May 20, 2019

Rocks. More rocks. Then mud. Trail-marking boss Kevin gave Brian and me our assignment, a section of the Massanutten 100-mile (MMT) trail-run course called Duncan Hollow that most of the time doubles as a stream bed. The flow moves north on the north-south trail, percolating and oozing, sucking at shoes and hiking poles. The entire trail extends for about six miles, with an intersection at roughly three miles with the east-west Gap Creek Trail, a steep, then steeper stretch of switchbacks up to the Duncan Hollow ridge. The trail then descends in two fast miles to the site of the Gap Creek aid station.

The trail-marking volunteer teams, generally two people, deployed Friday to hang bright plastic ribbons and luminescent reflectors from trees to show the way for the roughly 200 runners competing in the run, held this weekend on the Massanutten trail in Fort Valley, Va. The ribbons reinforce the tree-painted blazes, although most MMT veterans know the course. I think Kevin assigned us Duncan Hollow because the degree of ascent from the trailhead, near a place called Camp Roosevelt, is more benign than nearly all the others on the course and, this year, I’m the weak link on the team. Gap Creek is the 69-mile point on the 100-mile course.

From Roosevelt the trail weaves through thick forest for maybe a half-mile then, beyond a fast-moving stream, opens up through thinly wooded terrain for easy hiking. Brian and I move well, hanging our ribbons at longer intervals, since this stretch is well-established.  Farther south the Duncan Hollow ridge rises sharply to the east, the summit lost in treetops. We see the results of a controlled burn conducted by the Park Service in recent weeks, singed stumps, charred underbrush, and blackened soil that reduces the spread of growth for just a while.

Farther along, the trail widens and suddenly gets rougher, because the Service used tracked earth-moving equipment, either a small bulldozer or a bobcat, to shear through the growth and tamp down the mud. The tracks left scars that send the stream sloshing towards us. We’re hanging the ribbons and reflectors, slogging at a more labored pace—me, anyway. This is the grim Duncan Hollow trail, the slimy, sticky sluice that runners remember, especially those with the bad luck to traverse it at night. It was on this stretch on a 2016 training run that I stepped on a moss-covered rock and snapped my ankle, putting me in a plastic boot and physical therapy for five months. Now, thighs and hamstrings are aching as I lean forward clutching my package of ribbons. Brian is still moving well out in front. I’ve got ten years on him, but he’s the veteran.

At three miles, the turn onto Gap Creek takes us west, the trail veering sharply higher and out of the water and mud, across a patterned rock floor. It first winds in near-circles, then turns steep and north to the first switchback. As it ascends it narrows in places to no more than a foot wide, here and there, only several inches. To the east the valley falls away, we can’t see the bottom.

It’s been two years since I passed this way on my last attempt at MMT, at around 2:00 AM with my friend Alex, who met me at Roosevelt, mile 63 of the course, around midnight to support me as a pacer. He expected me earlier because I confidently said I’d be there—I wasn’t. That pushed us hard on the Gap Creek cutoff time of 3:45 AM. The cold water stiffened my feet and legs, every step became a struggle on that dark, narrow piece of trail. I crashed at Gap Creek.

Now, two years later, I’m back to MMT for marking. I’m struggling a bit, Brian is well ahead. I tie a ribbon here, a reflector there. Ahead is the deep green of the summit. Another switchback, then another, the trail obscured in the brush. The rocks, now boulders, unstable and loose, require trial-and-error steps to cross without cracking a shin or opening a kneecap.

We’re at the top. Then two miles of fast descent to the site of the aid station.  From Gap Creek the runners face another one-mile climb, called Jawbone, then a five-mile tiptoe across Kern Mountain, a ridge of razor-sharp rocks. But Brian and I are finished. The Duncan Hollow and Gap Creek trails are ready for the race.

Two years. I was ready then, but didn’t finish. Well, maybe I wasn’t ready. The rocks, the cold, the water, the sharp switchbacks, overcame my conditioning, such as it was. So now today—two years older, conditioning shot—I find myself thinking: could I do this? With what I know now? After all, it’s a mind game, getting hydration and nutrition right. I got it right last year at the Cruel Jewel 100 in northeast Georgia, with twice the elevation gain as MMT. I didn’t finish there, but hey, no pressure. Guys older than me have mastered MMT.

Fun thoughts. Delusional, most likely. Lots of bigger challenges coming down the pike that have nothing to do with trail-running fitness: two more docs’ appointments and another scan next month. But the course is still here. It’s a spectacular late-May day, time to think big thoughts. Next training run: July.

May 13, 2019

You can leave your job, but it may not leave you. Monday and Tuesday I put on a suit and drove across the Potomac to the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Maryland to tramp around the three-day Sea-Air-Space exposition. It’s a monster trade show at which companies that work for the Navy, or hope to, spend thousands of dollars, some hundreds of thousands, on glittery displays of their products, prototypes, and bright ideas for the few Navy officials who show up.

Being at the show doesn’t win contracts, but it’s visibility.  So company employees, thousands of them, wander like ants through the cavernous convention center trying to generate some buzz.

SAS seems like a big deal, with simulated sounds and product mockups suspended overhead, crowds of marketeers in blue and gray suits swaying beneath them. But it’s just a trade show, like hundreds put on all around the country all the time. Another way for industry to sell, sell, sell.

I’ve attended the SAS for many years. It was work for me, since I published two trade magazines in the field.

But it was harder this time, and I gave up after only a couple of hours the second day and never made it back for the third. I mostly found myself maneuvering past the PR guys and gals who wave fresh press releases at you like rug vendors in Marrakesh. It all seemed less important than it used to be, with other things now more important. It occurred to me that driving 50 miles roundtrip and paying $20 to park to ferret out trade-show news has become an eccentric habit, no longer an obligation.

The convention center squats massively on the Maryland side of the river, across from Alexandria. On Monday I stretched on a bench facing the water and ate my homemade lunch, then for a few moments closed my eyes and enjoyed the warm sun on my face. I looked out over the mile-wide river at the green Virginia side, wondering when, or if, Sandy and I would ever get back on the road.

Sitting there, I remembered writing here that we can let work enslave us, stealing from us more important things and leaving us self-absorbed grinds. So Wednesday I tried to rehabilitate by going for a hike, feeling relief stomping along muddy trails in deep-green woods, although forced to pause a half-dozen times to catch my breath. Thursday I attempted a bunch of yard chores.

This conundrum is fresh in my mind because Sandy and I went to a memorial service Friday for a man five years younger than me who had just succumbed to cancer.  His wife and friends and siblings told lovely stories about him. While he picked up fun things over the years, adding to his portfolio of wisdom, he never abandoned what he did at the start of his life because he staked out being the man he was, and simply grew that.

None of it surprised anyone in the packed church. Everyone knew he was happy in his skin from the get-go. He added to his life but never tried to reinvent himself. He became a bigger man. He taught: love your life, accept it, make it better, never run from it.

And yet—at some point, whether we’re 30 or 70, it can get hard to maintain that delicate balance between being faithful to a life mission we’ve accepted, and the yearning to modify it, or at least freshen it up, by pursuing other things. The trick is that trying to escape the parts of our lives that have trade-stamped our career or character is to understand that whatever we attempt to substitute also may engulf us.

We work, or worked, to earn a living. Do we have to have a second act? Just last week I wrote “have a plan” for leaving work. By plan I don’t mean adopting a new slate of activities to replace the old slate and make us more tired. Maybe the plan is just sticking with we’ve been doing all along, but massaging it around the edges to add a few new features.

Once we understand who we are and get reasonably comfortable with it, we don’t gain anything by throwing it over to achieve some ambiguous personal transformation. The add-ons—the hiking and gardening, and the other novel ideas—landscape painting, teaching, raising money to fight hunger in Africa—should be applied delicately to our lives, polishing and honing them in ways that make us more human, not to pretty up the base product.

Once I started going to the SAS all those years ago I hung in there and kept going, partly because it was work, partly out of habit. I grumbled about it but kept going. After all, the wisdom you gained from simply doing what is expected of you when you started building your life emerges from lots of mundane days that you can’t recall. In the mix were soaring successes, but also disappointment, maybe tragedy.

It’s still wisdom, the track record—a kind of merit badge of hard experience—that reveals truth. What we’ve been doing all our lives matters. Festooning your life with hobbies and avocations can seem exciting and fun. But it may obscure something more important: the person you made yourself, that is, the person you are called to be.

May 6, 2019

We went out to dinner at the local Ruby Tuesday’s Wednesday night, after I got a more-or-less good grade from my oncologist on the report of my CT scan of a week earlier. Whenever we go there, not often, we talk about how we had dinner at a Ruby Tuesday’s on our wedding night in Nashville 40 years ago.

Back then, Ruby Tuesday’s seemed a lot cooler than it does today. I guessed that particular Nashville place closed long ago. Sandy said, “It’s still there.”

That probably reflects the strange mood we were in. The doc said I’m stable but added that “we’ll have another conversation” after I have another scan next month. He gave me a copy of the report, pumped full of medical scientism citing every nick and dent in a 70-year-old body.

I like the doc. Medical school teaches them how to guess at the future better than the patient can—but not predict it.

The patient keeps trying, though. I’m guessing this inconvenient life detour will end soon. Thursday I went to early Mass at our old parish, then attempted a pat-on-the-back jog and hike into Prince William Forest Park in Montclair, on Burma Road across U.S. 234 (this blog, Nov. 5, 2018). Just before crossing Quantico Creek I took the eastbound three-hill spur, which had me quickly gagging. I did get the loop, then slogged another two miles before staggering, nursing my radiation cough back to the couch for the afternoon.

The forest is green again. It took long enough for this bleak wet winter to break. It hung on grimly, bringing a rush of sadness as much-loved people passed from our lives. But good friends stopped over and swept up the mountains of dead leaves I left in the yard last fall. Family, friends kept calling and writing. The coughing rashes now are spacing themselves out. The sun showed up, finally.

I tried mowing the forlorn 10- by 12-foot swatch of our front yard where grass grows. The mower seemed a lot heavier than it did last summer, and the swatch didn’t look any better afterward; the rest is mostly weeds. But with so many choices among outdoor chores, I’m getting comfortable with the weedy shade of green. What else could I do with all those hours I used to spend planting, watering, mowing, raking, mulching, weeding?

The truth is I don’t have a clue.  I’m not creative enough to redefine myself as other than the grumbling summer lawn-tender I’ve been for the 32 years we’ve lived here and in the earlier years when we had a much smaller swatch at our Nashville place which, being in the city, didn’t infect me with suburban lawn-care paranoia.

In the middle of this pointless fit of angst, it started raining and I pushed the problem (problem?) out of my head. Instead, we focused on more important things: our friend Amir, a long-time member of our neighborhood running group (THuGs) now working in Saudi Arabia, stopped by for a couple of hours with the priceless story of his 31-mile 14-hour Grand Canyon trail run two weeks ago. He signed on with fellow THuG Scott, now living in Austin, who thought up the Canyon run as a junket for the entire group. They both stepped up, the photos told of a great adventure. I conjured up a scenario for being there.

That same day, my cousin Eugene and his wife Jean dropped in on their way home to Long Island, N.Y., from Florida, where they had raced last week when we learned that his older sister Carolyn passed. The cousins, like those of every family of our age, dispersed over the years such that reunions take place at funerals. Sad occasion, but still a happy visit.

Their travel to our place was itself a gift. Amir, Eugene, and Jean looked bright and happy, not a trace of exhaustion, we were grateful for their detours and the stories they told. Amir sent photos of his trips to Jordan and Israel, to the site of Christ’s baptism, and great shots of the Canyon run. Gene and Jean updated us on their boys, Garrett and Pat, both engineers in Florida.

Our son Michael and daughter-in-law Caroline, en route to Richmond, stopped by and took us to lunch at Silver Diner, another old favorite. They looked great, and Michael, the medical physicist, reassured me: “Don’t bother reading those CT scan reports.”

We did our part by going to Seattle last month to see immediate family, later this month we’ll head to South Carolina to see our kids and grandkids there.

The conventional wisdom about retiring voluntarily is have a plan. If involuntarily, make one up fast. If you don’t have one, all those questions about what you’ll do with yourself will smack you in the head suddenly, and much harder than when you were ignoring them. Bottom line, the plan always should be: keep the people you love and admire close. Figure out the rest later.

April 29, 2019

Hunkered on the sofa, my usual spot while I’m popping cough drops, I heard a sharp knock on the front door. I muttered a few choice words, assuming it was a salesman for windows, siding, roofing, firewood, home inspections, or maybe fundamentalist proselytizers, who find our house an easy target. Sandy won’t answer door knocks, she tries to pretend no one’s home. I think though that at minimum, somebody knocking deserves to have the door answered, even it it’s just to get a blasted “No thank you!”

But today it was Paul, our neighbor across the street, holding a tray with a couple of aluminum-foil-covered plates.

“My wife made this,” he announced cheerfully. “She just wants everyone to be healthy!”

I was stunned at this surprise expression of kindness. I don’t typically expect it.  I had to struggle to withdraw from my already-formed indignation readied for a salesman or pamphleteer.

“It’s a pork dish,” he said, cocking his head to indicate one of the items. “The bowl is soup. Also a bottle of blackberry juice!”

“This is very kind, Paul,” I said. “We appreciate this very much.” I took the tray and thanked him yet again, he waved so long. I told Sandy and placed the items in the fridge. The soup was hot, I spilled some of it, but got them safely put away.

It was generous, but it also was spontaneous, unplanned, un-self-conscious. Human goodness in its purest form. I was almost embarrassed to be the beneficiary.

Paul and I aren’t close friends, even though we’ve been neighbors for years. I see him walking his dog. Sometimes we wave. I try to be neighborly, within limits. Narrow limits—that’s who I am. I do know that he has cancer because Sandy told me, because she talks to his wife and their elderly next-door neighbor, who lives alone and seems to know everything about everyone on our block. But I don’t know the details of what kind of shape he’s in. Not something I’d ask about. Nor would I volunteer anything about my own situation to any of our neighbors. Sandy does, though.

The elderly neighbor also has given us foil-wrapped meals. So have several guys in our running group. And Sandy has packaged food for neighbors.

I appreciate the charitable gesture. But I’m still surprised by it. Our neighborhood seems oriented against such unconditional, open-hearted kindness. Is that just my bad attitude? I’ll admit that for years I’ve never made much effort to get to know the neighbors. This subdivision always has been kind of a military-civil servant-contractor ghetto, a sensible place from which to commute to the military posts and federal offices in Northern Virginia and D.C. I did for years. But most of the neighbors eventually shuffle off to other assignments. I recall when we first moved here we had a few of these transients over for dinner. They came, but seemed puzzled, and never invited us to their own homes.

After the first few years we stopped making the effort. Except for kids on swim teams or in Brownies, neither we nor almost anyone else had much to do with neighbors. It’s the burbs, sure, but this place always has reminded me of those movies about big-city apartment buildings where tenants are scared to death of each other. We accepted that people kept to themselves and we adapted. We’ve never had block parties or neighborhood Fourth of July picnics here, things you hear about elsewhere.

We stayed while others moved away. Paul, his wife, the lady across the street, and a few other old fogies also stayed. Like us, they homesteaded here, meaning they found the place tolerable and didn’t, or don’t, have any reason to leave.

Yet when you find you have more gray hairs than brown ones, or few of any color, and you’re not planning right now on selling your home and moving away, you take more notice of those around you who still venture outside. If you have health problems, you can guess that others around your age probably do, too. And when they bring you home-cooked meals, you accept and enjoy the meals but also ponder why they brought them. Or at least I do. Is it pangs of conscience about tolerating for years the spooky impersonal atmosphere of the neighborhood? Long-latent neighborliness surfacing after years of yard chores and work? (Paul still works.) Or maybe, try this—it’s the honest-to-God recognition that bringing meals to neighbors in poor health is a fundamentally natural, fundamentally joyful thing to do.

Let’s face it, whipping up something in the kitchen, walking across the street with it, and waiting until the neighbor answers the door isn’t that hard. You do have to be prepared for the neighbor to not want to answer the door. But the point is that the preparer and deliverer of the dish have overcome the presumption that the neighbor isn’t expecting it, so won’t miss it, so why bother?

I’ve come to recognize that people do these things, even if they don’t know you well, because their nature calls them to perform acts of goodness, to respond to the instincts of charity that emerge unambiguously from the message of Christ, or perhaps from some other mystical direction.

And so we know the inclination to do good for others exists, and finds ways to express itself—to give something humble, like a meal, but more important, to overcome indifference to others that has too easily become ingrained in our daily lives. Whatever the source, to give from the heart and soul without thought of self, enables joy first for those others we assist in these small ways, but in the same way, for ourselves.

 

April 22, 2019

Good Friday. Three weeks ago a much-loved member of the Virginia Happy Trails group passed after a long fight with pancreatic cancer. On Holy Thursday a cousin, a year younger than me, died of breast cancer a few days after entering hospice care.

So darkness descended. As with any death, those who knew the deceased mourn, and their grief stings more sharply when the world moves on at its relentless pace to less solemn, sometimes bizarre events, last week the Notre Dame fire. On Thursday we endured the release of the Mueller Report on Russia and the 2016 election.

The report’s release brought out the clowns grinding their usual axes. The attorney general was fried by the Democrats for mouthing Trump’s “no collusion” sing-song. They booed Mueller for acknowledging he couldn’t decide on obstruction of justice. The Trumpers, sweating until Thursday, announced they “won” for the same reason.

I went to the doctor Thursday and came away with orders for a chest x-ray and three prescriptions. This was around noon, when the TV talkers were earning their dough. Strangely, it got me thinking about the South.

On Thursday evening I popped cough drops; Sandy went to Mass. Instead of the TV news I plowed through Paul Theroux’s Deep South, his chronicle of a car trip through the Southern States. I look for good writing about the South because, fiction or non-fiction, authentic Southern writing is American writing. Stories of the South tell us where the country is today. They tell us also why Trump is president more eloquently than Meet the Press, Morning Joe, and the other talking heads.

Theroux, a Massachusetts Yankee, drove around the deep South. He saw the awful poverty of South Carolina hamlets, endemic bigotry in Alabama and Mississippi, the hopelessness of lack of good work, the rituals of gun shows attended by white men too poor to buy the guns they admired. The gun shows, he writes, “left a powerful impression of a prevailing mood of bitter defeat.”

Trump, a New Yorker, yet is a product of these places. Trump himself is only an agglutination of appetites and impulses who doesn’t know why he is president. But if you read The Mind of the South by W.J. Cash, you will know why.

Cash worked for North Carolina newspapers in the 1920s, and contributed essays to H.L. Mencken’s “American Mercury,” including one entitled “The Mind of the South.” Publisher Alfred Knopf persuaded him to expand it to a book. He spent 12 years writing it.

Cash writes that over the nearly 200 years from the settlement of Jamestown until the Revolutionary War, an aristocracy evolved in Virginia’s Tidewater region, supported by slave labor. The aristocrats acquired property and grew tobacco, rice, and indigo, and forced owners of less-fertile farms west to the frontier. Some of them did well. These prosperous “yeoman farmers” won local elections and eventually became the true ruling class of the South.

That left the poor whites, the masses of white Southerners who didn’t own slaves. These were the people to whom the terms “cracker” and “white trash” were applied—the unsuccessful, the less-industrious and unthrifty. Most lived in isolated places; often large families lived and died in a single room. They raised subsistence crops or worked at odd jobs. Yet they shared with the wealthy planters and yeoman farmers the recognition of the distinction between their own lives, being white and free, and the humiliation of black slavery.

The reality of slavery enabled all Southerners to maintain an exaggerated sense of pride, the feeling that, no matter their own status, another class of human beings was beneath them. Cash argues that the recognition that slavery was the foundation of the economic and cultural life of the South united all Southerners: plantation owners, cotton farmers, and “crackers” in hatred of the Yankee North. That hatred, he writes, inspired the fanatical courage of the Confederate forces, both officers and the backwoods infantrymen who enjoyed no benefits from slave labor, in a war they could not win.

The lives of the poor whites were harsh, but their cultural bonds with those better off also led them to a sort of romanticism, a belief that they could someday escape their struggles. That romanticism, for Cash, translated to religion. Their religion wasn’t the genteel Virginia Anglicanism. It was simple and emotional, steeped in a sense of sin.

Cash writes that the poor whites’ faith was “of primitive frenzy and the blood sacrifice.” God was a passionate tyrant. These Southerners demanded the God of the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Presbyterians, which he calls the “personal and often extravagant sects, with their revivals, sweeping across the personal and extravagant South.”

Meanwhile, for poor whites, social and family life coexisted with drunkenness, gunplay, moonshining, and blood feuding, and warnings of damnation from backwoods pulpits. Yet they believed devoutly that their lives were guided by pure Christian values, even while blind to the evil of human bondage. Life’s daily struggles, Cash says, contributed to a social schizophrenia that robbed the Southerner of any sense of a need to adapt to the vast economic and social changes that over generations transformed the nation.

Defeat by the Yankees and Reconstruction, Cash points out, left the rigid Southern conviction that the North was determined to destroy the South economically and spiritually. Distrust and hatred of Yankees, he writes, united the poorest whites and the ruined planters and cotton farmers, overcoming once-uncrossable class boundaries.

This evolution of a “solidified South” was abetted by the pastors who preached that the god of the Yankees was not a god at all but the Antichrist.  For them, Cash writes, the Southern people were chosen by God to stand against the Northern pagans. They argued that the South in its virtue was assigned the moral duty of caring for the souls of slaves.

This sense that Southern Christians were victims of Northern oppressors moved Southern churches closer to a strict Calvinism that taught that slavery as an institution was ordained by God. The churches looked on the Yankees as threats to their missions as arbiters of Southern morality.

Cash hanged himself six months after The Mind of the South was published. He recognized, at a time steeped in Jim Crow, Southerners’ resentment at being lectured at by Northern politicians and churchmen about how to vote. Today, pondering Cash and Theroux, we find the South a metaphor for all those hopeless, angry places where that resentment still simmers. We see too in Cash’s perceptions of the pseudo-spiritual fervor he found the concrete-solid support of today’s white “evangelical” sects for Trump.

Theroux tells how he took a seat at a group table in a restaurant in Vicksburg, Miss., introduced himself, and mentioned he was from Massachusetts: “A woman muttered in a resentful way, ‘You know what you did to us?’”

This is heavy, depressing stuff at Easter. Barr probably didn’t have any reason for releasing the Mueller report on Holy Thursday. I still take consolation in the message of the Redemption. So for this weekend I didn’t take Theroux and Cash to heart. But today we should.