Crimming

August 27, 2018

Greetings from the Blue Line,

crimming. verb.  Denotes preparation for, and participation in, completion of, and/or celebration thereafter, the Crim Festival of Races.  See also passion.

There is always an irresistible energy right before the start of the race.  This one was no exception, and if not for the dampness the runners would have been giving off sparks, arcs of blue-white electricity between them. We were crowded against the starting line, straining at the line, wanting to go.

I looked back across the throng, thousands of athletes, idling at high rpm’s.  Once in a while someone would leap straight up, bouncing to warm up, and then someone else, like runner wack-a-mole.  I could feel the heat from the bodies around me, smell the sweat and the ointment and the miles on the shoes.  People stretched, tried to do their prerace routine packed in among the mob.  Excuse me. Sorry.  Oh, my bad.  Ope!

A dingy sky swirled above the glazed bricks, indifferent to us, intent on its own agenda.  We edged up to the start and waited to be released as the first wave of runners took off.  It began to sprinkle.  We waited.  The pause was too long.  People began muttering.  The rain was picking up.  My right foot was on the starting line.  Breathe in and out. We are going.  Lean, breathe in…

And then we had to quit.

I sat on the tile floor of the pavilion, my back against the wall.  I was dressed to run ten miles not camp out on the floor, but I was surprisingly comfortable in my little corner.  Somehow, I arranged my tight hamstrings and glutes and calves, already twitching from a hard week of running, into some semblance of ease. 

The storm was stomping around outside like a petulant child, banging thunder, thrashing about in the puddles.  Rain roared against the pavilion, a wet percussion to an unknown beat.  The Crim would wait till the tantrum passed.

Thousands of runners were crowded into the space, along with the friends who had been at the start.  Now refugees in exotic shoes, huddled in colorful knots, laughing, trading stories, trying to be grateful we were inside and not in the storm.  The rain punished glass roof above us, the water sluicing off the edges of the building in waves.  The runner’s voices added to the din, the sounds intertwined and looked for places to echo.

The roar softened, still as loud but without the edge of new noise.  There was no individual voice, no single sound.  It became more like surf scouring against rock, foamy and rich with life.

I closed my eyes to imagine it more clearly.  And then without knowing I was going there, I was dreaming. 

I don’t know how long I was gone but I woke slowly.  Something brought me awake, that unique intimacy of being completely vulnerable in a dream and knowing that someone was watching me sleeping.  I opened my eyes, felt the world again, heard the tamped roar of the surf.

The world still was at full tilt.  I looked up to see the rain on the glass, the people pooling around my sanctuary, flowing up and down the halls, their voices as liquid as the world outside.  All I could hear was everyone wondering the same thing.  I stood and stretched and walked out into the melee and willed the storm to pass.

Someone said they heard there was a small chance they would have to cancel the race.  I scoffed at that, admittedly only armed with naive belief in momentum.  The Crim had run for more than four decades.  I caught the eye of the race director, Andy, and he had his Zen look going.  His calm was going to work.

When things go exactly as planned the race is an amazing thing.  And then the storm came, and it became epic.  The wizards behind the curtains moved thousands of athletes and volunteers and spectators and police; packaged us up in dry places, and watched the sky until it was safe to run again. 

And then it was.  I wasn’t aware of where it began but suddenly we were moving outside, the same runners, only an hour and a half older.  We took our places and restarted our ritual dances.  And someone whispered ‘Go.’ And we did.  We churned across the start again, laughing, telling the story already, and rushed into the ten miles.

Thirty seven times I have run the Blue Line.   Decades of crimming; pasta and running shoes and traditions and superstitions and variations, that now includes a nap.  And every year, no matter the time, always running with the best.

Hope this finds you with dry feet,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith

Summersmith

August 20, 2018

Greetings from the magic,

With each step I run I pour my magic into the air.  Each footfall creates a vibration that changes the world.  God leans closer to see what it is and smiles summer on us.

I am in my natural state. I pull on only the morning mist, beads of dew on my skin, and run into the fog of predawn.  The energy created by my strides gives power to the lightning bugs. I call to the corn, the blueberries.  I don’t make their sweetness, I only make it possible.  I run through the country roads, fueling the warm day, pulling the sun closer, holding it longer.

This calendar makes idle threats, but I am not intimidated.  I have the power older than dates on paper.  I am Summersmith.

How else will summer be?  How else will the water know that it should foam and splash at the sandy edges of the world?  If I am not out to create the space where the heat can fill, if I don’t swirl a cloud of starlings into the sky, if I am not out running to send the message to the cicadas and the crickets, how else will we hold this magic still in the middle of ice and darkness?

Summer cannot just happen, it is not simply astronomy.  It is created each morning as I sip coffee on my deck, and then grows stronger as I run the two-lane roads.  I go by your windows as you are waking up and you hear mourning doves, you feel the soft breeze, smell the day and you know I am at work.

It happens because seeing a cluster of deer walk through my yard still makes me feel like something wonderful has just happened, like I am eight years old and this was created just to amaze me.  I know that when I feel this it pulls summer to us.

I run between the beans and the fences and the yards and the greenness flows out from me. I run and run and run and flowers too beautiful to name burst from the ground.  Clusters of chickadees, yellow commas against the shrubs, leap ahead of me to enjoy the warmth I create.

You stood on your porch and listened to the rain on the roof, chuckling into the eaves, and you were carried to when you were a child at your gramma’s, or when you were camping, or when you had your first kiss, and it smelled like this day.  Because somewhere out there, on shiny-wet strips of macadam, I am running, splashing the magic, making a summer storm.

I run and run and run.  And heat lighting flashes and the sound of a train floats into your dream undaunted by the screen in your window.  I run and the butterfly settles on the leaf, and the sun turns shadows between branches into mysterious daguerreotypes in the dirt.

I run and the day lasts longer because it wants to, it hates to end, and the sun steps up its game at the western end of the world promising to do it over tomorrow.

I can’t do it alone, there are others too.  The little boy on his bike who is creating the world a block at a time, the four girls running through the sprinkler, laughing in their bright bathing suits, turning the yard into eternal June and July.  The old man who makes the smell of fresh cut grass.  The couple who are grilling chicken, playing ‘Moondance’ on the stereo.  Somewhere someone licks the drop of ice cream escaping from the cone onto the back of their hand.  Someone tracks sand into the house.

I run to soak in the summer and radiate to the world and so you drive with your top down and the music up.  And the Frisbee floats to an impossible catch and the grass feels like silk against your neck as you stare up at the clouds and the water tastes like the garden hose, and it is the best.

I run and run and run and run and it is summer and it is summer and it is summer and it is always, forever summer.

This morning I am cupping it all in my hands, my skin the color of August, and I look into the pool of summer there and see my face reflected in it and know.  I am Summersmith.

Hope this finds you with the windows open,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith

Farmer in the Dark

August 13, 2018

Greetings from the lesson,

There is danger in the world.

The road was quiet, we had our slice of the pavement to ourselves for miles at a time.  Most of the traffic had moved to the new interstate a few miles away, roaring between the Blue Water Bridge and everywhere west.  We edged toward Canada, pedaling one behind the other, tucked against the white line.

The day was fading, already showing that dull orange-gray that summer evenings can hold.   We could see fireflies in the woods along M 21.  Night was coming, emboldened by the sun’s retreat.  Darkness flowed at us from the east and we pedaled to meet it.

The map in my back pocket said that somewhere in this stretch of road was a roadside rest stop.  A little red picnic table icon on the smudge grey line that took us from our town to another country.  Not a fancy rest area, like you would see on the highways, just one of those gravel turn arounds, maybe a pit toilet and a rough-sawn pine picnic table, and if we were lucky a pump well.  

It’s hard to say what two teenage boys had in mind.  We left home too late in the day to make it to the border, or to anywhere in particular.  We were planners of adventure, and sometimes the adventure overshadowed the details.  It was maybe seventy miles to Canada, but we’d have to stop somewhere along the way. 

We were carried on courage born of optimism and innocence.  Our world, so far, had shown us mostly challenges that we could overcome, only exploration and discovery and laughter and beginning again. We did not think in terms of Plan B.  Life was endless summer.

And now the day finally gave out.  Somewhere in the dimness we missed the place we thought we would sleep.  We rode on, thinking we might still see it, until the time came we couldn’t see anything.  The darkness soaked us in.  We coasted to a stop, stood talking about what to do next. 

Lights played on the road from behind us, and a station wagon slowed at the shoulder and eased to a stop. The passenger window was down, and a young girl peered at us.  A man was behind the wheel, outlined by the light from the dash.  He leaned over and looked up at us. 

“Need help?” he asked.

We bent down and looked back, Tom and I, and told him our one sentence story.  The man waited for a moment and said: “If you need a place to stay you’re welcome to come with us.”

I did not like this.  Standing in the dark, not sure of where I was, a stranger was offering help.  I did not feel helped, I felt fear.  This was danger.  Ice crept up from my chest.

In one of the rare moments we were not mentally in synch, Tom immediately said “Sure!” I nudged him, and we straightened, and I tried to whisper, in a few words, the one thousand frightening images that had just flashed behind my eyes.  There was something that didn’t feel right to me.  Tom laughed his ‘get over it’ laugh, and we moved off.

We followed the station wagon, driving at a pace we could maintain on bicycles, onto a dark, hardpack dirt road that led off the main drag.  We followed the red dots of the tail lights; there was not a single house, not a light anywhere.  The car turned into a gravel driveway and the headlights gave shape to a house that had been hidden in the night.  An old frame house, ragged from the weather.  The windows were blank. 

If I were going to write a story where two boys disappeared, this is how it would look.  This would be the paragraph where the reader would be screaming at the page. 

“I’m not sure about this.”  I said.  “Where is the family, why is the place so dark?”

Tom felt none of this and smiled at me, barely visible in the half light.  He said:

“What is there to be worried about?  He is the one who should be nervous, bringing home a couple strangers off the road.  Just relax.”

We squeezed into the kitchen, one light switched on over a worn oak table.  The man stepped to a vault-like Kelvinator and unlatched the door and swung it open.  He reached into the crowded shelves and pulled out a plate covered in foil.

“Do you like potato pancakes?” he asked.  Neither of us knew the answer to that question.  We wedged ourselves under the table and the girl piled the cold pancakes on plates and pushed them across to us.  We sat with large, heavy glasses of water and forked the pancakes into our mouths.

Slowly the ice in my chest melted.  Maybe this was just what it seemed, a kind person helping travelers in need.  I wanted to feel that, and I pushed the fear down, swallowed it with potato pancakes.

The man disappeared up a set of stairs and was back in a few minutes to tell us we were welcome to sleep in the attic bedroom.  I watched him in the cramped kitchen, tried to sense if I was letting my imagination overrule reality.  In the end fatigue defeated my unease.  Tom and I rolled into a lumpy bed mounded in quilts, and both of us fell asleep.

I woke disoriented, sleeping in my clothes, tangled in a strange bed.  Someone was talking to me. I panicked for a moment, trying to piece together what was happening.  The man was at our door, the hall light behind him.  It was still dark outside.  He would be going to work shortly, and it was time for us to eat and be going.

Breakfast was more cold potato pancakes.  We sat alone with the man in the kitchen, the house quiet, the day not yet started for anyone else.  He sipped a cup of coffee while we ate and we talked in quiet voices, little notes back and forth about each other.  And I learned the lesson.

We said goodbye and pointed our wheels away from the dark house, bumped along the pocked dirt road.  By the time we were back on pavement it was light enough to see.  We rolled east toward the sunrise, toward the day filled with adventure.

                                                                             

There is danger in the world.  I know even more about that now than I did when I was fourteen.  I have learned to be suspicious, to be cynical, to be critical, to judge and fear.  I know it is healthy to pay attention to the danger, to protect ourselves and those we care for. 

I have also learned that the real danger is often what we bring with us.  The fear we sense of the unknown, of the different, of what we think we know.  The real danger is rarely to us, but to what is poisoned by our fear.

In hundreds upon hundreds of moments where Tom and I knocked on a door, or waited in a park, or stood in the rain, or in the dark on the side of the road, people answered our need with the offer of help.  A patch of grass to sleep on, some food, a bed, a shower, an open door to their life.  The place where fear belongs is the exception, not the norm.

This is one of the lessons I learned on the road and brought into my life for every mile since then.  I’m sharing it this morning as a reminder for both of us.

Hope this finds you fearless,

David

Mind your own beeswax

August 6, 2018

Greetings from the meander,

Today I will share with you three things.  I am mentioning this in case you want to get a piece of paper to keep track. 

We are in the process of shrinking our house and then restoring it to nearly the exact dimension as previous.  We are doing this by first removing a tiny fraction of an inch on the exterior which will then be replaced by a virtually identical layer.  The actual shape of our house will not change.  At all.  It will be just like David Copperfield was here and made the entire thing disappear, slightly, and then reappear. 

It can be a challenging process.  There are ladders involved, often poised in precarious positions, and here I am using the word ‘precarious’ as a synonym for ‘perilous’ and not to refer to the Pre-Carious era during which insects ruled the world.  Which would be ridiculous for two reasons.

And so I find myself at the top of a ladder, from which height I can vividly imagine reversing my vertical progress at an accelerated rate ending suddenly on the ground next to the tool that I meant to take with me when I first ascended. 

So there are ladders and tools and cursing, which are employed to slowly and carefully remove the epidermis of our house like peeling the shell off a hard boiled egg.  And then, in an even more elaborate process, putting the shell back on in an almost exact replica of the first shell.  Maybe a slightly less reddish color, but not too yellow.

So that’s one thing.  Here is the second thing.

Informed citizens already know there is a bee shortage.  Farmers across the country have raised the issue to a meme-worthy Facebook post, which clearly shows the crisis in a way informed citizens can comprehend.  With the bee shortage many crops are in danger of not being pollinated.  There is a simple reason for this bee shortage; they are all living inside my house.

The more time I spend on ladders shrinking my house, the more places I find that bees are living.  Some have formed nests which are obvious, but many of them, and when I say ‘many’ I mean ‘all of the bees in the northern hemisphere’, have taken up residence inside.

Like most things that do not contribute to me getting coffee I try not to think about bees.  I have always assumed they have a similar attitude about me. 

If I find they have built an elaborate mud fort behind a shutter I am taking off the house, so that later I can put it back exactly where it was in the exact dimension it was, but in a slightly different color, I remain ambivalent.  Until one of the bees stung me right in my cartilage. 

It turns out bees do have an opinion about my existence and it is not as neutral as I have often assumed.  This rancor, obviously welling for some time, inspired one of their ranks to stab me in the cusp of my ear.

What I have surmised is that the bees resent having to work for farmers for free.  That antipathy, buzzing slightly below the surface of their seemingly carefree existence, can lead to violence.  Which for the record I did not reciprocate, at least not very effectively.

And so because of this agricultural oppression there has been a mass migration of bees to occupy the internal shape of my house, which as previously mentioned, I am currently shrinking/growing from the exterior shape.

It is in this context I find myself at the top of a ladder, which is swaying from the pull of the moon and through which I can feel the vibration from the shifting of the tectonic plates.  Defying the laws of gravity and common sense I am attempting to slice off a thousandth of an inch of the outside of my house.  And in that moment a bee drifts by, as if to say; ‘Are you sure you want to be up here?’

Those of you who got a piece of paper to keep track, will have noted that of the three things I said I would share, only two have been noted so far.  And that is the third thing.

Hope this finds you busy as a bee,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith