Charles River Review

The Harvard Extension School Writing Program

2003-04, issue nine, number one

Reflections on a Life Lived on the Run

Ruth Rohde

There is always a turning point on the run—a juncture—when what is familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the details of the world become imbued with newness. But it never starts that way. The start is always arduous, steeped in the familiarity and closeness of the domestic. There is inertia that must be overcome, projects that must be ignored, feelings of guilt that need to be tabled, relationships that must be left behind.

I pull on black Lycra tights and my legs begin to feel different, as if just the feel of clothing conforming to movement changes the nature of things. My running shoes whose technological appearance has a preternatural look conform so perfectly to my feet that the minute I slip inside their silver shells, tie the laces, and zip the outer tongues closed, I feel the pull from another dimension. On goes the running bra, which holds my breasts flat against my chest, almost flush with the rest of my torso. It is a challenge to decide which shirt to wear. I tend to run cold when sedentary and hot when active, so I select a top that is warm but well ventilated and flexible. I do not want to constrain my arms, since I have learned over the years that they serve as pendulums propelling my body forward even when it is not inclined to travel in the same direction or speed. It isn’t until later, when I have moved from the rigors of pavement to the unpredictable surface of the wooded trails, that my arms morph into wings: elbows bent and arms held out at a slight angle, ready to correct for any change.

Running is this: a paring down of life to the bare essentials. When I run, what I leave behind is as significant as what I move toward. Neither can be dismissed. I live with my husband and two small children, ages one and three, in a house built at the turn-of-the-century, in Concord, Massachusetts, the home of Thoreau, Emerson, and the Transcendentalist Movement, now a bedroom community twenty miles northwest of the city of Boston. I recall vividly the day ten years ago when I first walked into our house and was struck not by the craftsmanship of the interior, but by the wall of windows facing east that drew my eyes outside into the marsh, a wild corridor that separates the property from the Sudbury River. It was this view that stirred in me a longing to settle here and has since provided me with a window on the wild that keeps me from feeling too confined by life in the suburbs.

I have spent time sitting in the marsh, observing for hours life in the interior and on the edge: flocks of birds and single hawks perched in the shrubs and trees, deer browsing the green tips of branches, moss-laden fairy rings created by children now grown, and arbors made of vines that one gardener lovingly wove into place. These are just some of the natural history and human artifacts I have discovered there. Also I have watched a neighbor practice his golf swing; heard the crack of the metal club making contact with the ball, and watched the blind, white eye soar through the air and land in the marsh with all the entitlement and aplomb of a self-righteous tourist. At night, a different set of species inhabit the same marginal zone: fox, owl, rabbit, and raccoon, whose hissing, barking, and occasional otherworldly screams set our nerves on fire.

But it is the Sudbury River, on the other side of the wetland, the muscle of water that runs north to join the Assabet and Concord Rivers, whose collective waters flow to the Merrimac and eventually out to sea, that draws me on a different kind of imaginary voyage, one that unleashes in me the wanderlust that has been a dominant feature of my life. Like Thoreau, I am loathe to sit still in any place when passage to a further destination is close at hand. And so, often, when I set eyes on the sinew of river beyond the marsh, I dream of the day I can take a trip all the way to my ancestral home, Maine, following the network of watery veins.

For twenty years, before switching careers to social work (a transition I made to accommodate the changes in my life when I became engaged), I had a career as an outdoor leader, running my own business guiding outdoor trips for women in Maine. I loved my work. Everything about it felt like second nature to me. It allowed me to inhabit the place where I felt most at home and to make a career of being physically active in wild settings. But, like so many of my colleagues, I came to a point in my life when the desire to settle displaced the need to roam. I don’t regret my choice to get married and to have a family, but I do struggle with trying to find a balance between my need to be active in the outdoors and to be present in my relationships with my husband and children, often inside the confines of our home.

If I give too much thought to where I am going before I set out, I hesitate to go at all. When I run, the intent is never to cover a certain number of miles, but to travel a different kind of distance. I let curiosity lead me out the door, right, then left, to where there is a small neighborhood set apart by two old stone pillars and a sign that states, “Dead End.” Entering there, I often feel like an outsider without a right of way. But I choose to go anyway and to seek out the wooded path that I know exists at the far end and creates a thin margin between two worlds.

The trail starts wide, then constricts to the width of a narrow gauge, lined on either side by pines. The way is riddled with roots that force my stride into a jig. The trail ends almost as abruptly as it began at a steep incline above the Sudbury River. The mechanistic drone of cars and the smell of exhaust let me know just how close I am to the two-lane highway that bisects Concord. I linger at the top, where the sun, shining on the river as it bends around the neck of marsh, holds me in the majesty of refracted light. In the fall, a set of wooden steps, like a ladder thrown over the side of a ship, is revealed. Down I go, unable to resist the descent, eager to see where the trail leads. At the base, the heavy scent of Concord grapes—the local fall musk—lures me on a wild chase to an impenetrable wall of vines that keeps the fruit just out of arm’s reach. I turn around and head the opposite way, but soon come to a sloping lawn, where, too self-conscious yet, I feel unprepared to cross. Back on top, I take the trail that leads me past a medical complex to a pedestrian crossing near the local hospital.

I cross and go on my way, eager to leave the highway behind. At the bottom of the first hill, outside a retirement home, I find the next wild corridor: the “Buttercup Trail, ” a short, gentle path that parallels the road. At the head of the trail is a notice cautioning those who enter to do so at their own risk. The trail winds its way past an old well, complete with a historic marker. Inside, water has been replaced with a mulch of leaves and dirt topped with trash bobbing to the surface like apples after every rain. I come to a grove of hemlocks where a set of four chairs and a cigarette-butt bucket sit cordially at the far end. I have never seen a resident there, nor one sauntering down the trail, which suggests that the sign I read at the entrance carries more weight for some than for others.

The trail comes to an end too soon, at the road, where a dented metal rail marks the edge. I follow along the grass between the rail and the wetland and find the source of the next trail, its entrance invisible to nearly all who pass. In the spring, when the foliage is lush, bushes converge on both sides, creating a natural wall that obstructs the twenty-storey-high brick structure of the retirement home. In the fall, the corridor opens up, revealing the skeletal forms of trees and the building.

Nature writer Terry Tempest Williams stated that motion is also a place. In the world of nature writing, “sense of place” and “staying put” are considered sacrosanct. But within that world there also exists a subgroup of writers who characterize themselves as “restless,” driven by “wanderlust;” individuals for whom movement is a critical component of lifestyle and character structure. I count myself in this latter group, people for whom transiency, vagrancy, and physical exertion provide the primary vehicle for transcendence. Wilderness author John Daniel wrote that “motion for him [Muir] was not a pathology but a devotion, an essential joy, a continuous discovery of place and self.” (987) Like Muir and Williams, my love of wandering in the outdoors at a runner’s pace has the markings of a kind of devotion, born out of a faith that resides in the place where my body makes direct contact with the wild.

There is a midpoint in the run when way leads onto way, moment onto moment. A juncture when effort dissolves into liquid motion, the body driven forward by pure instinct. Some of my best thinking occurs in the middle of the run when breath and movement and ideas fall naturally in sync and I catch up with runaway thoughts. In sports literature, this is referred to as “the zone,” in adventure narratives as a state of “flow,” in writing as “moments of being,” in psychology as “peak experiences.”

There is no limit to the distance I can travel once I arrive in this place. And, not infrequently, it is in this interim state that I begin to see things that make me wonder whether I have crossed over into a different perceptual realm. Just the other day, in the midst of a run, I heard a murder of crows heckling a bird in the distance. I paused, gave myself a moment to move out of the scattered vision and rapid gait of the run, then followed the direction of the sound of the crows to the barren branches of a dead swamp maple on the edge of a marsh. There, perched on the top-most branch, was a large, nearly pure white, predatory bird.

I observed it for awhile, at first musing it must be a snowy owl, and then realized—after focusing on its features—that it was a hawk. But it was different from any I had ever seen. I watched it for what could have been moments, or an eternity, edging as closely as I could to fix every detail in my mind’s eye. The bird turned to look at me several times, unperturbed by my presence. Eventually, it flew away. When the hawk took flight, the crows resumed their raucous pursuit. As they trailed away into the distance, they took on the look and shape of a swarm of bees. Later, I learned from a local wildlife expert that my eyes had not deceived me. Several other people had reported sighting the same bird, which, it was determined, was an albino red-shouldered hawk.

Had I come upon this bird earlier in the run, I may not have seen it, or even heard the clue given by the racket of the crows. But because I was in the midst of the run, my receptivity was heightened, and I had the good fortune of catching sight of this rare white bird, whose ghostly presence is still etched in my mind. Diana Kappel-Smith writes that “when we observe something, what we take in is less that thing itself than its effect on us—the clangor of nerve ends processing chemistry, temperature, reflected radiation, old terror, and private hope.” (viii.)

I have come to a trail where I have an opportunity to open up my stride. At first, like a spooked horse, I set out too fast, paying out the distance between myself and the life I have left behind. It doesn’t take long before I am winded and settle back into a more natural gait.

I pass a marsh whose tall blond grasses remind me of the shape-shifting golden tones of the grizzly pelt I recently saw near one of the last natural ranges of this spectacular bear in the lower forty-eight. I learned then that the absence of pigment in the tip of some of the hair follicles of the fur accounts for the changing tones in coloration, or grizzled effect, that helps to camouflage this immense creature as it moves from the light tones of the open plains to the darker tones of areas with dense vegetation. As I run, I imagine undergoing a similar conversion, reinhabiting with each step some lost evolutionary ability to blend in naturally with my surroundings.

I continue through the woods to a stone wall and a fence that serves as a threshold onto the open terrain of a field, where a sequence of furrows moves across the landscape like script on a page. Running across the grain created by the furrows is difficult. So I follow a well-worn path on the periphery and choose one side route that takes me into the brush like a rabbit, then out the other side. At the edge of the field, I have the choice of taking a long loop away from home or heading back. If my mood is right—and childcare available—I will always choose the longer route out to a pond, where, before continuing on my way, I find a private beach opposite the public swimming hole and slip into the clear water without paying a fee.

Returning home is always problematic. Emboldened by exercise and stirred by wildness, I have often trespassed. Following wild corridors inevitably leads me to the edge of people’s lawns, driveways, and highways. In the face of private property and so-called public thoroughfares, I become, at the end of the run, irreverent as any animal. More than once I have heard the sound of sirens in the distance and fully expected the police to show up at the next trailhead: a platoon of blue suits in search of me, the intruder—half deer, half woman—bounding across some line I never saw, ignoring some sign I never read. In defense of myself, I was blind to it all. “But to go back means of course, to go back through the woods, legitimately, the same way, by the same path. And always, doing that, I feel a sense of anti-climax. It is better to go back illegitimately, to trespass,” wrote H.E. Bates (18).

There was one time when I chose a route on trails that took me past a prison, and, as if led by the invisible arms of justice, straight into the state police station where I asked to use a phone. I can only imagine how I appeared, rattled as I was by the transition that lay before me and my indignation at having to get home to meet some guests from out of town. I knew I was late—late enough to incur the anger of my husband, a mild-mannered man. Consequently, I was manufacturing my own story about getting lost in the woods.

I chuckle to think of myself standing on the other side of the bullet-proof glass: strands of hair in disarray around my face; a few twigs creating an unruly crown on my head; the splash of mud inscribed on the black surface of my lycra tights; and me, a woman of small stature and diminutive voice, addressing the sergeant in full regalia on the other side: “Can I use your phone?” Is it any wonder he asked if there was an emergency.

Caught off guard by his question, I heard my voice quiver and felt my heart pound. I told him there wasn’t, that I just needed to make contact with people back home. But in truth there was an emergency—an emergence from the wild, a disruption of spirit, a disassociation from the natural course of things. I had literally passed from one world into another, and the passage back was like I was reentering the prison of human society.

There I was, turning myself in.

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