by Noe Alvarez
“Can you run?” he asks, measuring me with his eyes.
“Well enough, I think,” I say. I notice scars the size of bullets on his chest. Sundance ceremony scars.
His eyes stay with mine until I look down. “We’ll see,” he says, and walks back to the van, throwing a nod to one of the bigger guys sitting around the fire pit.
The others, continuing to cast suspicious eyes at me, smoke cigarettes around the fire pit. They stoke the embers and mumble things to one another without so much as a welcome. Behind them is a dome-shaped sauna that I later learn is used for ceremonial sweating—a sweat lodge.
“Nice shoes,” a big guy named Tlaloc finally shouts. He’s shirtless. He wears a red bandana around his neck, has long curly hair, and is dressed in military pants cut into shorts. He has a ripped physique like that of Rambo—a name he insists people call him. When he calls me by a derogatory nickname to refer to my weight, I don’t answer. The stuff of bullies, I can already tell.
“Set your stuff down anywhere. Make yourself at home,” Ipana tells me, before disappearing inside the trailer.
I look around for a place to pitch my tent.
“Not there,” Tlaloc shouts again and approaches me, his curls hanging over his eyes. “There,” Tlaloc points with his knife to some mounds of dirt, away from his own tent. It doesn’t look right, but I know nothing of the forest or ant mounds, and I do as he says. Tlaloc disappears inside his green canvas tent. I realize that any one of these guys, who are tough as hell, can easily snap me in half and disappear me in the woods. No one would know where to find me, we’re so deep in the forest.
I turn, looking for some sort of direction, trying to absorb the culture. I see the profile of another shirtless man bathing under a patch of sunlight. His name is Refugio, a Mexican living in Saskatchewan and now stretching and rubbing ointment on his legs and ripped calf muscles. He’s in his fifties, but doesn’t look it. His body is like jerky—tanned and chiseled like an action figure. Like a crown, he ties back his greasy black hair with a folded bandana containing the partial image of the Virgin Mary. The runners are a blend of cultures. The tattoo of a large sun encompassing the whole of his back is revealed when he goes to meditate beside a bundle of sticks. There are about a dozen or so of these staffs resting against the base of a tree. They are engraved, decorated with intricate beadwork, and sinewed with feathers. Refugio closes his eyes, cocks his head up toward the sky, and his face becomes taut with a grand smile, gracefully inside his own world of meditation.
Wanting to prove myself, I spend the remainder of the evening taking an ax to a felled log, helping cut wood for the sweat lodge.
Andrec walks out from behind the trailer with his head hung low, combing through the length of his long wet hair with his fingers, as if he just showered. It sways only inches above the ground. While braiding it tightly into one long strand that hangs to his knees when he stands erect, he studies me with sorry eyes almost. He walks off, hair whipping behind him like a lasso.
When it begins to rain, men and women disappear inside the mouth of the sweat lodge—a structure braided in wood and enveloped in fur to contain the heat rising from hot rocks within, when water is poured onto them. It is a permanent structure, a sacred space that houses about eight to ten people.
Rattles and drums resonate from inside the lodge like a tremor in the earth. I crawl into my tent and into my sleeping bag, with a tremor of hunger in my stomach, waiting for tomorrow.
The next morning, I wake up wet to the sound of a conch shell. When I stick my head out of my tent, I see that the runners are gathered in a circle around the staffs, staring back at me. Mine is the only tent still up.
“We leave in ten minutes,” Pacquiao shouts as I hop out of my tent, and, nervous not to give myself away as a first-time camper, collapse it incorrectly.
When I join the circle of runners, I make another mistake.
“You have to enter the door on the north side, over there,” Zyanya Lonewolf tells me with a kind voice. Ceremonies, she says, have spiritual doors. The door is invisible only to me. She is from the Gitxsan Nation, nineteen years old, like me, and this is also her first day on the run. We smile.
Cheeto pitches in, “You have to turn counterclockwise before entering. Then they’ll smudge you, then you have to pick up one of those staffs over there. We run with staffs here.” He’s originally from the Mission District in San Francisco “back when it was real,” he will tell me later.
While runners get smudged in sage smoke, Refugio picks up the main staff, called the Father Staff. It is the one that encapsulates the whole of all the other staffs and that leads the run every day. It can be carried only by those capable of running especially long miles. Those who can carry the spirit of the other runners forward. The responsibility is intimidating.
Everyone follows Refugio’s lead. We select staffs one by one. Me, I pick up one at random, though it is supposed to be the one that calls to me, as Cheeto says. Mine has talons.
Some laugh and others sneer at me picking up a staff. These feathered sticks are representations of the specific communities that donated them, are supposed to aid us on our runs. Staffs have specific origins and stories, and I get the feeling that not everyone wants me handling them. Nothing about me says Indigenous. Ceremonies and everything about this run is new to me. I’ll just have to prove to them, and myself, that I can run.
Pacquiao concludes the gathering, and the runners scramble to get ready to run with nothing on their person but their feathered sticks and what they can carry in their pockets, if anything. The vans are packed with food and water, donated and purchased with funds from PDJ and packed into boxes and coolers that runners sit on between rotations on the run.
He announces that the run will proceed into the towns of Lillooet, Mount Currie, and Melvin Creek.
Our last stop will be Alkali Lake, Pacquiao says, roughly 180 miles south of Prince George, B.C., Canada. That will be our next camp, where we will sleep, then depart the following morning.
After Alkali Lake, the plan is to run through Mount Currie, Melvin Creek, Whistler, and into the city of Vancouver, roughly 350 miles south, before crossing into the U.S. and into my home state of Washington.
While everybody breaks up and jumps into the large van—to be dropped off in intervals of at least ten miles, to run alone—I run to the gray minivan where Andrec finishes cinching up everyone’s belongings under a tarp atop the van. Stuck to the side of the van are the circular stickers of the PDJ logo—footprints over the colors red, yellow, white, and black. “Sorry, man,” he says while standing on the roof of the van. “I gave everyone three calls, already. We’re closed up until we reach our destination.” No more room for today.
I drop my pack onto the ground.
“To all you new runners,” Andrec announces to the group, “welcome to the longest prayer in the world.”
The runners have crowded inside the vans among the coolers, canned food, and other supplies. The van sinks with their weights and odor. They don’t let me on. They tell me that newbies run first and that those who don’t wake up early enough run carrying their backpacks.
“But how am I supposed to run?” I say. No one has explained this to me.
They point me in the right direction and tell me to run straight. “Stay on the gravel road,” someone yells. Only Pacquiao, Andrec, and Chula Pepper navigate the maps and chart the courses.
Runners run mainly with luck on their hands.
They tell me the PDJ motto: “When in doubt, turn left.” That way, if I get lost, I’ll be running in circles and will be easier to find.
The van begins to creep away slowly across the camp, with everyone inside but me. I walk alongside it, asking, “How will I know when to stop running?” There’s only one gravel road that I can see.
“When you see something that looks like it’s not supposed to be there,” someone says jokingly from inside the crowded van, and they all begin to laugh. That something
will be my ten-mile marker—a pile of rocks, sticks, or a water bottle with a red ribbon tied to it, they tell me. Finally someone shows me a water bottle: “Look for this.”
Tlaloc takes my bag and closes the door. “I’ll make sure you get it at the end of the run,” he says, pretends to search in the bag.
“There’s a hardboiled egg left for you if you want it,” Cheeto shouts from the back of the van as it slips into the mountains without me. I take a moment to tie my shoes, when rain begins to pelt me. I look around. Nothing in sight but pine trees. I look at the gravel road, which seems more of a trail. We’re far from any city or major town. This is my shot. My first run on the Peace and Dignity Journeys.
I quickly pocket a hard-boiled egg from the picnic table and take off running after the van, thinking that if I run fast enough, I just might be able to keep pace with them and not get left behind, or maybe even tell the driver to take me back to the airport. But what would my family think of me?
I plunge into the forest a new man, stomping through puddles, breathing in the wild country air of these green mountains. When in doubt, turn left. Sons of bitches. Rain, sweat, and fear drip from my eyebrows, and I’m suddenly feeling like I’ve just been had. Scammed. All my stuff gone. I run harder, and now feel truly alone.
Water comes from above and below, my feet dropping into potholes and rivulets of rain streaming down my face. These shoes are light. And because they’re light, their bottoms feel thin, and aren’t as good for running in the outdoors over sharp rocks, gravel, and now mud. They will bruise my feet. My chest burns from swallowing sharp winds that bully me sideways. In all this excitement I forget to pace myself to conserve my strength. The forest is all about pacing, and I still have five months to go, having joined the runners one month late. In all my running along the Yakima River, I had never calculated my mileage. Running was never something to measure—it was always about burning through my emotional fatigue. I doubt I ever pushed myself past ten miles, let alone the fifteen I am now tasked with. I do what has helped me before in the fruit factories—breathing in beats, two in, two out, recalibrating my running form to the rhythm of my feet.
Running is rhythm, I remember Pacquiao saying.
After a long and laborious stretch alone along the gravel road in the forest, I stop at a split in the road. I look around for that thing that shouldn’t be there, a water bottle, a sign of some sort, as if I’m supposed to know the sorts of things that don’t belong in forests.
In their early days in Yakima, my father and mother planted pine trees deep in the Cascade Mountains, bandaging the land after logging companies wounded it. After a long day’s work, my parents gathered around a fire among other campesinos who lived like they did—one day at a time. They shared their food and what little they had with one another.
“We said little during those times,” my father would say to me at the dinner table when he shared stories of his past. “That was the way of the campesino—concerned only with things like who’s hiring next, the next job, location, pay. We really couldn’t talk of our dreams or plan too far into the future.”
Between the months of March and May, when seasonal work in the orchards was low and there were no jobs, immigrants flocked to the mountains in work vans and trucks.
“We worked two, three months in Naches, Tonasket, Wenatchee, Chelan, and all throughout the White Pass,” my father told me. It was work that he did for a handful of years. “Those months were cold, wet. Sometimes there’d be snow and we slept cold.”
They were sixteen years old, my mom and dad, knowing not a word of English as they labored in the mountains. They slept under tarps strung from cars, under the canopy of trees, or packed inside truck beds. They hadn’t met each other at the time.
“The men operated machines,” my mom told me. The machines were augers, used for boring holes in the ground. Behind the men, the women canvassed the forest carrying sacks of saplings, plugging the holes with life, with their hands and feet. They brought their own food and gear, which wasn’t much. Some showered in the icy rivers, but most didn’t. They labored in damp weather and crisp air, among the bears that watched them from a distance. But it wasn’t the bears that my parents feared. It was hunger.
They worked in a cold that lingered in their bones and that nudged them to move like this Canadian land nudges me to run today. During lunch breaks they huddled like penguins around their food, shivering. They rubbed and patted themselves down for warmth to revive sensation within them. Only after a long day did they settle around a campfire, where the heat thawed their bodies and soothed them to sleep in their respective corners, wrapped in the scent of hard work.
On the gravel road, small rocks and twigs piled into a pyramid formation instruct me to run left, to where Andrec is parked on the shoulder of this thick forest, waiting for me in the gray minivan and listening to Native American music. I jump into the van shaking, still catching my breath, and he drives me ahead, sixty or seventy miles or so, to where the runners are, and where he will drop me off again to repeat the run.
“Good. You’re still with us,” Andrec says, lowering the radio, while I take off my wet shoes. My toes are withered and whitened. Aching. Out the passenger window I peel my soft egg, then eat it.
Andrec turns on the heat for me. “There’s a quicker way to peel those,” he says. “I’ll teach you later.” The trick of blowing into the cracks of a hardboiled egg between one’s hands like a trumpet, separating it from its shell in seconds like snake skin. Convenient for when eating on the run.
“You ran that fast,” Andrec says to me about my mileage. As if to say, too fast.
“So you’re the college kid from Washington?” he continues, wiping the dashboard clean with one hand. Cluttered between the windshield and dashboard and nooks inside the van are people’s eagle and hawk feathers, beads, sage, and tobacco. Andrec keeps a secret stash of chocolates under his seat. Now he offers me some. “How’s everyone treating you?”
He’s Apache coming from Fresno, California, where he cares for his mother. He never knew his father, who left them when Andrec was a boy to live in Mexico. This is his second year on the run and the first time as coordinator with Pacquiao.
“People don’t seem too happy to have me here,” I tell him.
With chocolate in his mouth, he says, “Give them time.”
Again and again the work of the run is repeated. Runners are picked up and dropped off until someone says stop—that’s either Andrec or Pacquiao. The van continues to swell with runners: Cheeto, Zyanya Lonewolf, Chula Pepper, Refugio, and others, climbing into the back of Andrec’s van until there’s no more legroom. We guzzle water and consume salmon jerky from Alaska. These are our snacks, which are stored inside coolers inside the vans, apart from gas station snacks and potlatch foods like fry bread, fish, potatoes, legumes.
“Little man, get in the back seat,” Tlaloc says, opening the passenger door. He insists that I jump out and squeeze into the back seat next to Zyanya Lonewolf and behind Cheeto and another runner named Chenoa. I move back with the rest. The roof of the van is tagged with art, symbols, quotes, and inside humor. Messages to inspire, and remind us of why we do what we do. The van struggles up steep inclines and now and then, everyone gets off to jog behind the van until it can carry our weight again. In a quiet moment, all of us in our seats, I turn to Zyanya Lonewolf, who seems the most approachable.
“You’ve been here long?” I ask her.
“No. It’s my first day.”
“How’d you hear about this run?”
“Four years ago. The run came through my community,” she says. “It was Chenoa who convinced me to join.” They’re from the same communities. Zyanya Lonewolf, from Smithers, Canada, has lived most of her life with her grandparents, who survived the boarding-school system that fragmented their community, and younger brother. Her parents battle alcoholism. She has lived off the land, without electricity, and learned to tar roofs, build canoes, and prepare smoked
salmon and animal hides.
Tlaloc blasts the radio and, sticking his head out the passenger window, shouts war cries, his long hair swaying. They give me chills. This man knows how to be free, I think to myself. His shouts remind me of the aipas that united my coworkers in the warehouses.
Tlaloc was born in a land that marked his spirit like a birthmark, on a small beautiful ranch in the state of Durango, in the Sierra Madre Mountains in central Mexico. His family had had great difficulty crossing into the U.S., and when Tlaloc was an infant, his parents made a third attempt in which part of their plan was to clothe Tlaloc in a dress. The family settled in East L.A., where six more children would be born. It was the perilous journey of their parents’ migration that Tlaloc would grow to become most proud of, his parents’ courage to risk everything. He is a beautiful man. Like Refugio, he tucks his hair back into a bun and wraps it in a neatly folded bandana just above his eyes. This man is pure power.
“Okay. Next runner,” Andrec announces, braking and waking some of the others. Everyone jumps off for a quick stretch. The larger van is stationed beside us, where Trigger sits behind the wheel. “Noé. You start again from here,” Andrec says.
This will be my second run of the day. Ten more miles.
The runners cram back into the gray van with Andrec. My muscles have cooled and stiffened. My legs quiver with exhaustion. I hide the pain. My shoes give me little comfort. I try to stretch, but as soon as I catch Trigger’s eyes upon me, I start my run through gravel road immersed in thick forest, similar to before. The land abounds with green. I don’t want him thinking I’m weak. For a while I keep ahead of the two vans that struggle around potholes dug up by the rain and now by my feet. I feel the power of an audience, eyes watching me from behind, wondering who this new runner is, evaluating me, my spirit, my running form, maybe wondering if I have what it takes to run five months and reach the finish line at the Panama Canal. Already I’m feeling the pain of a runner. The gray minivan is first to leave and slowly maneuvers beside me on the left, with all the runners inside, to drop them off in intervals again, while Trigger is tasked with driving ahead in the second van to wait by my mile marker, picking up the rest of the runners. I try not to let the pain of my sore muscles and blisters show.