Into the Woods

Among the trees, there is solace.

hen I was a child, I walked in the woods with my father. He worked in We city where skyscrapers stood in for trees and then came home to the

suburbs where identical houses lined the parallel streets that were once a meadow. On Saturday mornings, he led us—my mother, sister, and me—on trails through the woods. He pointed out plants: skunk cabbage poking up through the mud in spring, May Apple with its tiny flower under wide leaves, hepatica that turned scarlet in the fall. We waded the creeks in our Keds, minnows darting around our ankles. I knew the difference between a frog and a toad, a butterfly and a moth, and a newt and a salamander. Dad dabbed sugar water on our fingertips that attracted butterflies to us, their tiny feet tickling like fairies as they lit and batted their wings. We walked, we looked, we learned.

When I took up distance running at age 47, I was introduced to trail running. I struggled to understand it—why would you want to run and miss all the things there are to see in the woods? How could you spot the preacher under the flopped leaf of jack-in-the-pulpit as you flew past? How could you count the chirps of the cricket over the huff of your breathing? How could you spot the vacated cocoon of a cecropia moth like a dried, crumpled leaf, so hard to find even when standing still? I ran a trail to see what all the fuss was about, and I loved it. It was different from road running and different from a nature walk, yet I found the same peace in the woods.

When the opportunity to run a relay in Appalachia arose, I thought only of running in the mountains, in the thick woods of West Virginia where I had never been. I forgot that I don’t like racing, the inclusion of time as an element of quality. I run at a thinker’s pace. I lope down the trail so I can spot the Dutchman’sbreeches in the undergrowth and view the crazy quilt of leaves created as the sun filters through. Then someone racing fast thunders down the trail behind me—I can hear their feet hitting the dirt like a horse’s hooves—so I step aside and let them pass. Then I start up again, trying to regain my momentum and my reverie until the next racer approaches.

At the relay, we would be a team of eight, rotating through three trails: Maple Flat for 3.5 miles, Big Pine for 4.6 miles, and Mother of Crack for 6.7 miles until

all had run each trail. I printed out a chart that showed the order of our runners, the order of the trails, and our expected paces, which gave us an approximation of our starting times so we would know when to be in the transfer tent. We weren’t aiming to win. In fact, it would take us over 24 hours to finish: starting in the morning, running through the day into the dark of night, then finishing the next day. Our only limit was making sure Sarah, our last runner, started her final loop before the 4:00 p.m. cutoff.

We all had our reasons for running the relay: a weekend away, the challenge of new terrain, time with friends. I feared running alone in the dark on an unknown trail. I feared getting lost, wandering off the trail into the dense woods, then falling, becoming a burden to those who would rescue me. As the oldest on the team, I wanted no one to take care of me.

In the weeks leading up, we practiced running in the dark in the woods. The first time was scary. Things looked different; they sounded different. Eyes unseen in the day peered out from the dark. The second time was not so foreign. We ran in pairs, pooling light from our headlamps, staying out of others’ shadows. At the midpoint of a hilly trail, we turned off our lights and huddled together. With no moon, the blackness surrounded us, our own hands invisible, let alone each other. Our final practice was pure joy. The lightning bugs flitted and we laughed our way along the narrow, dark, rooted trail.

Courtesy of Gretchen Stahlman

Eight Bear Baits relay team. | am third from the left.

ES Eo *

We drove in two vans from upstate New York to Big Bear Lake, West Virginia. The rises and woods of upstate New York became the foggy hills of Pennsylvania, which became the mountains and forests of West Virginia. We were used to running hills, accustomed to the woods dominated by birch and maple and pine, so this looked similar only more so: mountains instead of hills, dense forest instead of loose woods. We exited the highway and turned onto a paved road that faded to dirt. The road ended at a field at the top of a hill where the start and finish were set up. A village of sorts had sprung up: tented pavilions for the relay check-in, chow, medical, and merchandise. Three large flat screens tracked when a runner neared the transfer tent so the next runner could be ready.

From the village, the road made a sharp turn to the left across a clearing where each team claimed a spot for its camp, the sites as close together as wild grapes. It was a half-mile walk from our camp to the village, but we chose the spot because of the quiet it would bring. We pitched our camp: two tents, one for sleeping, one for changing.

I checked in our team and received the timing belt we would pass to the next runner after completing a loop. In the morning we would start in the earliest wave, 9:30. I was the fifth runner, so my time to run came around 1:00 p.m.

In the transfer tent, I accepted the timing belt, fastened it on as I trotted across the grass, crossed the road, and headed into the woods. The Big Pine trail was soft, padded with pine needles, silent, lined with waist-high ferns. A runner passed me, maybe another, and I felt a little sorry they were in such a rush. The trail turned rocky at parts as it wove up and down hills. Despite my thick trail shoes, my feet grew sore, like running on cobblestones in slippers, the occasional soft, rockless patch like salve. I watched the trail so I wouldn’t fall. At age 55, I fear falling, not because of the pain but because of the time it takes my body to heal.

The Big Pine trail was lined with evergreens and ferns that swayed as I passed, some so tall they swept my shoulders. I wanted to stop to search for a fiddlehead stretching into a frond, fronds gathering into a fan, fluttering to cool the earth. I wanted to turn the blades over as my father had taught me to see the dots of spores—not seeds, spores—a fern is more puffball than milkweed.

In his youth, my father was a runner, long before he became a young executive working in the city and living in the suburbs. He grew up in southern Illinois where running was a form of transportation, not a sport until high school. I heard he held a state record for years, but I don’t know the distance or time because he never spoke of this. As a child, I too was fast, able to outrun everyone, even the boys. Once when I was 5, my father and I took a walk around the neighborhood. We neared the hill that rose to our house, and I don’t know if he dared me or if I challenged him, but we raced to the top. I was running fast, smiling, winning. At the last few yards, my father turned on the speed I didn’t know he had and

P Running the Big Pine trail.

burned past me. In years since, I realize he was letting me win initially, but all I remember is the discovery that my Dad was the fastest man I’d ever seen.

The Big Pine trail twisted and turned, across a creek, up a hill brightened by thin trees, then darkened again as the trail plunged down into the packed forest. For the final quarter mile, Big Pine merged with Maple Flat and Mother of Crack, all runners ascending the stony path to the village. I kept up my steady pace on the trail, came into the clearing, then into the transfer tent to hand off the race belt to the next runner. I checked my runner’s watch: just over an hour to complete the 4.6 miles, only three minutes off the time we estimated.

In between loops, our team hung around together, sometimes relaxing in camp chairs, sometimes wandering to the village to cheer in a runner and send another off. We milled around in the sun, laughing, talking about other runs we would like to do some day. The emcee announced that a storm was rolling in and that in West Virginia, this happens fast. Immediately, it started to sprinkle and then pour, so we dashed for cover under a vendor’s canopy. Sheltered from the rain, we watched the ground of the village turn to mud. Our runner Keiko was on the trail, and we wondered if she was even feeling the rain yet under the thick canopy of the forest.

In November of the previous year, my father complained of abdominal pain so severe my mother called the ambulance. He was 82, his running days long gone; now he struggled to walk to the mailbox, 20 yards leaving him breathless, his hips aching. In the ER, they ran test after test but were unable to determine what was wrong. They admitted him, sent us home, but hours later we received a call that he was in the ICU. By the time we arrived, he was breathing through a mask as we watched his heartbeat rise and fall on the monitor. We thought this was the end, but it was only the beginning.

Now the wind picked up, blowing over other vendors’ canopies, which they chased before they got away, their product scattered in the mud. Lightning started,

Courtesy of Ragnar Relay

claps of close thunder, the computer monitors tracking the runners flashed and then went black, and the race was postponed. A mighty gust blew in and we heard screams go up along the row of camps. Then calm set in and the rain stopped. Keiko returned safely to the transfer tent, and we walked with her back to our camp in awe of the tumbled tents, rivers of water running through them. ES Eo *

At 1:00 a.M., I took on the Maple Flat trail, the shortest but also the lowest and, since the storm, the muddiest. I left the lights of the village behind and entered the blackness of the woods, remembering the pitch dark of our nighttime training runs, but I was not afraid. I trusted my light, and other runners would come behind me, their light augmenting mine for the trail we shared. I told myself I could do this, one step at a time, that this, above all else, was what I had come to do, to face this fear of being without what I thought I needed.

I picked my way through the terrain. Dad entered my mind, but I told him that I didn’t need him to watch over me, that I could do this on my own, just as I had told him when he fretted over my mother, sister, and I in the months before his death. I don’t know if he listened to me—sometimes fathers don’t when their daughters are being falsely brave—but I felt completely alone in the best sense. I ran on, taking the surest of tiny steps, each one secure before starting the next one. Runners passed me but I couldn’t go any faster even if I tried, which I didn’t.

My headlamp reflected off the trail markers, and the path was surprisingly easy to follow. I tiptoed down descents and I picked my way up hills, studying the trail constantly, looking up only to sight my path. The ferns looked different at night, so still compared with their constant movement in daylight. The tree trunks rose up, their branches unseen, swallowed up by the light of the full moon. Where the trail descended into a foot-deep mud pit, I picked my way around the edge. The race director said not to do that because it widens the trail and makes the mud worse, but I claimed senior privilege and did it anyway. I would do whatever it took to get me along this path.

It was slow, painstaking work. I was running but my steps were so minuscule that I made little progress. My watch beeped when I finally completed a mile. I didn’t read the time. I just kept moving along: two and a half to go.

More people passed me, everyone younger than me, which I noticed only just now. I started to feel ridiculous. Maybe I had started running too late in life, and if I was going to do these things, I should have started at 30, or 20, not as I approached 50. But who knew I was going to do this? Who knew this even existed? Who can see what the future will bring?

I feel a sense of my age now that I had not before. It surprises me that I’m 55, like it arrived in the mail unexpectedly instead of something that was growing all along. Most of my adult life has been in the middle, sandwiched between parents and children: my father was 30 years older than I; my youngest son is 30 years

younger. This is the formation we flew in, each of us changing in circumstances but not in relativity. Now I am in a new place: my middleness has ended; there is no one to follow. I have completed the phase of life my boys are in; I am headed where my father has gone. It is a one-way path that winds and turns, rises and falls, and until this year, I had not seen where it ends. I didn’t know that dying was so hard. My father’s last year was a slow deterioration of withering away until there was no more movement, only a heartbeat and shallow breaths, and then there was none of that. On the morning of his death, my father’s lifeless body looked like the cicada shells we picked from the bark of trees on summer mornings. The insides had flown away. All that remained was the tender outline of what once was.

It was slow going on the muddy Maple Flat trail. I slipped a few times but didn’t fall. I didn’t look at my watch. One runner after another passed me. Suddenly I felt I was not very good at trail running. In fact, I was really bad at it. Of the thousands of miles I’ve run over the years, the hundreds of miles of trails, it was this one, 400 miles from home in the middle of the night, that led me to this recognition.

A young woman passed me and asked me if I was OK.

“Yeah,” I said, “just slow.”

“You’re doing great. You’re looking strong.”

I didn’t feel that way at all, being passed again and again. I felt so weak I could have given up, letting my body sink into the black mud.

“Do you want me to stay with you?” she turned to ask me.

Her kindness rushed over me, a wave of possibility of surrender. I wanted her to hold my hand and lead me through this black swamp.

“No,” I said, “I’ll get there.”

She ran on while I plodded along. As much as I wanted her to carry me, I wanted more to do this on my own. I wanted to finish this thing alone among the ferns that dozed and the sentry trees and the clay that clung to my shoes like a fretful child. One day my body will no longer be able to do these things; walking to the mailbox will be a struggle. I wanted to say I tried this, I ran, I finished. I was here.

The last quarter mile where the trails merged was the worst: thick with slippery mud over the natural cobblestones, all uphill, worn and slopped and messed by the feet of the runners who went before me. I nearly fell several times, but I shook away the image of my knees hitting the stones, and I kept going because moving forward was the only thing to do.

Icame into the transfer tent apologizing to Keiko for taking so long. No worries, she said as she took the timing belt and headed off into the night. I stopped my watch and looked at the time. One hour and 11 minutes, much longer than I had estimated at 45 minutes.

I walked back to camp. There were few people on the camp road. In daylight, each team was lively at its camp, laughing, preparing food, tossing a ball to kill time between runs. Now no one was talking. Most were catching sleep, snores leaking out of the tents. A few walked the road, their headlamps casting a dim shadow over their faces. They walked unevenly on the mud and gravel road, like zombies. I saw no one I recognized, and no one knew me.

At camp I dropped into a chair and stared at the electric lantern. Snores came from the six women in our sleeping tent. More zombies passed on the road, and then one stopped and I saw it was my friend Chris, wrapped in a blanket. She sat down, her black eyes shining from the hood she had snugged around her face to keep in body heat.

“How was it?” she asked.

“I’m really bad at trail running,” I said.

“No, you aren’t.” Chris loves trail running, often winning her 40s age group at local races.

I shook my head. “It’s not just that I’m bad at it; it’s monumental. I’m an overachiever at everything, even being inept.”

“Tt couldn’t have been that bad.” Chris sat down, pulling the wool blanket tighter around her thin frame.

I tapped my watch and brought up the history.

“T averaged over 21 minutes per mile. One of the miles was over 22 minutes.” The ludicrousness hit me and I started to laugh. “Honestly, I can’t walk that

The sleeping tent at the camp of Eight Bear Baits.

slowly. If I walk with my sons, they tell me to slow down and they are grown men, taller than I am.”

Chris laughed too. She too has sons, nearly teenagers, only the youngest one is not yet taller than she is.

“And the best part is I was actually running. I was going as fast as I could, honestly running. I’m trying to figure it out. How could I have been putting in so much effort but making so little progress?” I tried to knock some mud that added an inch to the bottom of my shoes, but it wouldn’t budge.

“It’s all good,” Chris said.

“Tt was epic. I don’t know how I did that.” I sighed. I took a drink from my warm bottle of water. “Two bears set up lawn chairs to watch me go by. One of them said to the other, ‘Should we chase her?’ and the other said, ‘Aw, hell no; I can’t run that slow.’”

Chris laughed and so did I, and then we were both laughing really hard, not so much at the bear story but at the ridiculousness of all of it. When we came to ourselves, I said, “I know I can run the next loop, but I might not get to because I was so slow on this one. And if I don’t, then Keiko and Sarah don’t get to either.”

“You will. You’re strong.”

“Tt’s funny to me—what appears as strength feels like weakness on the inside, that we are strongest when we are weak.” Chris nodded and we watched the lantern, its electric light steady and unwavering.

We chatted awhile and then Chris headed off to sleep. I sat up creating more stories to tell of my unbelievable pace.

A turtle passed me and said, “It feels good to be the rabbit for once.”

A beached whale reached the finish line before I did.

I got a ticket for loitering.

I wanted to wake up my team so we could laugh about this together, but I didn’t. I peeled off my muddy shoes and socks, stepped into the tent, and slipped into my sleeping bag.

ES Eo * The sun rose. Sarah and I walked to the village for coffee and breakfast. The bonfire was still going so we warmed ourselves although it was so hot we couldn’t stand by for long. Shoes left there by other runners to dry now had melted soles.

Our team progressed through the rotation and loops, but because of the storm delay and my pokiness, we were way behind where we needed to be to make the 4:00 p.m. cutoff. If we kept to our projected paces, there was only a 15-minute margin of error. I had put us more than 20 minutes behind, and I still had the Mother of Crack trail—the longest—left to run. Sarah did too and would miss out on her final run if I didn’t come off mine fast enough. We decided to swap places to hedge our bets: if anyone had to miss a run, I felt it should be me. When we settled on a plan, we got word that we could double up our final runners. I asked

Sarah if she minded running with me, that my time would also be her time, much slower than she was capable of running.

“T don’t care at all,” she said. “I just came to give this a try.”

I looked forward to sharing a run with Sarah because I barely knew her. There is no better way to see into a heart than to run together in the woods.

Our time came and we started the Mother of Crack trail, which was not as muddy as the Maple Flat nor as rocky as Big Pine and even had stretches of clear running. It wasn’t easy, but it was easier. Sarah stopped to wait for me but there was nothing I could do about it. I plodded along, letting her pull me, happy to have a witness that, even though my pace was slower than walking, I was actually running.

T asked Sarah about her work as a hospital social worker. She told me of the frustrations over people who didn’t listen or deliver or follow through, yet she still enjoyed her work. A social worker, I told her, helped us make the arrangements for my father’s physical rehab before he came home for the last time. That had been in September, and over the following months, Dad made the slow, steady trek to the end. He slept a lot, spoke in phrases because that’s all the air he had; his back hurt from so little movement or maybe his kidneys were failing. Fluids leaked—from his legs, his torso, his mouth, his eyes. When the fatigue made it difficult for Dad to move from his recliner to the table, Dr. Blair made a house call, carrying his stethoscope and blood-pressure cuff in a plastic grocery bag.

“We could try a blood transfusion,” he suggested. “You’d have to go to the hospital for that.”

No, my father had said. No more hospitals. We promised him he would never leave home again.

Sarah stopped to take a picture of the woods, then took a selfie of us against the shoulder-high ferns. We started to run again, letting the ferns brush against our arms, legs, faces.

On a Wednesday near the end of March, Dr. Blair made his final house call.

“You are ready for hospice,” he said, the starting gun my father needed to hear. On Thursday he was much better, chatting with my son about the Marine Corps for hours where usually 20 minutes wore him out. Then, early on Friday morning, he was struggling, gasping for air, unable to get comfortable, unable to live, unable to die. A hospice nurse arrived to evaluate him, pronounced him actively dying, and gave him a shot to ease his pain. She suggested moving him to a hospice facility where they could make him more comfortable.

“Yes,” my mother said immediately. I hesitated, remembering our promise to Dad.

“We don’t know how to do this,” Mom said. “We need help.”

The nurse arranged for an ambulance to take Dad to a hospice facility and then left for her next call. My mother, sister, and I waited in the living room while my

father alternately dozed and gasped alone in the bedroom. He did not want us to watch him die, so we left him alone, purposefully giving him the time and space he needed to make the passage, his last chance to die at home.

The trail flattened, then widened, and I sped up, trying to catch Sarah.

“This business of dying is hard,” I said when I reached her.

We worked our way along, up hills and down, and over small wooden bridges. The rocky path turned to stones and then to boulders we scaled; then we came to a rock formation that towered two stories over us with a gap where the rock had split, the Mother of Crack. To pass it, we had to make a three-foot leap off a rock and onto the mud below. Sarah jumped down easily and ran a few yards on. I was afraid to leap but wasn’t sure of how to climb down, either. A group passed us, two women and a man, the man offering his hand to help the women down. They started to run off, but the man turned and offered me a hand. I took his hand and stepped down the rock face into the mud.

At the hospice, my father’s clothes were changed and he laid in the raised bed. He breathed easier because of the medications, or maybe because he was in the hands of those who knew what to do. He never opened his eyes.

“See you later, Dad,” I said when we left that day, but I knew I wouldn’t. I wish I had said, “I love you, Dad. Thanks for everything.” But I didn’t.

The next morning, the hospice called, asked us to come quickly, the time was near. I picked up my mother and then took my time on the drive to give my father as much time to pass without us as he needed.

“Is he gone?” my mother asked when we arrived.

“Yes, minutes ago,” the hospice nurse said. We nodded in relief, trying not to smile.

We sat in his room, his cicada-shell body on the bed, staring upward at something we couldn’t see. We cried, we waited for my sister to arrive, and we made plans to go on living.

Sarah and I made progress on the trail, although miles loomed ahead of us. We no longer had the energy to run up some of the hills so we climbed their stony faces. We ran what I could and walked the parts I couldn’t. Sarah pondered the type of cheese she would have on her postrace burger. Bacon, too, I suggested.

With two miles remaining, my watch died. Now I would have no idea of how long we had been running or how far we had to go. I focused on the job at hand: I would finish and it would take the time it took. I thought back to when I was Sarah’s age or even younger, and I could not run a mile. A 5K, 10K, halfmarathon, marathon—those were all things that other people did but impossible for me. I never imagined that at age 55, I would run 15 miles of trails over rocks and roots and mud in the dark of night and light of day. When I was 20, my father had a heart attack, and that became the footsteps I might follow in. But when 50 arrived for me, I ran a marathon, and the difference between possibilities and