Running with Sherman

by Christopher McDougall

  * * *

  —

  Mika and Zeke weren’t giving up. We didn’t have much hope, but we did have a plan.

  Two days later, I went under the knife. The following morning, I watched from the window with my hand in a thick wad of bandages while Mika and Zeke roped up Flower and Sherman. They were going to run two donkeys at a time, a different pair every day, so all of them would stay in shape while I was on the mend. Matilda stood at the gate, stunned. She couldn’t believe she was being left behind, then she made sure we knew how she felt about it by galloping back and forth along the fence line, braying bloody murder.

  My assignment, meanwhile, was to start working the phones in a one-handed search for a cross-country truck driver, a livestock trailer, and, oh yeah—a place to board and corral the donkeys while we were in Colorado. If we were in Colorado.

  Maybe Hal and Curtis could help. Hal Walter and Curtis Imrie were always getting themselves into impossible predicaments and seat-of-their-pantsing back out again. Once, Curtis was hired to portray a cowboy in a car commercial, and as part of the deal he got temporary use of a new Pontiac Fiero. “Temporary” is in the eye of the beholder, and Curtis decided to keep beholding that Fiero until they pried the keys out of whichever hand wasn’t busy giving them the finger. For years, Curtis managed to dodge GM repo teams and summons servers, shifting the car from hideout to hideout and turning friends like Hal into outlaw accomplices by stashing it under tarps behind their barns, until GM finally surrendered. I was sure that with that kind of can-do spirit, plus all their experience at long-distance donkey hauling, Hal and Curtis would have some ideas.

  Better find someplace quiet, I thought, feeling a little self-conscious about talking to Hal while one of our donkeys was airing her grievances in the background. But Matilda, I realized, had suddenly gone silent. I glanced outside to check on her, and found Mika and Zeke back in the driveway. “Forget something?” I called.

  Mika’s head jerked up with a look I’d rarely seen but instantly recognized. She was fuming. Zeke looked just as pissed. Sherman and Flower, on the other hand, were delighted. Their manes were swaying as they trotted toward the fence, happy to be reunited with Matilda.

  “We got nowhere,” Mika said.

  “They just played us,” Zeke added.

  By the time Mika and Zeke had covered the hundred or so yards to the dirt road, they were so frustrated and overheated they felt like they’d gone five miles. Mika said it was as bad as our first days with Sherman, or maybe worse; Flower had learned from Sherman how to spin in circles, and Tanya wasn’t around to straighten things out. We’d done too good a job of surrounding Sherman with friends; the three donkeys had become such a tight team, there was no splitting them apart.

  “They won’t run unless they’re together,” Mika said. “Nothing works.”

  But after taking a night to recover, Mika and Zeke were back at it the next morning. Mika had spotted their mistake and remastered their plan: the problem wasn’t the donkeys, it was the lineup. Flower was the best frontrunner and Sherman was a natural sidekick, but even donkeys can use an emotional-support animal. Matilda was the key; she couldn’t stand being left alone, but she was independent enough to leave, so as long as she was a constant in all the pairings, the two-donkey system might have a chance. The other two would never go anywhere if Matilda was behind the gate yelling for them to come back.

  Zeke liked the Always Matilda approach, but added his own twist: Matilda would stay chill if Flower was with her, so Zeke suggested he and Sherm start off on their own and have Mika and Matilda follow. On race day, he reasoned, all those other donkeys and so many miles of twisting trails made it almost certain that we’d get separated, so it made sense to prep Sherman in advance so he wouldn’t panic. Zeke’s math was sound, except he didn’t account for one factor:

  The return of the Wild Thing.

  Zeke opened the gate, never realizing he was about to release a supervillain whose powers for destruction had only grown while it was entombed in ice. Sherman wasn’t a recovering invalid anymore; over the past few months, all the companionship, wild runs in the woods, and fresh grass had built up his strength and confidence so much that there was no longer any sign of his old fear and fragility. Sherm was a new donkey; but deep inside, the Wild Thing’s survival instinct still smoldered. Sherman’s brain was as formidable as ever, and now in possession of a far more powerful body. Zeke didn’t stand a chance.

  Mika watched from the window, then ducked away to spare Zeke’s feelings. The whole episode was so painful, she didn’t want Zeke to know there were witnesses. Sherman feinted and corkscrewed, backtracked and buffaloed, anticipating all of Zeke’s donkey-wrangling skills and shredding them to pieces. Even with Matilda munching peacefully in the pasture with Flower and keeping quiet, Sherman wasn’t following Zeke anywhere. Mika waited for nearly half an hour, then came outside to put an end to the battle. Sherman and Zeke were still in front of the gate.

  The donkeys had laid down the law: United we run, divided we stall.

  * * *

  —

  Four days after my surgery, the hand therapist unwrapped the bandages and we got a look at the damage. My hand was swollen and stitched from wrist to knuckles like a deflating football. The fingers had frozen into a claw; they were so stiff that when I was asked to pick up some colored beads, I could feel the stitches stretching and the metal in my hand protesting.

  “It’s all up to you,” the therapist warned. “You have to work with this hand every day, or it will never move again. I see people all the time who rested too long and their mobility was gone forever.”

  I opened my mouth to ask a question, then snapped it shut. If she never told me when I could start running, then I wouldn’t know it was too soon, right? Half-assed and self-delusional as that reasoning was, it still ignored one thing she’d made super-abundantly crystal clear: If I jarred that plate loose, they’d have to re-open my hand, remove the hardware, and rebuild what was left of the bone all over again.

  But just to see for myself, that afternoon I went on a trial run anyway. I wore my plastic splint and held my arm awkwardly, protecting it as best I could. “Feels fine,” I thought, but that meant nothing. With Flower, my left hand was my anchor point; that’s how I held the coiled rope, using the right to pull in and release any slack. When I suddenly had to clamp down, my left hand was the first responder. There was no way I could control a 700-pound donkey with just one hand.

  But what if I didn’t?

  One thing that always stuck with me from the burro race I’d tried years ago in Leadville was the way the best racers looked like ballroom dancers, sticking so close to their donkeys that their bodies brushed together. Tom Sobal and Karen Thorpe and Barb Dolan seemed to have worked out some kind of mind meld so they didn’t have to exert control and just communicated with the wave of a hand and a nudge of the hip. It got me thinking: Our donkeys wouldn’t run unless they were in a pack, but maybe we could turn that to our advantage.

  “Let’s get Zeke over,” I suggested to Mika. “I want to try something.”

  I expected her to refuse for my own good, but I miscalculated. Mika and I had never been through a year like the one we’d just had with Sherman. Our Top Gun call signs for each other were “Nervous” and “Reckless,” Mika being the one who brought the girls inside when she heard thunder and made them wait it out in the basement, while I once put six-year-old Maya behind the wheel of the car with her younger sister and cousin in the backseat and showed her how to gun it while I pushed from behind after we got stuck in the rain on a strange dirt road I’d driven down to see if it led to the Susquehanna (Mika’s first question when we got home: “Did you also show her the brake?” Answer: “Um…”). But after all those months of loading live donkeys into our minivan, and cleaning the “bean” out of Sherman’s penis, and storming through the woods with no clear se
nse of how we’d get back out again, we’d learned more about each other than we’d ever expected. Beneath the surface, the two of us were tougher and more cautious than we’d ever let on. If Mika was concerned about something, I knew she had a good reason. And if I wanted to take a chance, she could count on me to know the limits.

  She made the call, and in no time, Zeke was rolling up the driveway and hopping out of the car to help Mika gather the three donkeys. Instead of my usual twelve-foot rope, I chose one that was only two strides long: a short six-footer. “Hey YUP,” I called, and Flower was revved and ready, heading straight for the road at an easy trot. Normally I’d roam a few feet behind, leaving enough distance to spot and head off any oncoming Flower goofiness. This time, I stuck to her side, glued so close that her tail whisked my leg as we ran. I was holding the rope with only my right hand, which meant if she chose to bolt, I couldn’t stop her. All I could do was let her know that I was there and it was time to do our job.

  As we approached her favorite trail, Flower veered toward our usual creek crossing. I wasn’t ready to risk slippery rocks yet, so I pulled back gently, ready to quick-release if she resisted. But she took the correction like a champ, looping back without breaking stride. She was caught off guard again at the end of the gravel road, expecting to go right and head up the Big One, but when I slid around and nudged left with my hip, she read it perfectly.

  It felt pleasantly weird to be back on flat road after we’d spent so much time on the trails. I’d forgotten what it was like to actually run with Flower; in the woods, it was more like mutually beneficial bedlam, all six of us doing our own thing while playing the same game. But today, Flower and I were a pair of Ice Capaders. Our bodies were so close together that unconsciously I’d let my legs and lungs slip into her cadence; our feet were hitting the ground and our breath was huffing out in perfect drumbeat rhythm. I could tell in a blink what she was about to do next; I don’t know if I was reading the terrain or sensing some twitch in her body, but before she moved to the side, I felt it coming and shifted out of the way.

  Get so close you disappear: Mika and Sherman practice the art of Donkey Tao.

  Flower and I were so keyed in to each other, it was as if she knew what I wanted before I even asked. Almost like I wasn’t even—

  Holy shit. The memory hit me so hard, I caught a foot on a rock and nearly tripped. One of the great things about running, even with a donkey, is the way your mind travels to places it never goes at any other time. And that morning, it suddenly hit me for the first time in nearly twenty years how wrong I’d been about that whole Tao of Steve philosophy I’d been swearing by since the night I laid eyes on Mika. Every time I’m asked how we met, I tell that story: “The three parts of the formula are ‘Be desire-less, be excellent, and be gone,’ ” I would explain. “And I believed it so much, I literally grabbed my coat and left, turning down a ride home from Mika in a freezing storm because the Tao says get out of sight before your act gets old.”

  It took Flower to show me I didn’t know dick about Tao. In a flash, the pieces snapped together in a way I’d never seen before, as if my brain had decided that this dirt road across from Roy Beiler’s goat farm was the ideal spot for the end of an M. Night Shyamalan movie: “Flower loves to run,” I thought, “and so do I. When two of you want the same thing, your own desire doesn’t matter anymore. You’re desire-less!” We practiced together and got good—nearly excellent, really—but one thing was still missing: that morning, I discovered Flower needed a little more reassurance. All she wanted was a touch of my hand, or a snort from Matilda, to let her know that when she was out there in front, she wasn’t alone. When I kept my distance, we lost that connection. But when Flower knew I was near, I could disappear.

  I was gone. I was desire-less. And it was awesome.

  * * *

  —

  Now that Donkey Tao had been updated for Flower and was back online, we were soon back to building solid miles. We stayed out of the woods and stuck to lonely roads, trying to protect my hand by avoiding any treacherous creeks or trails. We’d still have time to sharpen our water crossing and trailrunning footwork in the final days before the race, I figured. For now, the priority was to get strong and avoid another fracture.

  We still had one major headache looming—until out of the blue, a bolt of lightning struck. Waving a scrap of paper.

  The lightning bolt’s face looked familiar, and then it came back to me in a rush: the woman in my driveway yelling from her car window for me to c’mon over was Tanya’s friend Shelley, the one who’d raced over to notify us about Tanya’s accident. I felt a twinge of guilt—it had been a while since I’d visited Tanya—and then my stomach flipped. Uh-oh. Shelley’s news was so urgent, she wasn’t even getting out of the car. This couldn’t be good.

  “Iiiiiii’ve got something for yoooouuuuu,” Shelley singsonged. She was trying to open the car door with one hand while waving a paper in the air with the other, but she’d forgotten to unfasten her seat belt. Both hands disappeared, then the door swung open and she popped out.

  “Look what I’ve got!” she crowed. “Do you still need a driver for Colorado?”

  “Don’t tell me you found somebody!” I’d asked all of our dairy-farming and pig-raising neighbors if they could haul our donkeys, but none had either the equipment for that kind of drive or the free time to wait around until after the race to bring us home. I kept kicking the problem down the road by promising myself that in a pinch I could always send a Hail Mary to Hal Walter and ask him to road-trip out with Harrison for a father-son donkey-hauling adventure, except I’d never actually asked Hal if he was interested in a donkey-hauling road-trip adventure.

  “Okay. So do you want me to tell you, or not?” Shelley taunted. “Because if you say ‘don’t tell me’—”

  “C’mon, what’ve you got there?”

  She handed over a scrap torn from a horse show program. Someone had scrawled “Call Karin,” along with a phone number. Nothing more.

  “I was at a horse show in Virginia, and I don’t know how I got to talking about it, but I began telling this woman about Tanya’s accident and how it wasn’t just her that was in a jam, but you too, and all of a sudden she goes, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’ ”

  “Wow. You think she’s legit?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Shelley nodded. “I see her at all the big shows. She brings in these beautiful horse carriages from Europe. She’s a very legit person. Don’t know anything about her driving, though.”

  The second Shelley left, I began punching the number into my phone. A woman answered with a strange accent, a weird mix that somehow sounded authentically Deep South and totally phony. The drawl was unmistakable, but her “der” instead of “the” was weirdly German. I tried to draw her out with a little chitchat, but after telling me she lived in “V’ginia,” Karin got straight to business.

  “I hear you need someone to haul your mules.”

  “Actually, they’re donkeys—”

  “All der same. Me and m’girlfriends can take care of that for you. Just tell me where you got ’em and where you want ’em.”

  “Okay. Um—how much do you charge?”

  “I’ll figure it out,” she said, as if eighty hours of hard driving behind the wheel of a two-ton livestock hauler was something she did for fun. “Won’t cost you much. We’ll sleep in the trailer.”

  No. This reeked of a scam, except I couldn’t figure out the angle. This stranger wasn’t asking for money; the only thing we’d be turning over to her were three mismatched donkeys of questionable disposition. Maybe she wanted to steal them? Sherman would certainly make her regret that decision. Plus, why go to all the trouble? From what I’d seen, donkeys weren’t hot-ticket items. I’d gotten three for free in one year, and I wasn’t even trying.

  “Do you have experience?” I asked, groping for questions that woul
d make sense of all this.

  “Horses, plenty. Donkeys, no,” Karin replied. “Always wanted to see Colorado, though.”

  Silence. My move. I wracked my brain, trying to decide which mistake would be worse: trusting a stranger to get Sherman, Flower, and Matilda to the race? Or missing the race because I didn’t trust a stranger? “Let me think about this, and I’ll get back to you,” I offered.

  “We ain’t got much time,” Karin said. “So if you want me on those dates, you gotta let me know.”

  That jolted me awake. Jesus Christ. The race was in three weeks. What other option did I have?

  “Yes. Absolutely,” I agreed. “We’re on.”

  Karin promised to map a route, round up her girlfriends, and be at my door the Sunday before showtime. If they drove straight through, they would arrive on Tuesday. Just enough time for the donkeys to rest and for us to semi-acclimate to high altitude.

  “Great,” I said. “I’ll talk to you—”

  Click. Karin, whoever she was, was done talking.

  * * *

  —

  For the next two weeks, I ran down a mental checklist every time we went for a run. I knew I was missing something crucial, but I couldn’t figure out what. It was driving me nuts, because with the countdown clock at fourteen days, I was running out of time to catch and correct anything I messed up.

  So what was I forgetting? We had three able-bodied runners again; well, able enough. Amos’s brother had just trimmed the donkeys’ hooves, and we’d even had the vet stop by to blood-test them for travel. “I’m used to puffy donkeys, especially when they’ve been in the barn all winter. Yours are so sleek and trim,” she marveled. “Really wonderful.” To Zeke’s relief, all three got clean bills of health. “Can you imagine Sherman with rabies?” he said. “That would be apocalyptic.”

  We now had a driver, a trailer, three new packsaddles, and as of that morning, a place to stay. Thanks to the never-ending wonders of Airbnb, I’d located lodging for both us and the donkeys. Less than ten miles from the racecourse was a three-bedroom “Earthship,” which we decided, after poring over the photos, must be a home that was carved out of the hillside and crafted from naturally reclaimed materials. Good enough! Even closer to town, a sheriff’s deputy was renting barn space and pasture grazing at her farm. So the entire time the Gang of Three was in Colorado, they would literally be under police protection.