Booker T. Washington

In the winter you start out cold. Always, but never wear pants. Pants inhibit movement and make you sweat. Sweat evaporates and makes you colder. You’ll wear a base layer, a sweatshirt, a wind-stopper or a fleece. But always the same swim trunks. Always run in the swim trunks. Even when it’s so cold, that you’re legs get numb and you don’t feel when a briar rips blood out of your thigh.

You start out cold. Your fingers begin to get tingly, and your face is numb.

The trail leaves a parking lot, goes to gravel, and then enveloped by woods. The gravel is mixed with red clay, and then turns into all red clay in an inverted, outside, sloping turn. By the top of the turn, your calves start to feel like the targets of a circus knife-thrower, or your knees feel creaky, and you feel like there’s some big rock in the gears down there.

The blood starts pumping, your fingers feel warm, and you start to sweat. You wish you hadn’t worn that base-layer/sweatshirt/wind-stopper/fleece. Oh well.

You run up another hill, then another, now for easy street. You get to run down hill, you feel great, knees are smooth, calves are cool, there’s wind in your lungs. You’re moving to Kashmir.

The woods now end at the shore of a lake slough. The trail follows the shore. You brace your legs for the ramp, a sickening drop, then right back up. It’s like running through an ax wound from Paul Bunyan. Your breath catches after that. The slough is giving way to the lake. You see the trail bank hard right to parallel the lake shore. There is a massive tree bent over the trail.

In civilization, a bent tree like this is considered a deformity. Trees aren’t meant to bend over like arches. No, they should be straight and tall.

In civilization, this tree’s deformity will be copied with metal and bent over a river. It will be called an artistic wonder.

You don’t run away from things. You run to them. You don’t run away from your anger, guilt, shame, heart break from two years ago. You don’t even run away from last night’s heartbreak.

You run towards a deformed tree, under its arch and around a hard, right turn. You run towards a hill top, with your head craned to the left to gaze at sail masts on the far shore, where the sun refracts off their polished metal.

You run towards a place where arches don’t need to be six hundred feet tall to be magnificent. A place where a seven-foot arch mystifies you and tells you that yes, there is a God. That he made you. He loves you. That he made that tree for so many reasons, one of which you realize is simply to give you joy on this day when your knees are smooth, your calves are cool, and the red clay has given way to black dirt, pine-needles and dead leaves.