To Get There, Run Here

On a hard ending, ghost trees, and going home

The election results staggered into New Zealand over a long, muggy Wednesday afternoon. As the vibes started to turn I took my son to his dance class down at the high school. Me and a buddy whose kid also dances have lately been going for a run during class. You gotta move, at this age, and the evenings grow long and lovely as we lean into spring. This Wednesday, less so. The sky was grey and the air a bath, with a steady sort of rain-but-not that runners love to ignore. You know you’re gonna look tough out there, sweaty before you even start.

We did speed drills. Intervals, we called them last century in my high school cross country days. There’s an app for that now. On golden evenings we hit the Rail Trail or a shady gravel lane out towards Martinborough, but this Wednesday we headed straight back into the streets of Greytown. Speed drills are domestic chores, little stitches of ordinary time. Work where you live. We did not speak of the election. We just ran, man, me keeping to his right side so I could catch the orders chirping from the phone on his arm.

We warmed up at a jog past the old hospital, long shuttered and now reborn as a luxury getaway, unsold for years now and definitely not haunted. At the app’s instructions we stopped to stretch by the rugby field, where there’d recently been a traveling carnival of animatronic dinosaurs. Now there was only silence and grass and rain. Silence, plus the disembodied voice of our coach in the app. A Black American woman, in fact, named Chelsea Cox.

Coach Cox counted us down and off we shot at a 10k pace, whatever that was. I have not run a 10k in decades. Go faster, but not that fast? I got up on my toes a little bit. Tried to feel the wet asphalt whoosh under my feet.

Eyes up, Coach Cox said. Running strong, and in control.

We ran past the back of the primary school, past the playground where my kids will have grown up. The yellow slide, the monkey bars in green and blue. We ran through the school’s back parking lot, the one that used to be a weedy fringe, and past the retirement village named The Orchard for the orchard it replaced. I kept my eyes up, peering north through the rain. Total control.

On Coach’s word we dropped back to a recovery pace. This my body does remember. Shuffle jog, we called it, just enough juice to stay above a walk. Your elbows swing like a race walker, not just slow but performing slowness. Coach kept up a steady patter. I pictured her in a studio somewhere in America, reading a script on a quiet weekday afternoon. I imagined an editor peering at a screen, splicing her words against the rigid time splits. And yet when she counted us down again my heart sped right up. 

Your 5k pace this time, she commanded. Seven out of ten, speedwise. I raised my shoulders, head held high. Form is everything, they used to tell us. Each body moves in its own way, but a perfectibility lurks in there somewhere. A physics, a ballet. I listened to my elbows, I listened to my ribs. My legs just rolled. For a second there as we crossed Jellicoe Street these old legs weren’t even mine.

Don’t look at your watch, Coach said. Don’t pay attention to the numbers. Pay attention to how you feel.

We zipped down Reading Street, where I have walked a hundred times or more, often at night after the kids are asleep. On our left we passed the ghost of a giant palm tree. My favorite tree in Greytown, used to be, spikey and fat and wildly out of place. The fronds were always full of scuffling birds. You hardly saw them, up in the shadows, but you could hear them. Walk by in the dark and it was a whole bird city up there, talking in its sleep. When my family landed here mid-plague, lost and drifting, it was the Reading Street palm that first welcomed me. How ya goin, desert boy. If I can do this, you can too. There’s a bit in John Fante’s Exit The Dust where the frustrated young novelist sits in his cheap LA motel, typing out nothing but palm tree palm tree palm tree. This was that tree. I’d finally found it, or rather it had found me. Then on one night’s walk it was simply gone. Next walk they’d ground the stump out. A fortnight later the grass seed had taken. Strange how quickly, how thoroughly, a tree can disappear.

Coach called for speed. Eight out of ten now. We whipped around the far turn and back onto East Street, blowing right past my own house. Inside Jenny and an American friend over the hill from Welly were holding vigil in front of a livestream, and the kids, bored of the numbers, had given up and wandered off. I didn’t glance over. I was working up a stitch from stress-eaten gingerbread. On a scale one to ten, how much does it hurt? Past Jellicoe, heading south. Past the primary school again, on the front side now, the big kids’ playground, tall and austere, with bars of unpainted steel. I was bonking out. Dance class was suddenly leagues away. I flashed back to cross country practice, the afternoons I’d find myself a couple miles out from my old high school, barelegged and broken by the side of a six-lane road, wondering if I’d ever make it home. Always did, somehow. Coach Cox knows. She was getting zen in the final stretches. There is only one interval, she said, and it’s the next interval. Don’t skip ahead. To get there, you run here.

Good run. Fist bump. Drive back home and face the news. As we pulled into the carport our daughter was already waiting. At the first crunch of gravel she’d run out to meet us. She lives to deliver news, that one. A minor update on dinner sends her running the length of the house. Her school days we receive in exquisite social detail, down to the friend who almost went to the nurse’s office. Now she stood there in the day’s collection of pinks, oblivious to the tiny rain, her feet on the wet sidewalk in the socks I bought at the Sioux City Walmart last summer. She was still but sparking, arms out at her sides, hands open, fingers splayed. Her eyes were up. She was strong, in control. As I bumped the car over the curb she caught my eye through the windshield and I knew we had lost, and that the America I remembered was gone.

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