“Roger, you’re my hero,” I said. “But don’t we have to check with her? Just to make sure?”
“Nah,” Roger said. “That will get my brother involved. Leave it to me.”
* * *
—
“So that’s where we are,” I told Kip. “We’re waiting for the Pedrettis to arrive so we can meet our Mystery Teammate and find out if she’s really up for this. Nail-biting time.”
“If you want, I could practice with you a little,” Kip volunteered. He was in solid shape from mountain biking, and even though he hadn’t run in a while, he could handle a few miles. I jumped at the offer. I wanted to see how Sherman would react to a new partner, and Mika and I had to at least try to get used to the high altitude. Four days isn’t nearly enough time to adjust to 10,000 feet, but I was hoping for a little reassurance that our summer of hill running would soften the impact.
We hustled back to change into running gear, then gathered our ropes and harnesses and called the Gang of Three in from the meadow. The donkeys ambled over to the gate and held their heads patiently while we tacked them up. Already, Kip had the makings of a natural. During his time in Alaska, he’d done a fair bit of skijoring—cross-country skiing while pulled by sled dogs—so he’d developed an ease and quiet touch around animals. Once Zeke showed him how to rub Sherman’s ears just right, it looked like Kip and the Wild Thing would get along fine.
“Heey—” I began, but Flower sprang into action before I finished, trotting down the long dirt road that stretched from the Earthship across the mesa to the foothills. Matilda must have been just as eager for action after the long trip. She and Mika locked in right beside me, while Sherman—
Vanished. In his place, a stone statue of a donkey appeared at the end of the Earthship’s driveway. Kip did everything he could to urge him forward, but Sherman remained in character and didn’t move a muscle. Zeke hobbled over on his crutches to help. He tried to lead Sherman for a few steps to get him started, and maybe it was my imagination, but I’d swear Sherman gave Zeke a look that said, “For real? You think I’m falling for that?” Sherman and Zeke were finally back together again. If we’d thought Sherman was just going to walk off with some guy he’d never met before, we didn’t know Sherman.
Burro racing is so punk rock! Kip leads us on a pre-race run near his Earthship.
“Let’s swap out and see if he goes with you,” I told Mika. She took Sherman, and I pinned Flower right up beside him, with Kip and Matilda bringing up the rear. We started again, this time at a slow walk, allowing all three donks time to stay together. After a while, I eased Flower into an easy, shambling jog. Matilda followed right away. Sherman dropped his big Eeyore head and harrumphed, then fell in behind Matilda. After two days trapped in a truck, it was bliss to feel my body warm from the exercise and the summer sun—for about three minutes. I lifted my hand in surrender, too winded to say stop. My head was swimming so badly I was on the verge of hitting the dirt.
“Thank. God,” Mika panted. “Dying.”
Ken waited patiently while Mika and I, hands on our knees, fought to catch our breath. I remembered hearing that Paige Alms, the champion big-wave surfer, trained at this same altitude because it was akin to getting hammered to the bottom of the ocean by forty-foot waves. Even for a pro athlete in peak condition, it’s excruciating. “Running at 10,000 feet is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” said Paige, and that was even after she’d survived enough bad falls to be a multiple nominee for Worst Wipeout of the Year. Your sport, Paige was reminding us, is my punishment.
Or death sentence. Not far from where we were, a twenty-year-old Pennsylvania woman was hiking near Aspen when she was overcome by altitude sickness. It sounds benign as a bellyache, unless you know that altitude sickness is actually shorthand for “High Altitude Pulmonary and Cerebral Edema.” When the young woman reached 10,000 feet, her lips would have turned blue and she’d have coughed up bloody froth. She’d be wheezing for air and blinded by an excruciating headache. She would have to lie down—and that would seal her fate. Her lungs would fill with fluid, drowning her on dry land. At that moment, we were approaching the same elevation she was at when she died.
We started again, even more gently this time, but I managed only fifty yards before my pounding headache made me stop. Behind me, Mika was already walking, her head down and hands on her hips. Did I really want to put her through this—for a donkey race? And we still had to climb another 2,000 feet. What were we doing? And of course, the one person on our team who’d really dedicated himself to cross-adapting to high altitude by squatting in icy water was the one person who was sitting back at the house with his foot in a boot.
“This is looking like a bad idea,” I told Kip. “I’ll be honest, I’m afraid of what can happen on the mountain. We can really get in trouble up there.”
“You’re right,” Kip said. “But you might want to think about this.” He hesitated, weighing whether to go on. “Look, I hate to sound all mystic and shaman-ey,” he continued. “There’s this Burmese saying that always stuck with me: ‘Fear that thing, do that thing.’ ”
“Yeah,” I said, faking as much interest as I could muster. “Cool.” Was he kidding me with that shit? I needed Advil and a blood transfusion, not some cornball fortune cookie. My irritation was reaching the boiling point—and then, just like pulling a sink plug, it drained away. Not because of anything I did, but because of Flower. After six months of burro-whispering, Flower had conditioned me to blow out tension as soon as it reached critical mass. All right, I told myself. Calm your ass down. I remembered something Curtis had told me: “Your mind will beat you before the mountain does.”
Mika caught up with us. She flopped across Sherman’s back, using him as a pillow while she took a breather. “What do you think?” I asked her. “Call it a day?”
“I’m going to be slow, but I can keep going,” Mika said. “Maybe it will get better.”
“That’s the spirit,” Kip said with a smile. “Can’t get worse, right?”
I sucked in a big bellyful of air, hoping it would help, and it reminded me of Curtis’s other advice: “Find the rhythm.” Donkeys may not look like ballroom dancers, but if you watch closely, everything they do has a tempo. They trot and breathe to the beat of a waltz, and that’s what allows them to keep going, lightly and easily, for miles and miles across sun-scorched canyons.
So this time I tried to sync myself to Flower. I focused my mind on her rhythm, and as we ran, I counted out a beat.
One, two, three…
One, two, three…
We made it 50 yards, then 50 more, before I realized the numbers had turned into words:
Fear that thing…
Do that thing…
Fear that thing…
Do that thing…
* * *
—
Two days later, a minivan pulled up to the Earthship and out piled a pack of Pedrettis.
“You definitely called the right Pedretti,” Rick said. “My brother can talk my wife into anything. She’ll come home with something she bought and say ‘What do you expect? I was with Roger.’ ”
We liked Tammy immediately. She was joyful and friendly, and despite her delicate glasses and apologies in advance for holding us back—“Really, I’m slow”—it was apparent as soon as she slipped out of her Patagonia jacket that if we had one weak link in this operation, it wasn’t Tammy. She looked more fit than any of us, except maybe Zeke, with the kind of ropey muscles in her shoulders you get when you’d rather be strong than skinny. Tammy had taken up running only a few years ago, signing up for her first half marathon as a fortieth birthday present to herself, and like us, she felt in over her head. But Tammy had witnessed a lot of Pedretti burro-racing horror stories over the years and was quick to reassure us that sooner or later, one way or another, everyone finds the way back. The f
irst time her husband ran the long course, he spent an hour lying flat on his back on the rocky mountainside, eyes closed in exhaustion, until dive-bombing mosquitoes forced him back to his feet. The following year, Rick was stranded in freezing wind for an hour again because his burro refused to walk through snow. His brother Roger once finished with a broken rib after being dragged by Dakota, which wasn’t so bad considering Rob had to be medevaced to Denver after he ran the back half of Leadville despite being kicked so hard his lung collapsed.
“You know how they say, ‘It never always gets worse?’ ” Rick said. “It’s a lie.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Tammy said. “If I can do it, so can you.” That hushed Rick, but more important, it opened our eyes to the fact that Tammy had actually run a World Championship before. Twice, it turned out. I didn’t remember Roger ever mentioning that, and it gave us an instant double shot of hope. When it came to mountain training, Wisconsin was no better than Pennsylvania, right?
Sherman and the Gang were eyeing us curiously from the fence, so Mika and Zeke led Tammy and her kids over to meet them, while Rick and I walked back to the Earthship to gather the tack. “Can I ask what happened with Rob?” I said, once we were out of earshot. I’d heard bits of the story, but ever since Roger had made that comment about Zeke, I’d wanted to know more.
“It’s okay, I like talking about him,” Rick said. “Our brother was one of a kind.”
Rob was a real intellect, he said, a super-quick learner with boundless energy. As a boy, he showed such a knack for animals that both grandfathers recruited him to help train their coonhounds. While other kids were asleep in bed, young Rob was plunging through the woods, following the baying of his dogs as they pursued raccoons in the dark. Rob ran cross-country in college, and became so hooked on endurance sports that after graduation, he moved to Colorado to join the growing tribe of roving ultrarunners. Right away, Rob got himself a pair of dogs, and even though nursing was his profession, he was soon in demand as a hunting guide. “Toughest little shit we ever met,” one of Rob’s hunting companions would say. “He was ridiculously strong for a small man. He’d throw a 150-pound mountain lion over his shoulders and still leave you behind. He was a natural for chasing lions, because those hunts can turn into marathons. One guy said, ‘The best dog I have is Rob.’ ”
Rob’s combination of brains, tenacity, and animal empathy was the perfect raw material for burro racing, and once he gave it a try, he was hooked. For the next five years, he and Samaritan were locked in mortal combat with Hal Walter and Tom Sobal in races that were often decided by no more than a donkey’s nose. Hal and Rob were ferocious rivals but became devoted friends, and it was Hal who first detected something a little strange about Rob’s behavior. “Rob was always on the go,” Hal noticed. “Any downtime was filled with caring activities, such as coaching a Little League baseball team or working odd shifts as a nurse at nursing homes. Rob rarely spent much time at home,” Hal realized. “I often wondered why.”
Still, Hal was shocked when he heard that Rob, out of the blue, had suddenly sold his hunting dogs, closed his outfitting business, and was moving to St. Louis to become a chiropractor. He was thirty-six years old, Rob explained, so he’d decided it was time to quit running around like a kid and settle into a steady profession. “Suddenly, he’s out of the mountains and in the city,” his buddy Kenny would tell me. “Only goal he’s chasing was education, and that was no challenge at all.” Rob blitzed through the classwork with ease, which left him with time on his hands and without any wilderness to explore or dogs to roughhouse. Tough little shits don’t whine, though, so even as Rob began sinking into depression, he shared his despair only with his journal.
“He wrote about his pain in the last months, and when you read it you think, ‘Man, how did he make it this far?’ ” Rick said. It was Rick who heard the gunshot that February day in 2004 and came out of the woods carrying his dead brother in his arms. “You never know what kind of demons somebody is facing,” Rob’s friend Kenny would later lament. “Because if Rob Pedretti isn’t invincible, nobody is.”
Rob was finally at peace, but his mother wasn’t. Carol hated the idea of Rob’s beloved racing burro waiting for him in a Colorado pasture, never knowing if Rob was coming back. Roger set off to fetch Samaritan with no truck, no trailer, and no clue how to operate either, but that turned out to be the least of his problems, because the guy who had Samaritan refused to give him up. It took three full years of relentless Pedretti-ing before Samaritan was finally handed over. Roger tried to step into Rob’s shoes, and when he and Samaritan first ran the World Championship in Rob’s honor, the family descended on Fairplay in such force that more Pedrettis showed up for the race than racers.
Privately, they’re also here to settle a debt. Rob’s mom spent three years fighting for rights to a donkey, and that’s only a taste of what she’ll do to show her gratitude to the community that helped her son when he was alone and far from home, struggling in silence against a disease that was trying to kill him. Rob didn’t know he’d accidentally discovered a treatment for his depression by boosting his life-saving levels of serotonin and oxytocin. He just knew he’d suddenly been swept up by a burro-racing band of brothers and sisters who gave him a chance to run hard, breathe the snowy air, and care for the kind of big, furry creatures that have made humans feel safe and content since the dawn of time.
“Your friend Zeke,” Rick concluded, hurrying to finish his story as we approached the gang in the pasture with the donkeys’ gear. “This might be the best thing for him.”
We could see Zeke across the field, surrounded by kids and up to his wrists in Sherman’s ears as he showed everyone how to give Sherman his favorite deep-tissue massage. Sherman was adoring all the attention. He looked so happy these days—so strong and self-assured—that it was sometimes easy to forget that for all the healing he’d gotten from Zeke, he’d given as much in return.
* * *
—
“Anyone seen the Ladies?” I asked after we’d finished our warm-up session with Tammy and the Pedrettis had headed back to the Hand Hotel.
A chorus of nopes. No one had seen them since breakfast that morning—or, wait, wasn’t that yesterday? They seemed to have vanished in the night, or at least before dawn, and now it was getting dark again. I’d been so distracted by our trial run with Tammy, I hadn’t thought about the Ladies all day. We started Tammy off with Matilda, and right away she showed her chops. Tammy positioned herself right in the sweet spot near Matilda’s flank, and urged her along with a steady stream of chirps and lip smacks. Matilda always likes working with a fellow boss, so she clicked with Tammy as quickly as we did. Even Sherman was surprisingly chipper. Maybe all that ear caressing in the meadow had won him over to Team Pedretti, because suddenly he was okay leaving Zeke for a while and trotting down the dirt road with Mika and a pack of Pedretti kids. We managed a gentle three miles, and it wasn’t too bad; breathing was still torture, but whoever was trying to smother us to death with a pillow had loosened his grip.
“You’re going to have a lot of fun,” Rick promised, then clawed it back. “Well, not at the start. That’s crazy. There’s this one dirt bank, really steep, and suddenly you’ve got sixty burros crashing down that thing, stuff flying off their saddles…” Luckily, the younger Pedrettis were hungry and pulled Dad toward the car, nipping off any more blood-and-guts details about what we were facing. We made plans with Tammy to meet on race-day morning, then waved good-bye and headed toward the Earthship for a potluck dinner with Kip and Kristin’s family.
I checked my phone: still no word from the Ladies. Part of me said chill; the Ladies had been gallivanting nonstop since we’d arrived in Colorado, and so far they’d never had a problem. Twice, they’d set off into the hills on horses borrowed from randos; once, they drove halfway across the state and back to have lunch with Linda’s daughter, who lived a few hour
s from the Wyoming border. Always, they barreled in with tales—weird pawprints they’d seen, or hidden mountain passes they’d four-wheeled, or the free tattoo parlor they’d discovered in Fairplay (the catch: you do it yourself)—before offering to take the kids out back and teach them how to shoot cans with Karin’s pistol.
But the more adventures they had, the more I wondered how long their luck could hold. They were so smart and tough that my imagination couldn’t conjure up an image of them actually getting hurt. But landing inside a cell after telling a Colorado state trooper exactly where and how far up he could shove his ticket book? Snapping both axles in a 4x4 duel to the top of Mount Aspen? Picking up a teenage hitchhiker running away from an abusive home and masterminding her escape to a safe house in Portland? The only shocker about any one of those scenarios would be that it hadn’t happened already. And where would that leave the rest of us? Stuck in the middle of a lonely mesa on Planet Earthship, with no way of getting the donkeys back home to Pennsylvania, let alone into Fairplay for the race. As much as I got a kick out of the Ladies’ squeeze-the-day approach to life, I didn’t want them tipping the canoe when we were thisclose to shore.
Finally, at eight p.m., I couldn’t wait any longer, so I tried Karin’s number. No answer. No voice mail. I clicked over to e-mail, since Karin knows I don’t text. Nothing.
We’d already finished dinner and the kids were dealing out Uno cards when headlights finally appeared in the driveway. We uncovered the food, expecting the Ladies to be ravenous when they burst through the door, but they never appeared. I headed out and found them sitting silently in our adobe cabin, sharing a drink from a bottle of Bird Dog Whiskey.
Running with Sherman Page 31