May
28, 2018
Greetings from
the source,
Most people
would not feel it. You have to be close
enough to sense it, and understand the relationship so that you would even seek
it.
This fourteen
mile rectangle has aged. There are
cracks in the blacktop. When I bend over
to stretch, sweat is dripping from the brim of my hat. I watch the drops, made bright diamonds by
the morning sun, chasing each other to the pavement. Noiseless splash, the tiniest of impact on
the bitumen, staining it slightly darker.
The cracks are
crosshatched like the lines in my hands. The edges of the road are crumbling into
pebbles. A little farther on the pavement
will run out and I will be on dirt for a few miles. It has aged differently there. I know this road intimately, know this swale
tucked in between the field and cemetery.
This road and I have aged together.
Fourteen
miles. If you multiply the number of
times my foot has struck the roads, or pushed off to propel me to the next
step, there are millions and millions of pounds of energy driven into these
roads. I have been running out here for
most of thirty years. I am not up to doing
the math.
Some of the
roads have not survived without help.
This morning there is new blacktop, a sexy ribbon of ebony splitting the
fields, unblemished yet by yellow lines.
I know that underneath this clean layer there lies the pavement and rock
and dirt I have run over. I can feel it.
I run until
the new road gives way to it’s old face, pitted and scarred, creased with the weather
and wear of cars and tractors and a man who runs in fourteen mile
rectangles.
It is a warm
morning, and my legs are tired. I coast
to a stop next to the cemetery, lean over my knees and feel the heart pounding
in my ears. Feel the sweat coursing over
my back, down my legs. Feel the miles, the ache of fatigue, the trembling from the
willing but not willing muscles.
I push up,
hands on my knees and stand straight, my shadow does the same. I can feel myself planted on the road, from
my head down through my spine, through my legs, feel the feet pressing down
into the cracked road beneath me.
Billions of
pounds of energy I have poured into this fourteen mile rectangle. Morning after morning, season after season,
year after year, converting my desire into the next footfall down into the
world, where the power I created is driven into the pavement.
Physics experts
will tell you that the energy is returned with each step, but not all of
it. What they won’t tell you is that it
is not wasted, it is not lost. It is
kept there, there in the road.
As I stand
there panting in the sun, seven miles from where I would finish, I feel it. I close my eyes for a moment, feel the sweat flip
off my eyelashes, and feel it soaking into me.
The road knows what it owes me, what I have invested in it.
I look ahead
and watch the road lead off under a patch of shade, over a small creek, up the
hill ahead of me and disappear. It is
urging me to move, to take the next step and the next. It is promising me it will give me the power
I saved in it.
I know this
promise. I have felt it all my
life. Every time I swung my leg over a
bike and headed for the horizon. Every time
I reached the end of my driveway and looked at four or fourteen or twenty and
knew the road will live up to its bond with me.
I lean forward
only slightly, and my legs are already moving, reaching out for the first step,
the first push off, then the next landing.
They know the relationship after all these years, without me explaining
the physics. They move me, muscles
turning the desire into power, giving the road this first gift knowing that it
will give it back, now and on the next day I need it.
With each
footfall we renew our pact; I give it the energy, it holds it and pushes me on
with it, keeping a small share for the day when I am not sure I have what I need
to finish. This road, and every other I
have crossed, has always lived up to that promise.
Hope
this finds you striding out,
David
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