A Mission

January 20, 2020

I dialed Sandy’s cell number. She answered.

“I’m done,” I said. “I got lost.”

“You’re kidding.”

As we stumbled further into winter, I started the week getting turned around—check that, lost—in  the 14-mile-long network of mountain bike trails at Fountainhead Regional Park in Fairfax. I ran out on an old horse trail, one I’ve taken many times. On the return I detoured onto a barely visible stretch of trail into unfamiliar woods. I guessed I was entering the northernmost leg of the network, marked Green, not the lower Black or Blue sections, which extend crooked fingers of trails down to the Occoquan Reservoir.

I followed a trail I’d never set foot on, then turned onto another, then another, under thick cloud cover that promised rain. Two hours passed as I ran, then walked, then ran, enjoying the adventure, until I realized I was totally baffled by my surroundings.

I saw no one. It was a weekday, after all. Along yet another branch, three husky white-tail deer leaped ahead of me and crashed through the underbrush. At one point a large red fox ran by. Otherwise, just bird calls and squirrels. The wildlife and I were deep in nature, their element, not mine. Peaceful, if you look at it that way, which is supposed to be the point of venturing out there. Silence, meaning calm, tranquility, respite, which we seek, and treasure when we find it.

I saw the deep-green reservoir ahead and to my left, meaning east—or maybe south. The reservoir branches in short inlets between peninsulas on all sides, so I could be facing either direction. The trail curled around sharp turns into thick woods then back to clear stretches near the water. Through the trees the reservoir grew wider, on the far side I could see a large house, which enjoys a water view. I noticed red blazes occasionally on the trees, but no escape route.

This was Fairfax, Virginia, not some mountain wilderness. I knew I’d walk out, embarrassed. But time was passing. I had said I’d be gone a couple of hours. It had taken 90 minutes to complete the first part of the course, before I entered the network. I could see no clearing along the horizon, just treetops massed in every direction, winter gray and bare of foliage. The dead leaves of last summer covered the trails.

The red blazes pulled me around another peninsula, where I quit the trail, grinding my teeth. I skied through the mud down a steep embankment to the water, then hiked overland along the reservoir. The Fountainhead crew dock was visible in the distance, but across another impassable bay. I reclimbed the embankment and reentered the trail, which led to another bypass. In another half-mile I found the spur that would take me to the parking lot.

I had run in circles in the center of a regional forest park, in a maze of trails engineered to be easily navigable, through uniform deciduous woods, with only the meandering reservoir as a vector. I could have been out there even longer. Number one lesson: know where you’re going. I was lucky, the weather was mild, the rain held off.

So this minor-league crisis ended. I wasted time wondering why it happened, where I went wrong, etc., etc. Careless sums it up.

As a counterweight to my self-absorption, Sandy drove the next day with two friends out I-66 and I-81 to Mount Jackson in rural western Virginia to visit a fourth friend, a woman married just a year, now bedridden with a debilitating illness. The friend’s face lit up when she saw them coming, Sandy said.

The three friends knew the woman from their local church choir. At some point she and her fiancé moved the nearly 150 miles out to Mount Jackson, a pretty but remote place just west of the Massanutten Mountains and about halfway between Front Royal and Harrisonburg. We attended their wedding there, in a small Methodist church. A dozen folks from the choir made the trip and sang at the service.

Sandy has visited her a few times since the wedding, usually when I was running trails in the mountains. She’d drop me off at the event start, pick me up in the evening. But since I’ve been laid off that for a while, she has missed those trips.

A small rural community is a hard place for complicated health problems. No specialists practice in Mount Jackson, seeing one means long drives to Front Royal or Harrisonburg. My impression of the place, on one visit: isolation. But what I think doesn’t matter. Sandy’s mission was one of friendship, and hope.

She calls the woman regularly to ask about her health, but more than that, her feelings about her life. She knows how to be a friend.

That evening we drove to Springfield. Bishop Michael Burbidge came to a parish there to make his annual pitch for his Bishop’s Lenten Appeal. A year ago, at the same event (this blog, Feb. 4, 2019) he said a quick prayer for success of my chemo-rad treatment. He was then getting through prostate cancer therapy. We’re both apparently okay now. Sandy mentioned she’s doing well after her stroke last July, taking her meds. The Lord must have heard all those prayers.

The bishop then spoke with passion, as he does, about people in his diocese afflicted by poverty and hopelessness Those folks are hidden, some in the mountain hamlets along I-81, but also in the affluent suburbs around D.C. Drive past wooded lots along the main thoroughfares in Prince William County and look out the window. Through the trees you will see their tents.

Sandy notices them. She’s at ease in our short conversation with the Bishop, and he listens. His BLA does much good, but we know it’s not likely the food donations reach the tent people. The work is huge and enduring. It calls for good people to “go out” of themselves, to recognize the mission. I want to say I keep learning, or at least trying to learn. Between Sandy and me—who had a good day, and a good week–I finished third.