Response #83: (rubicon)  Sep 12 '99 15:06

 Kay and I ran to the bunny shrine today. Spring and summer all pumping
 into each other, sticky monkey flowers and irises together on a hillside.
 Blasphemous miscegenation.
 
 Perhaps "run" is not the right word. Neither of us really run.
 
 I guess you could say that Kay jogs. It takes her 15 minutes to go a
 mile. She almost hops along the road,  and going that slowly, staying
 with her, exhausts me. She springs straight up and then lands  a bare
 inch from where she starts. Spikkkkk.  Spikkkkkk. I tell her that she
 runs like a flea. Up! Up! Up!  I impatiently trot back and forth, dash
 into driveways, circle her, until she yells at me to go away! just go run
 somewhere else!
   
 I don't know how she manages day after day, five miles or more, jump!
 jump! jump! Slowly with knees high, she's as purposeful and strong as a
 Clydesdale.  She rides her bike like that too. Up! Up! Up! (She writes
 that way too. No glamour, just leaving the rest of us in her poky dust.)
 
 One time I watched her ride up the switch-backed cut in the cliff from
 the White Rim Trail to the top of the canyon, over a mile and with no
 incline less than 17%. We had spent three days on the Trail with a group
 of strangers, all young, male and competing.  During the trip, she and I
 tooled along and looked at rocks while the boys raced each other up
 cliffs. We  all had a gorgeous time. When challenged by this last
 monster-wall, the fellows took off in a testosterone cloud.  Kay calmly
 threw a leg over the bike and started pedaling.  I put my head down on my
 handle bars and cried. No way could I ride the whole way. Then I thought,
 maybe, if I conserved my strength,  I could ride the straight,
 horizontal parts and push my bike up the vertical-looking switches. Kay,
 I knew would just climb. Up! Up!
 
 Since my push and ride method up the cliff was extraordinarily slow, I
 had plenty of time to watch them all riding  back and forth above me. It
 was late morning, it was desert, it was hot and bright.  Up there,
 straight up,  one by one, the boys fell into the thick, sandy dust of the
 road. Kay just kept on.  She passed each of them without even looking up.
 Chunk!  Chunk!  Chunk! Chunk!  Never faster. Never slower. Each leg
 pushed a pedal calmly almost reverently. Chunk! Chunk!  A sweating zen
 master.
 
 I was still close to the bottom, moving awkwardly, but moving according
 to my plan.  My "push a while, ride a while, push to a count of 15, ride
 to a count of 100, push, ride" was getting me  slowly forward. In fact,
 after about a half hour, it got me up to one of the young men, still
 panting by the side of the dirt fire road.  When I got to him, I offered him 
 some of my water.   He was looking straight up at Kay, admiration mixing 
 with his sweat. . "Christ!" He spit.  "She's a fucking steam engine!"
 
 And she is a steam engine,  jogging or riding, or putting her head down
 against trouble, she just goes on,  legs like pistons, with that Danish
 disregard for inconveniences of pain or steepness.  Who knows what is in
 her head? Maybe some jingle or aphorism. She told me once, she thinks
 about her socks. Kay can ride or jog forever, but she takes forever to
 get there.  She's a stronger rider than I am and, perhaps, a stronger
 runner, but she's slow.
 
 When we go out  together on our Sunday "runs", I can hear Kay's steps
 behind me on a trail, and I can hear the brief measure when both her feet
 are off the ground, that slight jump that keep those pistons going up,
 down, up, down. I  also hear the feet of other runners as they pass me.
 Real runners, the fast ones are, like Kay,  air bound for a split second. 
 And real runners land lightly, on the balls of their feet making light
 tick when they land. Not me.  Even when I run, I'm partly pushing. I land
 flat, scooting the leaves and dust in front of me, like a battery-run
 beetle in a track. Today, I listened to my feet and the sound was a kind
 of ssssssknnicksssssknickssssknick. No part of me ever completely leaving
 the safety of the earth. No moment of flight.
 
 I don't know what to call what I do out there on the trail. Scoot maybe.
 It can't be honored with the word "run". I don't jog.  And I certainly
 don't walk.  I don't dare walk. To tell the truth,  I can race-walk a
 great deal faster than this activity I'm trying to name.  I don't walk
 for exercise, however, because walking does something strange with my
 attention. Walking  flips my brain into over-drive. If I walk, I start to
 think, write, measure, compare, note,  argue, indicate,  make
 relationships, present. In short, walking causes me to talk to myself,
 usually aloud.
 
 No matter how much I try to control myself, walking gets words going
 around in my mind, around in my mouth. I turn inside out, my thoughts
 taking over my body. I go from stride to stroll to stop in seconds.  I
 find myself staring at the sidewalk or tree stump or wall,  lost in some
 irrelevent hue or  fold  or nuance. Tap me and I startle, unsure of where
 I am.  I once had a parakeet named Birdly who would sing frantically, who
 would go through his entire repertoire of words, if I turned on the
 vacuum cleaner.  I knew how Birdly felt. The same thing happens to me
 when I try to walk .
 
 My  mind and body do not cooperate to make exercise of it.  Instead the
 collude against my intentions; they over-power me. Instantly  my steps
 began to create  thoughts. The swing of my arms, the rising of my ankles
 start  pushing  sentences through sieve of restraint. And I start to
 babble. If one could  scan the rhythm of my sentences it would exactly
 match the cadence of walking steps. It's bad enough when I find myself
 stopped in thought in the slight walk from my office to my mail box at
 school. But there, I can explain away my mumbling as the working of a
 great professorial mind. On the mountain, with my loving Clydesdale
 munching up the trail behind me, I have no excuse. I am an idiot stuck to
 the trail.
 
 No. I don't dare walk.  I can't jog.  I'm unable to run. So what I do is
 shuffle, scoot, scoop.  And today, I shuffled, scooted, scooped  to the
 bunny shrine.  It was delicious.
 

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