ankle-twisting stones. Flower’s agility always astonished me; I kept thinking of her as a big ol’ galoot, mostly because of her reticence, but once in motion she’s an absolute butterfly. She clattered along without even a glance at the ground, while I stumbled behind her, my eyes darting desperately from rock to rock.
Her courage restored, Flower floated past Sherman and Matilda and slid back into the lead. I kept feeding out rope, letting her barrel along at her own pace, figuring I’d catch up to her when we reached smooth trail ahead. Instead, Flower blasted off when she hit the dirt like she’d been waiting for it all day. I pushed hard to keep up, but something smacked me in the legs. I stumbled, and got thumped again. Sherman and Matilda were crowding in, racing to get past me like a pair of gladiator stallions. All three donkeys were on fire, surrounding me in a flying wedge, with Mika and Zeke at full sprint bringing up the rear.
I felt the last inches of my twelve-foot rope sliding through my fingers. Time to get this shit under control, I told myself—but I didn’t have the heart to rein those nutballs in. Something about the feel of cool dirt under their hooves seemed to electrify them, just the way it did the first time we led Sherman off the gravel road and he raced up the hill to visit our neighbor’s horses. The donkeys were having such a blast, it gave all of us an extra surge of energy. All six of us whipped around turns as the trail dipped and twisted, forgetting to worry about our footing as we were carried along by the excitement of our mini stampede. The donkeys slowed a little as they navigated a tricky stretch covered with jutting roots, giving us all a breather, but the party kicked off again the second we reached the other side.
Flower blazed ahead, storming straight toward a fork in the trail. “Right!” I yelled, waving my hand at Flower’s left eye and hoping that in the previous five minutes she’d suddenly learned English. That fork was the same spot where I’d made my aha! discovery a few weeks ago that the only way out of the maze was to go right. Flower, of course, went left.
I had only a few inches of rope in my hand, so I couldn’t pull her back. Flower plunged happily along, oblivious to the fact that the only thing in her future was a mile-long drop down to the Susquehanna. I lunged, grabbing for an extra handhold of rope, pulling myself hand over hand like a drowning swimmer, gripping a little more each time. When Flower veered around a sapling, I saw my chance. Flower went right, I went left, and the sapling caught the rope between us. It bent like a bow but held, slowing Flower just enough for me to rein her in.
Seconds later, Zeke and Sherman slid in for a landing, both of them stutter-stepping to brake their speed on the steep dirt slope.
“That was—” Zeke gasped. “Awesome!”
I leaned against the sapling while Zeke walked in small circles, both of us belly-breathing hard. Matilda and Mika, the more sensible team, took their time coming down the hill. I should have waved Mika off and saved her the long hike back up, but I was too gassed to think clearly. Sunlight was stabbing through the trees, heating the maze into an open-air oven. Zeke and I pulled off our shirts and knotted them around our heads like bandannas, letting the long ends drape behind to protect our necks. We’d been out for only an hour, but I was already parched and my stomach was rumbling from skipping breakfast before the run.
Mika took a swig from her water bottle and passed it around. She counted out her almonds and divvied them up with Zeke and me, kindly neglecting to point out that the two rockheads who’d declined their own bottles back at the house deserved a dope-slap instead of a snack.
“I won’t make that mistake again,” I promised.
But privately, I knew that wasn’t good enough. A friend of mine at MIT’s business school likes to remind his graduate students that problems come in two flavors: “Stubbed your toe” versus “Lost control of the chain saw.” You need to determine the degree of damage, in other words, before you decide the degree of response. For corporations, that’s an excellent battle plan, but for experienced burro racers, the math doesn’t add up that way. You can be running with your burro in a beautiful groove, both of you perfectly in sync and feeling awesome, when a little wrinkle bunches in your sock. It would be stupid to ruin your flow over something so teensy, so you ignore it and muscle through…until the blister rips open, the blood seeps through your shoe, and your limping gait upsets your burro and ends your race, leaving you lame and stranded at 13,000 feet. With donkeys, there’s no such thing as a tiny glitch. Every stubbed toe is a gathering storm.
We can’t worry about just the donkeys anymore, I told myself as we munched the last of the almonds, fueling up for our next push through the maze. Deep inside, Sherman and Matilda and Flower had such a core of strength and loyalty that they would follow us into nearly any adventure. But it was up to us to lead them back out again, and I wasn’t sure I was up to the job. So far in the maze, I’d dropped one chain saw after another. I’d flamed out on the big climb, lost control on the trail, and gotten caught in the heat with no water. In the Rockies, any one of those flubs could be a disaster, and I’d rung up all three in a single hour. We couldn’t just train the donkeys anymore; no matter how well prepared they were, we had to keep one step ahead. We had to be a little stronger. Always.
“Time to climb Everest,” I said, and we began trudging back up the hill.
The donkeys took it easy on us, letting us hike comfortably beside them until we reached the top and eased into a jog. This go-round, I forced myself to stay tight by Flower’s side, keeping enough coiled rope in my fist to steer her through the forks in the trail. A few times, I was so focused on Flower that I missed the turn and had to backtrack, but no one seemed to care. The snacks and water had revived us. We weren’t lost in a maze anymore; we were running wild in the woods and having a blast. Before we knew it, we crashed out of the trees and onto the dirt road to Tanya’s house.
—
“That’s my girls!” Tanya hooted when she saw Flower and Matilda trotting down her driveway. “Oh my god! Is that Sherman? Is that the same Shermie Germie?”
Tanya was overjoyed. She crooned over Flower and Matilda, massaging their ears until their bottom lips drooped with pleasure. She hadn’t seen Sherman in a few months, and she couldn’t get over how much he’d changed. “He looks terrific,” she said, then made sure by squatting to check his hooves. She nodded her approval. “Even his feet are looking better.”
After Tanya and her husband split up and we lost Sherman’s hacksaw hoof savior, we’d put out a distress signal on the Amish word-of-mouth hotline. It turned out our neighbor over the hill, old AK, had a son a few miles away who could do the job. Whenever Matilda needed a trim, she’d hop into the back of our minivan, poking her head into the front seat so she could enjoy the view as I drove. Sherman and Flower were too big for the van, so we’d run them cross-country through the hayfields, waving to the Amish kids who clustered along the fence to watch as we cut behind the baseball field next to their schoolhouse. Sherman must have loved getting his hooves trimmed, because on the way back, he’d prance like a show pony.
“You think he’s looking pretty good?” I asked Tanya.
“God, yeah. Remember that bloating along here?” she said, swatting his flanks. “All muscle now. You’d never know it was the same Germie. You can see in his eyes how happy he is.”
“Sooo….” I began, preparing to hit Tanya with the first of my two do-or-die questions. “The race is in two months. We’ve really got to ramp up training. Is it fair to Sherman to work him that hard?”
Tanya chewed it over. “How’s it been going so far?”
“Some days great, some days not,” I told her. “They’ll run four, five miles, no problem. Then I’ll try to go longer and they’ll just shut down. Remember the Amish Full Moon Run? Same thing. We’ll be cruising, then suddenly they blow a fuse.”
“That’s up here,” she said, tapping Sherman on the head. “Remember what I said about a sense of purpose? You taught them the wrong job.”
Somewhere along the line, I’d accidentally strayed from Tanya’s number one rule: Make the donkeys think everything is their idea. The best jobs, she’d explained to me, are like the best dinners. You tuck into them because you’re hungry, and when you finish, you feel strong, happy, and fulfilled. I’d thought I was doing the right thing by easing Sherman into new challenges, spoon-feeding him along, but that was like getting the same dry meat loaf every night. It was time to spice up the menu: it was time to put our donkeys on the Bomb Dog Diet.
* * *
—
I’d first learned about it from Alexandra Horowitz, the PhD psychologist who specializes in the canine mind. Horowitz has spent a lot of time observing bomb- and drug-detection dogs, because they’re among the most rigorously educated animals in the world. Sniffer dogs have to locate fantastically small traces of explosives—we’re talking a trillionth of a gram—even when camouflaged by scents as overpowering as coffee grounds or Vanillaroma car air fresheners. Success means saving lives and averting massacres, but it also means ignoring every other instinct and distraction and focusing so intently on the task at hand that, in the midst of havoc, these dogs are able to home in on a hidden chemical that no other machine or creature alive could detect. And do you know what they get for a reward? Not a juicy bone. Not even a handful of treats.
An old, chewed-up tennis ball.
Detection dogs go nuts over a toy like this, because it’s something they can chase and hunt and track down—just like they do on the job. Their occupation is so gratifying, in other words, that the best thank-you you can give them for doing it well is to let them do it some more. Could donkeys feel the same way?
“All creatures have a biological imperative: The sun is up, so how do I fill my day?” Horowitz told me one evening when we met before a screening of Isle of Dogs. She was there to talk canines, but she was gracious enough to take my questions about donkeys. “By domesticating animals, we can remove their evolutionary purpose,” she explained, “and that can lead to problems”—no surprise if you’ve ever arrived home to discover your springer spaniel has stalked and eaten your dress shoes.
This is easy to grasp if you remember that we humans are just animals in clothes. “The differences between us are trivial compared to the similarities,” Horowitz pointed out. So if you and I are hungry for a challenge, for some task that feels urgent and perfectly suited to our skills, why wouldn’t every other creature? It’s tricky, though; we humans made things a lot more complicated when we took over job distribution for most of the planet and stopped letting animals choose for themselves. Dog shelters are packed with living proof of how often people get it wrong, but it’s not that hard to do it right.
“The best situation,” Horowitz advised me, “is to find a coordination of purposes.” A job that matches their natural drive. Dinner that feels like dessert.
* * *
—
“You’ve got to retrain them,” Tanya explained to me, Zeke, and Mika in her driveway. “You need to mix things up, let them know every day is different but one thing is the same: their job is to stay by your side until you decide to stop.” Somewhere in Sherman’s brain, a factory whistle screamed for quitting time as soon as he put in a solid hour of running. Instead, he should be having such a blast that his reward for running with us should be…the joy of running with us. One part of Sherman’s brain would always be calling him back to Lawrence and that cozy little barn, but my task was to make the workouts so much fun and so fulfilling that he forgot all about the barn for a while.
“So for the race,” Tanya asked. “What’s the starting line like?”
“Oh god. Mayhem.”
“Okay, you have to do mayhem. How about the finish line?”
“Worse. Spectators are screaming. And oh yeah—sometimes you crash into the outhouse race.” I’d forgotten about this until just now. While waiting for runners to return, the Pack Burro World Championship likes to entertain the crowd with a shithouse sprint: four-person teams push wooden outhouses on wheels down the middle of Main Street, so many of them that heats, semifinals, and finals are needed to crown a champion. It wasn’t unusual for a burro racer to finally struggle home after twenty-nine miles of mountain running, only to lose her burro in the last hundred yards because it got spooked by a Ben Hur gladiator derby of giant wooden crappers.
“Perfect!” Tanya said. “That’ll get them rockin’ and rollin’. Keep throwing crazy at them. The harder you make the training, the more they’ll respond.” I drank it all in, feeling more optimistic by the second. It was so great to be around Tanya again. I’d forgotten how uplifting she can be, even when she’s pushing me to cowboy up and get to work. Her mind seems to operate in terms of dreams and adventure, even though she’s always blunt and honest. No wonder her animals love her. I wasn’t 100 percent sure I understood what she meant by “throwing crazy,” but whatever, it sounded cool. We’d figure it out.
“They’re great donkeys,” Tanya concluded. “They won’t let you down. Look how great they did for you today. That’s really good on a scorcher like this.”
“Actually,” Zeke piped up, “these conditions are ideal for donkeys.” To my horrified amazement, he went on to explain to Tanya—to Tanya, who grew up in the saddle, who majored in equine science and single-handedly kept Sherman alive—yes, to that Tanya, Zeke decided it was appropriate to deliver a lecture on the descent of the modern donkey from the wild African ass, pointing out that really, as desert animals, a hot day like today was right up their evolutionary alley.
I forgave Tanya in advance for telling Zeke to blow it out his evolutionary ass. Instead, she swatted him on the back. “Where’d you find this guy?” she asked with a laugh. “Thanks, Zekipedia. Desert animal
s or not, they’re going to get fussy. You guys better get moving.”
“One last thing,” I ventured, already regretting the last question I had to ask. I knew Tanya was still struggling to make ends meet and keep Christmas Wish Farm afloat after her marriage had suddenly ended. We’d barely seen her over the past few months, and when we did, it was usually because she was zooming by on another last-minute driving job for an Amish farmer. I was about to put Tanya in a shitty spot, but with only two months to go, I didn’t see any way around it.
“What do you think about hauling us to Colorado?” I said, as I cringed inside. “Any chance that’s still on the table?”
“Are you serious?” Tanya retorted. “I wouldn’t—”
“I’m sorry,” I quickly apologized. “I just wanted—”
“I wouldn’t miss it!” Tanya finished. All winter long, the one bright spot she’d been looking forward to was the day she could watch Shermie and me push our way into the ranks of world-class racing burros and try our luck high in the Rockies. She had already calculated how much time she could take off and who would watch out for her horses and Dobermans while she was away. I should have known better. Did I really think for one dang second that some wayward ex-husband was enough to stop Sherman’s fairy godmother from getting him to the ball?
“How big a trailer are we talking?” Tanya asked. “Is it just Sherman, or all three of you now?”
This time, Zekipedia kept quiet. His eyes were pinned on the ground, suddenly very intent on interpreting the gravel. He didn’t say a word, but everything he felt was written on his face. Mika and I glanced at each other. We hadn’t discussed it yet, but at some point in the maze, we’d made up our minds.
Running with Sherman Page 22