Running Up That Road, Running Up That Hill

I have been running for about eleven years now, (and boy are my legs tired—ba-dum-bum.)  In that time I have found running to be a great metaphor for many things.  It gives me a way to wrap my head around the difficulties of marriage and parenting, the process of developing a good habit, and the work and commitment required to tackle any large undertaking.  I often find that my running life gives me a way to make sense of my non-running life.

Lately I have found that sometimes the opposite can be true, too.  Sometimes my non-running life can give me a unique way to think about my running.  This has happened twice in the past few months here in the hills around Ithaca.  

When life gives you lemons you are supposed to make lemonade (and maybe add a bit of ice and gin).  When life gives you hills, as it does so abundantly here in the Finger Lakes, you just need to build them right into your runs on purpose.  Make them useful.  So that is what I have been doing with a particular beast-of-a-hill called Besemer Hill Road.

After living and running in New Haven, CT for nine years, (elevation 43 feet above sea level), Besemer Hill looks like a mountain.  If I get to the end of the driveway and turn left, then climbing Besemer will not be a part of my run.  If instead I turn right, I know that 1.7 miles down the road comes The Hill.  It is a decision I make in the driveway, without the terrible image of the Hill before me.  Once I turn right, it is already a done deal.  All told, the Hill is 1.5 miles long and gains more than 500 feet of altitude.  The worst section gains more than 300 feet in a half-mile.  It is a killer.

To get myself up and over Besemer without stopping to walk I sometimes have to play tricks on myself.  (Being human, this is very easy to do.)  And this is where I have noticed my non-running life coming in useful to my runs.  One trick I play is to remember a scene from Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent novel Animal Dreams.  One of the characters in the book is a train engineer in the mountain West.  In one scene he describes the difficulties involved in getting a long train up and over a big hill.  Once the front of the train crests the hill and begins its descent, the train experiences gravity pulling it apart from the center.  Both the front cars and the rear cars are being pulled back down their respective sides of the hill and an unskilled engineer can lose the entire train if it uncouples.

To prevent this from happening, there are engines at the rear of the train to provide a push up the hill, but they must be in synch with the front engines providing pull so the cars in the middle are not accordioned.  It is a hard process to get right and requires much skill.  So when I am trudging up Besemer Hill I sometimes take part of my brain and send it on ahead up and over the top.  I imagine it coming down the other side of the hill and back toward the driveway.  And then I trick myself into believing that that part of me that has already made it to the top is providing some pull as my legs provide some push and, together, they get me over the top and back home.  And in that way Barbara Kingsolver gets me over Besemer Hill.

This past weekend I listened to a Radiolab episode called Emergence while driving back from New Haven.  There was a segment explaining how ants seek, find, and collect food to bring back to the nest.  It has to do with order emerging from chaos, and the way this happens in ants is through the pheromone trails each individual lays as it walks.  As individual ants search for and then find a food source, they are constantly secreting chemical trails.  At first these trails are random but over time, as more ants discover the food, the trails in the vicinity have more and more pheromone laid down on top and become stronger and easier to follow.  If five ants have walked the same trail, the scent is stronger than if just one or two have gone that way, making it more likely that successive ants will follow that particular path and in doing so, they will add their scent to the trail as well, making it even stronger.

I had this image in mind two days ago as I got to the end of the driveway and had to decide—left or right?  It was a very long and snowy winter here and I had not run up Besemer Hill since November.  In ant terms, there were no pheromone trails going off to the right and therefore nothing for me to follow that way.  But I knew that I wanted to start building the Hill back into some of my regular runs.  In the end, what helped me decide to go right was thinking about future-me getting to the end of the driveway and sniffing around for a direction.  I wanted that day’s me to get there and be able to tell that the freshest, most recent trail goes to the right and that I should follow that runner who took that trail on Tuesday.  And when I again choose that trail, I will be helping Saturday’s me make the same decision, but it will be less of a decision and more of a built-in instinct.  The trail will get stronger and stronger and the decision will get easier and easier.

Sometimes I love how simultaneously stupid and complex our minds can be.  It is like we are both: the dumb individual ants out in the world basing every move and action on blind instinct, and the larger colony benefiting from the results of all those unplanned, unexamined actions.  In the end, whatever gets me up and over Besemer Hill can only be good.

It Just Doesn't Matter

So the nine Supreme Court Justices have heard the cases for and against DOMA and for and against California’s Prop 8.  Now they are in their chambers, trying to decide how to decide.  From all of the media coverage a person could think that the decisions in these cases matter a lot.  I have to take a different view.  It is becoming clear that the gay marriage train has already left the station for most Americans.  No matter what the Supreme Court Justices rule, society has already passed them by.  Even if they decide to uphold DOMA and Prop 8, these laws won’t stand for long.

I in no way want to diminish the importance of marriage equality and I know that there are real people who will suffer real harm if DOMA is allowed to stand and if Prop 8 remains the law in California, even if just for another year (or two or three).  For them, the decisions of Chief Justice Roberts and his cohort matter very much.  But as for the long-term American project of expanding just who is actually covered by the protections of the Constitution, this particular court cannot throw it into reverse. 

Under our system, people who are part of an officially sanctioned marriage accrue many rights and protections not offered to people who are not part of an officially sanctioned marriage.  This is a fact.  In fact, it is the only relevant fact to consider.  Some of the Justices seem to be asking, “wouldn’t it be moving too fast to allow for gay marriage?”  This is the wrong question and it is not the one most Americans are asking.  Most of us are asking: “Is it unconstitutional to exclude some people from some rights because of who they prefer to kiss?”

The people defending DOMA and Prop. 8 are left spouting platitudes about the sanctity of marriage and the procreative imperative.  They are arguing from the religious point of view, which, in this case, runs counter to the ethical and constitutional point of view.  This is a nation of laws not a nation of religious teachings, and therefore it should be clear even to Antonin Scalia that gay marriage is protected by the Constitution.

Some opposed to gay marriage are employing the slippery slope argument: “If it is okay for two men to marry, then what is to stop people from bigamy or even bestiality?”  As far as bestiality goes, the animal cannot give consent to have sex with the human, so that would be rape, plain and simple.  Marriage without consent has never been protected by the Constitution. 

Bigamy is a different story.  There have been times and places where religious leaders have preached the necessity of plural marriage.  There are countries today that allow men (mostly) to have more than one spouse.  However, this has never been the case in most of the United States.  If, someday, cultural norms change drastically, (possibly in response to some catastrophic event that kills off large numbers of men), then maybe American states will begin to consider allowing plural marriages.  This seems highly unlikely to me, but you never know.  If that happens and there is growing consensus for the approval of plural marriage, then the Supreme Court can take that case and make that decision when the time comes.

This “slippery slope” argument holds no water.  It is the same strategy used by the NRA in their fight against any and all regulations on firearms and ammunition.  I find it entirely insulting because it says that we are incapable of making distinctions.  It says we are too dumb to see the difference between a shotgun and a machine gun. It implies we can’t see the difference between two women committing to spending their lives together and a man fucking his goat.  (Maybe the advocates of the slippery slope argument are really just telling us how they see these sorts of equivalencies…)

In any case, as important as the outcomes of these two cases seem, in the court of public opinion they are already decided and what the nine Supreme Court Justices have to say just doesn't matter.