Missoula Half Marathon

Yesterday’s half marathon in Missoula, Montana was great. The race began outside of town on a road that descended for two miles through a heavily wooded area. It sometimes gets very hot in Montana in the summer, so race organizers scheduled a 6 a.m. gun, (or cannon, in this case). It was 52 degrees and the sky was clear and blue. Perfect running weather.
Erica and I ran the first five miles together and we saw a bald eagle carrying a fish back to its nest and another bald eagle perched in a treetop just over the race course, perplexedly watching 731 half-marathoners plod by, earthbound and sweaty.
I trained much smarter for the race than I have in the past and as a result I felt good the whole way. I am not a fast runner so I was hoping to finish the race in less than two hours. I ended up doing a little better than I had even hoped and finished the 13.1 miles in 1 hour 54 minutes and a few seconds. That works out to 8:43 per mile, which for me is pretty good. I was very happy with the result.
Next race is a 10-miler in Branford on August 3, then a 12.2-miler in New Haven on Labor Day, and then a 212-mile relay through New Hampshire in mid-September. It is called Reach the Beach and it is the reason I have gotten back into running lately. I am sure I’ll write more about Reach the Beach in future posts.

High Water

I can’t say that I am a good flyfisherman. The most I am willing to say is that I sometimes catch fish. My technique tends to the sidearm, and my fly selection leaves lots of room for improvement. I like to think my deficits are the result of flyfishing only four or five times a year, but it might just be that I am not any good.
To be fully honest, I don’t really care all that much if I catch fish or not. Of course I would rather come back to the cabin with a couple of fifteen-inch rainbows in my creel, but if I come back empty-creeled, it’s no big deal to me. I feel about flyfishing the way I did about playing football in high school. I was on the team, but I wasn’t a starter. I liked the practices, I loved the games, and I did my best. But if I dropped a pass or if we lost a game, it didn’t crush me the way it did some of my teammates.
On a good morning here at the cabin I’ll wake up before everyone else, microwave whatever is left in the pot from yesterday, add cream and sugar to make it potable, and then go out to the shed to put on the waders, vest, and net that transform me from a teacher on vacation into a flyfisherman. I’ll chug the coffee as I get dressed and then walk down the road a quarter-mile to the Stafford’s bridge, where I’ll step into the river. The first time each year is always a little awkward—it feels like I am moving too fast with the river—like I should take some time to get to know it again, maybe buy it a drink and chat a little first.
My steps are uncertain and my body is not yet used to the constant push of water feeling gravity’s pull past my thighs on into the Plains. My first few casts are invariably tentative. But pretty soon I get my sea legs and my Kent Tekulve-cast figures itself out and I am on my way.
Before I ever even learned to cast a fly, one of my favorite books was a novel by David James Duncan called The River Why. It is a funny book that contains several passages extolling the pleasure to be had from laying out a well-cast fly in a sublimely beautiful setting. I understand just what Duncan was writing about.
I generally have an excellent sense of time. I can usually tell what time it is to within ten minutes no matter what. The only exception is when I am out on the river. When I am fishing the Stillwater with dry flies, time does all kinds of strange things. It mostly gets caught in an eddy and spins there in place so that when I get out of the river after six hours of tossing a fake bug through the air it feels like I have been in the river for just an hour or two.
Excuse my metephysicality, but my self just goes away for a long stretch of time when I am waist deep in the river, trying to think like a fish and gauge the wind and the current. Losing my self for such a long period of time is better than sleep. It clears my head and leaves me feeling relaxed, both in the world and in my head.
Alas, it is too windy and the river is still too high to go out this morning. Instead I’ll have another cup of coffee and sit out on the back deck to read before anybody else wakes up.

Idealism vs. Realism

I have been reading many different writers’ laments about Barack Obama and his charge to the center lately. The writers question Senator Obama’s stances on capital punishment for sex offenders, amnesty for telecommunication companies that helped the government eavesdrop illegally on American citizens, and the Supreme Court’s recent second amendment decision, to name just a few of the bones of contention.
I understand the disappointment these writers are giving vent to; I can even commiserate with them on some of his shifts. But I refuse to share in their disapproval of the Senator from Illinois.
The past eight years have been an unmitigated national disaster. President Bush has set the bar to a new low for presidential performance. But we need to remember that George Bush was already four years into his catastrophic tenure when he was re-elected in 2004. He managed to defeat John Kerry not because of the strength of his record, the force of his intellect, or the power of his personality on the campaign trail. He managed to defeat John Kerry because John Kerry ran a god-awful campaign.
Barack Obama is a smart man and a skilled campaigner. He used his organizational strength and his eloquence to defeat a heavily favored Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination. He knows what he is doing. It is not the Democratic base that is going to win the general election for Senator Obama. It is the large, increasingly nervous and frustrated center that will give him the landslide he will most surely earn in November.
To reach that large group of voters in the middle, Barack Obama must spend some time emphasizing those positions of his that are more moderate. To complain about his tack to the middle is to place ideological purity above electoral success. There will be time for idealism when President Obama is sworn in on January 20, 2009. First, he needs to win the election, and the way he will do that is not by preaching to the choir but instead by proselytizing the unconverted.

Home

I woke up at four o’clock this morning with a cramp in my left calf. As cramps go it was a pretty good one—excellent timing, good form, real staying power. It forced me out of bed and vertical in about two seconds flat. Once I was upright and put my full weight on my left foot, the cramp went away. And I realized I needed to pee. Once I took care of that, I quietly crawled back into bed so as not to wake Erica.
As I lay in bed I realized that beneath the cramp and the full bladder there was another feeling. In the dark at four a.m. I couldn’t identify what it was. I tried for a while, but then the sound of the river flowing by the cabin and down to the Yellowstone and into the Missouri and then on into the Mississippi caught me up in its music and its flow and I fell back into sleep before I could name what I was feeling.
This practice of naming my feelings is a new thing to me. Heck, for many years I hardly even recognized that I HAD feelings, let alone spent time trying to identify them. As a result, the names don’t always come quickly and last night the river music and sleep came first.
Then this morning I went for a run on the unpaved road that follows the Stillwater River wiggle-for-wiggle through this beautiful valley. And as I was running I was able to name the feeling. It was “homesickness.”
I was born in Delaware and lived there into sixth grade. Then we moved to Long Island, where I lived for eight years. I went to college in Pennsylvania, lived for two years in Yemen, and then spent some time in Massachusetts, Delaware again, and Maine. And none of those places ever felt like home—none of them ever touched something inside me directly the way Montana did the first time I saw it.


I spent three summers working on various Indian reservations in Montana before I finally got my act together and moved there for good. At the time everything I owned fit in the back seat and trunk of my 1970 Plymouth Valiant named Fuad and I vowed to just drive on Interstate 90 in Montana until I got tired. Wherever that was, I would stop and start a life.
It was Billings. On my first morning there I found a job and an apartment. In my third year there I met a woman and, within three months of meeting, we knew we would spend our lives together.

But then our lives took us away from Montana in 1997 and since then we have only been able to return for visits a few times a year.

During my run it hit me full-on that no other place in the world feels the way Montana does to me. Montana fits in a way Delaware and New York and Connecticut never have. As a child I drew mountains everywhere, even though I had never seen real mountains. (The highest point in Delaware doesn’t even crack 500 feet above sea level.) The mountains I drew were rocky and jagged and had evergreen trees on the flanks only so high. Often they were snow-capped.
The first time I went to Montana it was to direct a community service project on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in the southeast corner of the state. I flew into Billings and when I exited the airport I had to stop in my tracks, drop my bag, and stare with my mouth open. There, off to the southwest, were the mountains I had been drawing my whole life. They talked to me in a language I could understand because I had seen them before. The feeling I had on my run this morning was my reminder that I need to find a way back here. I need to come home before my connection to Montana has been stretched too far and too thin to hold.

Last Weekend

Last weekend was pretty great for me. I got up early on Saturday and ran twelve miles in under two hours. I am training for a half-marathon to be run in Missoula, Montana on July 13 and Saturday’s run was my final long training run. When it was over I felt strong and ready.
And then on Sunday I drove to Ellington Airport east of Hartford and jumped out of a plane from 10,500 feet. “Jumped out of a plane” is really a misleading description, though. In actuality, I was strapped to a veteran skydiver and together we fell out of a plane for about 5000 feet and 45 seconds before he pulled the ripcord and activated our chute. All I had to do was scoot forward out the doorway of the plane and then let gravity work its magic. It was utterly terrifying for about ten seconds and then pretty amazing for the rest of the fall.
All in all, a really good weekend.