June 20, 2022

We walked up and down Main Street in Sturgis, S.D., 20 miles north of Rapid City, a quiet place 51 weeks of the year. The remaining week, in August, about 250,000 bikers show up for the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. They celebrate amazing feats of motorcycle design and engineering, and other things: biking skill, leather outfits, for some, booze, for others, politics. This year’s rally is set for August 5th through 14th.

Sturgis, for some who have never been within 1,000 miles of the place, has become an icon of a bizarre strain of American life. Depends on your point of view.

The streets leading to Main Street resemble the streets of lots of other small American towns: modest homes, churches, supermarkets, gas stations. Most of the year traffic to and from southwestern South Dakota suburbs and southeastern Wyoming scoots by on I-90.  In August Main Street and the adjacent neighborhood becomes Biker Paradise.

Many Americans think of bikers as rebels. Lots of classic films reinforce that idea. There was The Wild One, with Marlon Brando, in 1953. Then came Easy Rider, with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson. The 1969 movie, released at a troubled time, surveyed the landscape of drugs, dangerous behavior, and redneck violence. The movie pitched drug dealers as rebels, the rednecks were killers. The themes were disturbing, but memorable.

Some bikers—not all—cultivate and advertise the Easy Rider shtick: the hair, the clothes, the unconventional behavior. But something happened in recent years to the biker mystique, if that’s what it was, or is. Some bikers—not all—went off the rebel reservation and became walking, er, riding advertisements for loutish, lowbrow America.

At Sturgis, booze, drugs, and asinine behavior get the same attention as the motorcycle design and ridership competitions. Then in August 2020, as the covid pandemic killed thousands, the rally went on as planned in the face of calls for it to be canceled. The studies conflict, some say the impact was minimal, others say it spread the virus to hundreds of thousands.

Sturgis also now is a friendly place for that strain of public policy analysis that holds that Trump is the fearless defender of the real America; Biden isn’t really President because the 2020 election was stolen; an AR-15 is a man’s best friend; the only good liberal is a dead one. At Hot Leathers, on Main at Junction Avenue you can buy a $300 leather jacket emblazoned with a giant skull. Across the street you can get a banner with a silhouette of an automatic weapon and the slogan, “Come and Get It”; a poster of Trump wearing aviator glasses and waving an AR; flags showing Trump with the legend, “Finally, a Guy with Balls.” Main Street is, in a big way, Trump Street.

Anyway, some folks come for the motorcycle contests and the beer.

From Sturgis we crossed the state line into Wyoming, heading into the vast horizon of green, empty range and brilliant blue sky of the smallest U.S. state in population with about 577,000 souls, fewer than Vermont, which has one-tenth the square mileage. We headed to Sheridan in the northeast corner, still the heart of Trump country, but also Cowboy Country.

As we settled in the hotel room we heard a knock on the door: our youngest daughter, Kathleen, appeared. She had driven the 500 miles up from Colorado Springs as a Father’s Day surprise. Truly lovely.

Sheridan shows the class of cowboy land, aware of its huge place in the history of the West. King’s Saddlery, Sheridan’s “tack” store, says it offers everything the cowboy or cowgirl needs: saddles, ropes, bridles, bits, reins, halters, saddlebags, and items I never heard of, and you can get it all online. Don King’s Museum, behind the store, captures the story of the West, which is the tough spirit of the Polish and Italian settlers who became the ranchers, miners, cowboys, and businessmen. It captures eloquently the rodeo culture, the cattle business, the life of Native Americans, but also the bloody tragedy of the U.S. Cavalry-Indian Wars.

At the museum we talked to a mild-mannered guy who said he’s pushing 80, slim and handsome in cowboy gear, and it wasn’t fake. He told us how 40 years ago he fell from his horse chasing cattle and nearly bled out. The museum gave him a job, he’s been there these last 40 years.

I saw one, exactly one “Cheney for Congress” yard sign, and a sprinkling of signs for Harriet Hageman, her opponent in the Republican Congressional primary. Liz Cheney is the most prominent of the miniscule number of Republicans who supported impeaching Trump. Hageman is the Trump-endorsed challenger. She’s favored to win. Cowboys, like bikers, are Trump people, they like the aviator glasses look.

We were here for the Bighorn Trail Runs, four events starting in the awesome altitudes of the Bighorn National Forest west of town. On Friday we drove 25 miles out to a spot on a gravel road past Dayton along the fast-moving Tongue River for the start of the 100-miler, the mountains towering on all sides. We met old Virginia friends, took pictures, wished the runners luck. They took off in a hot cloud of dust, the mercury forecast to reach 95F.

Saturday I started the 32-miler. On the hour-long bus ride to the start we ascended into the rugged and spectacular Bighorn Mountains. The driver pointed out clusters of moose grazing in meadows. The race began in a blustery breeze. We slogged up mountainsides and through snow and mud. The sun rose higher. In early afternoon I started to fall apart on a six-mile stretch across open prairie in mid-eighties heat. I missed the time cutoff at the 20-mile point, and didn’t complain.

An aid-station volunteer, a local guy, drove me to the finish. Because of a snowdrift across an access road we took a teeth-rattling ATV trail back to a gravel road, a two-hour ride. He talked about life in Wyoming, family, and politics, usually taboo among strangers. “I can’t talk to my friends about some things,” he said. They’re worried about Democrats taking their guns away, he said. I said that sounds like South Carolina.

When she got a cell signal a volunteer called Sandy to let her know I was alive. At the finish we watched the successful runners cross the line, congratulated the finishers, and cooled down by wading into the frigid Tongue River. We said so long to everybody and I limped back to the van.  Sandy and I headed back to Sheridan. We’re looking, again, at 2,000 miles on the road.

June 13, 2022

Two weeks ago we hiked up I-26 to I-40 then west on the long slog through Middle Tennessee. We headed the same way Saturday, this time aiming for Sheridan, Wyoming. We thought about flying, but at some point the inmost heart of America, with its vast skies and mesmerizing emptiness, can’t be denied.

For an hour or so once again the mountains held us back, long grades and short twisting ones through deep-green western North Carolina. The country is rugged out to the Tennessee Welcome Center near—well, near nowhere, really. Mountains and forest, more mountains, more forest. Eventually the mountains fade into hills and the highway becomes an eight-lane interstate into gritty Knoxville, home of the University of Tennessee Volunteers. The road is packed with cars showing the Big Orange Power T. You can almost hear “Rocky Top.”  

Traffic slows through the city but the pace picks up west of Oak Ridge. Three interstates, 40, 65, and 24 meet in downtown Nashville. I-24 is a straight 50-mile shot to Clarksville, on the Kentucky state line. The traffic clogs through Nashville and beyond the Cumberland River—where are they all going?

Beyond Hopkinsville we skirted giant Lake Barkley, 134 miles long, on the east side of the famed Land Between the Lakes. Barkley turns into the headwaters of the Cumberland, which meanders a couple of hundred miles down through Nashville. West of LBL is even larger Kentucky Lake, 190 or so miles long, which becomes the Tennessee River and loops down through West Tennessee, turns east, and flows through Huntsville before rising to Knoxville, then becoming North Carolina’s French Broad River.

We missed most of this country in the years we lived in Tennessee: it was too far away, we were too busy, too distracted by work and kids. A month after Laura, our first, was born, we drove this way once, en route to St. Paul. I recall a fleeting glimpse.

After 80 miles in Kentucky and 500 miles for the day we paid eight bucks to bunk at Fort Massac State Park in Metropolis, Ill., just across the Ohio from Paducah. The fort now is a rebuilt half-dozen log buildings at a high point above the river. The Spanish owned this territory from the 1500s. The French seized it in 1702. They built the fort around 1745 because the site commanded the intersection of the Ohio, Illinois, and Tennessee Rivers. They named it Fort De L’Ascension, in 1759 or 1760 it became Massac, after the French minister of colonial affairs. The British took possession at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763.

The colonials took Massac when Col. George Rogers Clark captured the entire Illinois territory for the State of Virginia and the new United States. The place saw sporadic use by the Colonial Army and last was used for training by the Union Army, then abandoned. Illinois eventually rebuilt it as the state’s first state park.

The park is pretty and richly green, set among massive oaks. It’s also a level surface, important for campers, reminding us we’ve arrived in the Midwest. As we fished for our gear in the van a guy with a thick white beard trudged by and paused. Turns out he’s from South Carolina, making his way to Dallas. I frowned, Illinois seemed out of the way. “I wanted to see the Ohio,” he grinned, and walked on.

After cooking dinner we walked down to the river, at this point a good half-mile wide. Near Paducah a huge tug toiled downriver toward us. A dozen barges were tied up on the Kentucky side, waiting for a push south. I walked to the shore and looked across the wide expanse. The angry brown water surged by.

This is a spot on the map, a place we’ve never before visited and likely won’t visit again. We flew through Kentucky in a couple of hours, barely noticing how the hills of Tennessee transformed into cultivated Midwest acres. Metropolis, about 6,500 souls, takes its name from Superman’s home town and sits square on the southern stub of Illinois. There’s a tongue-in-cheek billboard outside the park entrance. A small hiccup of fame.

Before turning in we sat outside the tent. In the distance some kids at a playground yelled. Campers started to file back to their campsites after their hikes and picnics. Local folks? I wondered. Fort Massac didn’t seem the kind of a place for outsiders, except our Dallas traveler—and ourselves. Who knows who’s here, and why? The interstate outside town will take you in three hours to St. Louis, or to I-57 and in five to Chicago. It’s no local byway.

The night air was warm and humid, we didn’t need the sleeping bags. At dawn the park was silent. I thought: here we are, a long way from home, heading into the Midwest heatwave.  Like everyone else we gag when we buy gas, yesterday’s fill-up (regular) in Clarksville was $75.00. The Post ran a piece Saturday about seniors coping with inflation. They’re cutting back. Not news.

It’s an old law: higher demand means higher prices, for everything. So why in heck are we making this trip? We could sit home and think about doing it at some future time, in some future year, when gas will be cheap again and everything will be fine. Not sure where I’ll be then.

In the morning I fired up the camper grill and heated my coffee. We walked a bit and looked around at Fort Massac. Around 7:00 campers started stirring. We got showers, loaded the van, and headed for the interstate.

June 6, 2022

The golden anniversary reunion came 11 months after we had last been up to St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., then for a funeral. It actually was Year 51, since covid canceled everything last year. So, back to Manchester, our favorite New England mill town. The mills all are closed or repurposed as offices and condos, but as we arrived for our three-day reunion, the look still is there. So is the feeling.

When my classmates and I arrived at St. Anselm (then “St. Anselm’s”—the apostrophe “s” has been dropped) in September 1967, we fell into an alien place. The college was and still is operated by the Benedictine monastic order, a community of priests and religious brothers who live by the 1,700-year-old Rule of Saint Benedict, which defines and regulates monastic life, captured in the phrase ora et labora (pray and work). They never stopped reminding us of the Benedictine tradition of higher learning. They lived in a gracefully designed monastery adjacent to campus. Early on, for most of us, the monastery might as well have been on another planet.

The city, Manchester, was a stereotype of urban decline. The mills were shut down by then, the textile trade long ago migrated to the low-wage South, and from there to Southeast Asia. The city still endured spells of air and water pollution that had ebbed and returned over a hundred years. The Merrimack, which flows fiercely through the city and south past the mills of Lowell and Lawrence, Mass., was a chute of foul chemicals. The air sometimes was tinged with orange, thanks to burning leaves and the fumes of coal and oil furnaces that heated the ancient frame houses of the central city.

We came to the hilltop campus, with its lush lawns and towering pines, in a dreamy state, teenagers mostly from suburbs scattered around New England, with a large crowd from Boston. Maybe a half-dozen, including myself, came from Jersey or New York or points beyond. The accents were jarring. The college now is co-ed, but then still was male-only with a tiny cadre of female nursing students, who lived in an old hospital dorm downtown. Most of my classmates cleared out on weekends. Late-Sixties Manchester was a desert for college students. It was no different when we graduated in ’71. Third-tier New England towns change slowly.

We didn’t know how little we knew about the world, abysmally little. Weeks after we arrived on campus Navy pilot Lieut. Cmdr. John McCain was shot down over North Vietnam, where he remained as a POW until being released in March 1973. The Army and Marine Corps were brutally engaged in Vietnam, with hundreds of young men, many our age, dying every week. Antiwar turmoil was rising in major cities.

We knew next to nothing about Vietnam or protests, the big story in Fall 1967 was the Red Sox-Cardinals World Series, won in seven games by the Cards. In February 1968 Richard Nixon came to campus, revving up his campaign. Hardly anyone noticed. The grind of academics wore us all down. St. A’s was not an easy-A school, grades given were the grades earned.

Over time, most of us settled into being at college. We made our peace with the Benedictines, many of them professors and administrators, but first always monks. It was at times a rocky coexistence. The new students, suddenly away from mom and dad, slept in Sunday mornings rather than get to Mass in the lovely chapel that marks sublimely the entrance to campus. The monks always were ready to shoot the breeze with students in the coffee shop and stay up late in the dorms to get party-happy guys into bed. But they lived in the timeless world of Benedictine monasticism: prayer, obedience, humility, intellectual rigor. It took us some getting used to.

Martin Luther King Jr., was killed in April 1968. The country shuddered, storefronts were shattered, buildings burned. Two months later Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy, Jr. In August violent provocateurs and violent police tore apart the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In November the SDS led a “Vote With Your Feet” rally in Boston—nearly a riot—to protest American entrapment in Vietnam, and entrapment it was. Our shuttered world began to open up.

The nightmares kept exploding: Cambodia, Kent State, the draft and draft lottery, nationwide college shutdowns. Like others elsewhere, we were transformed. Transformed or paralyzed. But because of the Benedictines we avoided the worst. Sanity maintained on our hilltop. The nihilists with the Viet Cong flags were frozen in place. The centerpiece of Vietnam began to dismantle itself. The monks worked harder to drag us to graduation. They kept requiring us to take their theology courses.

In the roof of the refectory, or dining hall of the monastery is a series of small stained-glass windows that depict from start to finish the life of Saint Benedict as described in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, Pope Gregory I. In sequence, up one side of the roof and down the other, they illustrate his doubts on his path in life, the pain and danger he endured, the gathering of his disciples, the miracles, the creation of monasteries, the death of Saint Scholastica, his twin sister, in 543.

The windows tell the story of the foundation of the Benedictine movement, the mission to educate and serve God’s people through, once again, prayer and work. Without much awareness of that mission over those four years and maybe not even now, the members of St. A’s ’71 grew, evolved, matured, slowly, some of us very slowly. We were kids, jocks, party animals, many the first in families to get into college and then finish college. In June 1971 we hiked across the lawn in front of the Ad building and picked up diplomas, our tickets to complicated futures.

The thrill wore off through Cold War, recessions, a dot.com bust, the 9/11 terror/mass murder, more war, a real-estate meltdown, all shuttling us into the most recent insults: one million covid deaths, an epidemic of mass shootings. Yet now back over a blur of days, months, years, decades, here we are again, our numbers whittled down by mortality and infirmity, the way of the world, the way of life. The New England tech and real-estate boom is still going on. The pollution is mostly cleaned up. We’re all wearing nametags to help us recognize each other.

The last reunion day was Pentecost Sunday. We filed back into the chapel for Mass. The Abbot, also one of us, gives his blessing: “In the spirit of Pentecost, all is transformed. Hope, in its purest form, makes all things new. In the pursuit of truth, beauty, and wisdom in Christ is found our salvation.” Saint Benedict is in the place, we know it. We stand, genuflect, and go on our way.

May 30, 2022

We headed for Nashville through thick fog that obscured the mountains and reinforced the numbness we felt, the whole country felt. What goes through the mind of an 18-year-old kid as he pulls the trigger in an elementary school classroom? No one knows, maybe not even the kid. On Memorial Day weekend we should be honoring those who served. Texans are mourning children.

We plodded on, from one gun-happy state to another, up I-26 past Asheville then to I-40 into the Volunteer State, legendary home of Davey Crockett and his long rifles.

We looked forward to going back, but the fast-moving dark clouds and sheets of rain slowed us down. Tennessee, greenest state and all that, has become a weird, offbeat place. Firearms and violence are ingrained in its history. Just past Knoxville is a billboard advertising tours of Brushy Mountain State Prison, the remote, now-closed state penitentiary where James Earl Ray, assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., was locked up—until one day he wasn’t. Ray escaped in June 1977 and tramped in circles around the bleak, hostile Frozen Head mountain forest for two days. We passed on the tour.

The Civil War is big, with ads at rest stops for the “Tennessee Civil War Trails.” At a pretty picnic area outside Crossville is a marker noting the exploits of Confederate guerrilla leader Champ Ferguson. Champ commanded a vicious band of rebels that attacked Union troops and supply lines. He operated with even more-notorious General John Morgan, who led a gang of irregulars in harassing Union forces in East Tennessee.

Morgan was caught and shot in September 1864. Ferguson surrendered in May 1865. Because he wasn’t a regular soldier he was hanged as a traitor. Morgan is memorialized in Greeneville. Ferguson’s shrine at Crossville is more impressive than his military career.

Music City, when we lived there in the mid-70s through mid-80s, still was a slow-moving, easy-going Southern town: No NFL or NHL team, only two or three high-rise office buildings, no rush hour. The city had two independent daily newspapers. It had its local scandals, mainly the one with Governor Ray Blanton. He went to jail in 1984 for mail fraud, although also indicted for pardoning a bunch of prison inmates who bribed him, including 20 convicted murderers. Nashville Sheriff Fate Thomas, who held the office for 18 years, served four years on various corruption charges.

The most recent seamy story is of Mayor Megan Barry, an up-and-coming, fresh-faced Democrat who in March 2018 resigned as part of a felony plea after admitting to having an affair with her police bodyguard, who was paid for time he spent with her. They both got three years’ probation and reimbursed the city.  Nashville, after all, was and still is one of the biggest buckles on the Bible belt, I recall something like 700 congregations of all persuasions.

A few years ago you could bump into country music stars buying groceries. On Music Row you’d see guys dragging guitars, hoping to get an audition at the studios that line the Row. The population of the metropolitan area then was about 500,000, now it’s one million and counting.

We lived near Vanderbilt University. On football Saturdays traffic would back up on our street, we could hear the crowds at the games, mostly groans, because Vandy wasn’t very good. Back then it was kind of a lowbrow place, some houses kept up, others down and out. One house away from ours was a home for troubled boys. Today the neighborhood is absolutely chic, with homes marketed in the $900,000 range. Joggers roam the streets, contractors are adding upgrades, signs advertising Democratic causes decorate the yards.

One of the two newspapers went out of business, the other was absorbed into the monster Gannett conglomerate. Downtown now is pocked with skyscrapers that weren’t there five years ago. Acres of stores and homes have been bulldozed to make room for new apartment and condo towers and office buildings. The once-humble North Nashville precinct has been obliterated through gentrification run amok, block after block of apartments have appeared and are still appearing, construction cranes are rising, jackhammers throbbing.

The Nashville boom isn’t unique, it’s going on in Florida, Texas, and South Carolina. Gridlocked traffic snakes along city streets, property taxes skyrocket, newcomers bid against each other for boxy houses and townhomes on treeless lots. But then, everyone needs a place to live. Nashville has its throbbing, exciting pace. Too exciting for us.

I walked past our old place, just a brick Cape Cod-type cottage with a few nice features, like a stone fireplace. The brick has been painted gray for many years. I can still see the crooked lines of my chimney tuckpointing. A dried dollop of white paint, which I spilled, remains on a front-window screen. It’s been 36 years.

I resisted the urge to ring the doorbell and asked whoever answers if I can get a look at the inside. The fellow or gal would be puzzled; he or she may not have been born when we left. The place has been sold several times anyway, with the local real estate market red-hot for decades.

Across the street from our house stands a large home once surrounded by a beautiful, spacious lawn. I looked once, then twice. A second home now sits on the property, crammed between the older house and the sidewalk. Well, the couple who were our neighbors in 1986 are long gone. Why not add something?

Before we left we strolled through Centennial Park on West End near Vanderbilt, a true jewel of the city. We passed the graceful Parthenon, a knockoff of the real one in Greece. The park has been nicely spruced up, with cleanly designed walkways, a Tennessee Women’s Suffrage monument, and new landscaping, yet remains the same place we took our kids to play long ago.

We drove 100 miles south to Monteagle, winding up Sewanee Mountain, and got a room at the Smokehouse Lodge. We listened for a while to Mississippi base virtuoso Brandon Greene sing his heartfelt ballads on the patio out back. We waved at a few folks, people who stayed put on the mountain, happily. The next day, perched high on the Cumberland Plateau, we stared at the spectacular vista of lush green farmland. We breathed deeply. Not a construction crane in sight.

May 23, 2022

The old man stared at the green corridor ahead. Daylight was fading. His back ached from leaning forward. His legs felt heavier with each step. He heard nothing, no breeze in the trees, no bird calls, no scurrying squirrels. No human being was near. He was alone on this stretch of trail, probably five miles from the last aid station and that far from the next one.

He reminded himself he was 74, the oldest entrant in the field in this 100-mile trail run. He figured he was around mile 45. Lately, he was the oldest in any event he entered, usually the only one in the 70-plus group. Even with his aching back he grinned at the thought of winning the division, finishing both first and last. The race report would place him first. Oh boy, he thought. Isn’t that a big deal.

The event was called a “trail run,” but his pace included very little running. He picked up speed on the descents with a kind of calculated trot. He focused on the surface, trying to avoid the obstacles that could cause him to topple forward. If he did and was lucky he would throw his hands forward to cushion the fall. If he couldn’t, he might crack or slash something.

It had happened countless times, usually just a glancing blow, but at others, gashed arms and legs, ankle strains and sprains, knocks on the head, once a concussion and a couple of broken ribs. Injuries were part of the game. He felt pleased that he stumbled far less often now than in his early years of running in the woods. He had needed many training runs to develop his skills: the ability to quickly assess the terrain as he moved over it, the reflexes to place his feet firmly and safely, avoiding rocks and roots that could throw him off balance. He was good at it. He should be, he reminded himself, he had been doing it for 20 years.

He could see the stretch ahead rising to a short level point, then rising again until the trail disappeared into the trees. His thighs throbbed, each step became shorter, more deliberate. He watched the ground no more than ten or twelve feet ahead, focusing on progress over and past the rocks, than casting his eyes forward to measure his progress. The climb became steeper. He paused and drew water from the tube of his hydration pack. It was warm but good. He stepped forward, feeling the drag of gravity.

What’s the point, he asked himself. He knew the question would come to him at some hard moment, as it always did when he was stuck alone in the forest on a knee-stretching, breath-sucking climb. He had conjured up different answers: senior fitness, camaraderie with younger folks, the lure of the challenge, the satisfaction of finishing or at least trying to finish. There was the sublime, consoling solitude of the deep forest, the breathtaking mountain views. Then the nagging one he tried to avoid: the reality of age, of time passing, the mystery of what lay ahead. Seventy really is not the new forty

None of the answers made the trail easier. He knew, no, he hoped, he would stumble into the finish under the 35-hour cutoff. The few folks still hanging around would applaud, the race director would smile and shake his hand. He would slump in the nearest chair and bow his head.

He achieved the top of the hill and exhaled and paused, looking at the descent that curled around a sharp bend. He knew this short, steep slope led only to another hill. Night was softly closing in. He reached up and touched his headlamp. At the start of the race in the pre-dawn darkness that morning he had left it hanging around his neck rather than stow it in his pack, to avoid a stop to fumble with it. He had packed a spare light and triple-A batteries in case of a midnight headlamp disaster.

He reached the bottom and turned into the curl, the trail narrowed and wound into thick brush. He knew this section went for about a mile, or was it two miles. The descent provided some sense of recovery, but he knew it wouldn’t last. He tried to stay in the center of the trail to avoid touching the underbrush, where the ticks waited. He paused, thinking he heard voices, then shook his head. What was he hearing? The rest of the field were far ahead, he knew he couldn’t overtake any of those young greyhounds, or even the middle-aged ones. Keep moving, he muttered to himself.

The question returned: what’s the point? Why the endless training, with the risk of injury–not only cuts, bruises, skinned knees, blisters, but also sprains, dehydration, kidney stress. Then, snakes, horseflies, ticks. Then the days of recovery, the aching back and legs, the temptation to numb the pain with bourbon. The folks at the finish always had plenty of strong stuff.

The shadows lengthened, the lush greenery grew dark. To conserve battery power he waited until darkness had nearly descended before switching on the headlamp. He moved more slowly. Night fell, and he slogged through the beam, glancing left and right, the light creating ghostly shadows of the trees and underbrush, gnats dancing in the light around his face The woods came alive with the deafening staccato of katydids and crickets, and in the distance the haunting hoot of an owl.

The air cooled, he paused and reached into his pack for his thermal shirt and pulled it over his head. He moved on through the forest music, the beam ever brighter in the deepening darkness. He drew more water.

He felt stronger then, knowing he had managed his pace well up the climbs and down the descents, around the rocks and the blown-down trees and fallen branches. He breathed deeply, freely, knowing the point: relentless forward progress, moving through the pain, the exhaustion, the loneliness, the heat of the day and the night’s chill. To persevere, to overcome, to finish the race, to succeed at the mission. The mission was within him all these years. It was the way he wanted it to be, the way it always had been. The mission told him all he knew about himself.

He guessed the aid station was within a mile. He had come a respectable distance for an old coot. He looked forward to a welcoming word from the crew. They would ask him how he felt, and if he wanted to go on or drop from the race. He would have a moment’s pause to get his breath. Then, before the urge to quit seized him, to step back onto the trail.