On the Eve of the Reggae Marathon, No Bananas

For these hot summer days, a hot story from Jamaica. From the Running Journal, May 2010.

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The man latched onto me like a hungry tick.

I was at the pre-race pasta supper for the Reggae Marathon in Negril, Jamaica one December a few years ago. A long line of open tents covering tables of food had been set up in a sports park. Serving would start soon. At a separate tent I’d just registered and picked up a plastic goodie bag containing my race bib, timing chip, tee shirt and other complimentary items.

The one item of food I was looking for on this tropical island and could not find was the same one every other runner wanted but could not find: a banana. At the registration tent I learned the problem. A handwritten sign stated, “Yes we have no bananas, courtesy of Hurricane Ivan.” Ivan had barged into town a few weeks earlier. He stayed for a couple of days and blew the bananas slam off the trees.

Runners milled around, waiting for the food lines to open. I wanted to talk with some of them, but a man from New York had taken over my party. He was friendly enough—too friendly enough. I thought he was going to talk my leg off. His life history was mine for the taking—or listening. Philip, as I will call him, was red-bearded, maybe fifty years old, and he was wearing a bicycling hat like riders in Europe use.

He’d gotten lucky and won the lottery at his running club back home. The prize was a trip to Jamaica for the Reggae Marathon. He was observing the race, not actually planning to run it. The club paid his way just to promote the race. He’d already decided to come back and run the race next year.

Philip’s wife had come too. But that was not lucky. Their plane had been scheduled to leave New York at seven in the morning. Everything unraveled; it was a long story. There were mechanical problems, plane substitutions, re-scheduling and so on. They flew errant flights around the eastern United States for a while before actually heading toward Jamaica. Instead of arriving in Negril later that afternoon as planned, they didn’t arrive until three in the morning the next day.

His wife was mad as a wet hen.

“She had to go five hours without a cigarette,” he shouted. “Even after we got on the ground, she couldn’t smoke until we cleared immigration.” She was still back at the hotel, he told me, on a section of the beach where clothes are optional. She could smoke there. That was a good place for her.

“Next year I’m bringing my girlfriend instead of my wife,” he announced. That’ll work out a lot better, he thought. She likes to swim and bike and run. Yeah, that’ll be better. Oh, he still lives with his wife, you know—that’s not a big problem—but it’s just that his girlfriend likes to do what he does.

Of course, he hadn’t been looking for a girlfriend—she just came along. “We went running together a few times,” he explained. She was just a running partner. But one thing led to another. They got to be friends. Soon they went bicycling together. And so on. It was all very natural. She likes the same stuff he does. He’d made up his mind about the matter—next year he was bringing his girlfriend. Even his wife might like that better.

He was friendly, but I needed to scrub him off before he started talking about real estate and brothers-in-laws. I couldn’t even catch a chance to look through my goodie bag. A woman from California saved me. She sat down behind me and started talking about San Diego’s Rock and Roll Marathon, of which the back of my T-shirt reminded her. She was as big a talker as Philip, and for a minute I thought I’d made a mistake taking her on. I was caught in crossfire, yammering coming from two directions instead of one.

Then I had an inspiration. I gently deflected her comments to Philip, nurturing a tentative dialog between them. It blossomed into a full-blown storm, an even match. I took the opportunity to duck out. I wanted to find Burt Carlson.

I found Burt sitting on the curb at the head of the line of food tents, waiting for the food bars to open. He’s a story. When he finishes this Reggae Marathon it will bring his total to 268 marathons. He’s 79 years old (this was in 2004) and he’s here to run in this humidity and heat. A doctor wouldn’t recommend it.

But I wasn’t surprised; I’d seen his picture in the online race literature, where he’d run the race the previous year. I figured he’d show up. Still, how old do you get before you learn you won’t be back? Older than 79, if you’re Burt.

It was Burt who blew my cover on the bus ride from Montego Bay. A bunch of beer-drinking senior citizens had been throwing a loud party on the bus. A situation I don’t recall confronting before that day—rowdy senior citizens! I’d hoped to keep my mind quiet by avoiding marathon questions from people who I figured didn’t know a marathon from a motorcycle.

The driver had made a restroom stop for his revelers—smart driver. As passengers climbed back on, someone tapped me on the shoulder and I looked up.

“Have you run this one before?” Burt Carlson said. I hadn’t seen him on the bus—he’d been seated behind me somewhere. He looked surprised when I called his name.

Actually, I’d run a race with him, the 41-mile Strolling Jim ultra marathon in Wartrace Tennessee, on an unseasonably warm day in May four years earlier. A man from St. Louis had introduced us. The man from St. Louis quit the race, got in his truck and split for home. Burt kept going, even past the hilly section they refer to in the plural as “the walls.” He kept going—on through that day’s heat—until he got to the finish line where the race’s namesake, Strolling Jim, the first world champion walking horse, is buried. The race director was drinking beer and grilling barbecue chicken, a victorious woman runner was throwing up while her mate tenderly held her hand, and I was sitting very still in a folding chair concentrating hard on staying conscious.

Images of a race, I remember Burt.

The food line opened, and Burt and I started through. I believe it was the most elaborately abundant collection of food I’ve ever seen. It was not a fiesta; it was several; each tent was a fiesta unto itself. Here were local delicacies—curry goat, jerk chicken, whitefish—and a variety of cooked vegetables. Food of every description was kept warm over open flames, attended by chefs in white hats. One tent featured a table piled high with baked bread shaped like animals—squid, fish, snake, alligator….

From the total available, only a tiny sample was possible. I had primavera, seafood pasta, boiled dumplings, sliced tomatoes and fried eggplant. Sadly, that was all I could allow myself the night before a marathon.

Burt and I sat in folding chairs eating. A man with a gray goatee walked up and asked me if I was Burt Carlson—I’m pretty old, too. “No, but he’s right there,” I said pointing. He handed Burt a laminated copy of a page from the local paper, and walked away. Burt sat looking at it bemused—he hadn’t seen it until that moment. It was a story dated November—after Burt had registered for this year’s race. Twin headlines told the news—“Burt’s Coming Back”—and announced a profundity I wish I’d written: “The Human Body Was Made to Run.”

Next morning, the stroke of 5:15 would prove it.

Doomed Slue Was Scene of Fishing Adventure

This story seems an abrupt shift in topic from the last post, which concerned the children of Jamaica. This story is about youth, too - but youth in a different time, a different place. This story occurred to me when I was jogging in New York's Central Park and I saw a couple of kids squatted at the edge of a lake. Kids everywhere love messing around water. From the Herald-Citizen, February 6, 2010.

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Before the waters of Cordell Hull Lake drowned it forevermore, there was Billy White’s Slue, a shallow two-acre lake standing in the bottomland of Smith Bend, in Jackson County, Tennessee. It could have been called a lake or a pond, even a swamp, but we always called it a slue. Each winter the floods of the Cumberland River filled it with backwater and fish. Then the floods receded, leaving the water and fish trapped.

Brush and trees lined its banks. River bottoms stretched beyond, fields of rich, black dirt strewn by flint chippings and stone tools left by ancient humans. The bottoms grew corn and soybeans, and dropped steep sandy banks down to a languid river. Plowed cropland abutted woodlots, thickets and canebrakes.

In the branches muskrats and raccoons caught crawfish, discarding pinchers and shell fragments on the bank. Lowlands oozed oily water and grew dense stands of swamp grass where cottontails and quail took cover.

When I was young, the slue belonged to Joe Myers. When he died in 1949 the farm passed to his son, Billy White Myers, who farms and lives there yet. He has always been called by two names. We dropped his last name and simply called the slue Billy White’s.

As a boy, I prowled that slue and all the land surrounding it whenever I could. Everything was there—squirrels, fish, turtles, snakes and, sometimes, ducks. I’d sneak up on the waterfowl with my .410 single-shot. They always flushed out of range of the little gun.

That patch of earth had everything an 11-year old boy needed. It had always been there. He could not have known it would one day be gone.

It sustained me until I grew up and left the Bend. In 1973 it slipped away, sinking beneath a cold flood that had come to stay.

Before then, though, it was the location of the great carp adventure. I think Carson Givens gave me the idea that led to it (I have changed his and his family’s names.)

Carson and his family lived in the three-room house near the bottom of the hollow on our farm. He rented the house for half of whatever he and his mules could grow on the farm, a typical arrangement for farmers lacking their own land in those days. “Sharecroppers” is the rude term, but we called them renters, and there was no shame in it. A man did what he had to do.

What Carson had to do was fish. It was a calling and a gift. He could catch fish better than anybody I knew. A place where he couldn’t catch fish was a place with no water. I admired him very much. Fishing was important.

He kept trotlines and funnel-shaped nets called fish baskets strung out in the current of the Cumberland River. Each morning and night he checked his lines and baskets, cranking up an old Ford sedan and bouncing a mile over the farm road that wound along the fields and across the spring branch down to the river.

The fish he caught he stowed live in a cage suspended in the river. Thus he always had fresh fish on hand when people came wanting to buy some for supper. He caught buffaloes, catfish, drums, jacks and carp.

His wife and kids helped with the fieldwork. That arrangement gave Carson time to fish. He made money from fishing, and it helped support his family.

This gave me the inspiration to cabbage the carp in Billy White’s slue and to sell fish steaks.
Carson’s son Harold and I threw in together. Harold was 11 years old, the same age I was. He brought along his young brother Pee Wee, not big enough to help much, but his presence increased Harold’s share.

It was a hot summer, and the slue was drying up. When we got there, all that was left of it was a yard-sized puddle of roiling gray water surrounded by two acres of cracked blue mud. You could see the hemmed-in fish as they sloshed and churned, their backs slicing though the gray water. We had a fish bonanza.

But we could not reach them. The mud near the water was worse than quicksand. The waxy sludge grabbed our feet and would not let go, and the closer we got to the water, the deeper we sank.

We solved the problem by finding a rotting flat-bottomed boat resting against the bank at the slue’s normal edge. We dragged it across the cracked mud, then got in and poled across the slime until we arrived in the middle of the gray puddle. There we sat surrounded by a swarm of agitated carp.

My frog gig was no help. The fish were so big, their scales so tough, the prongs of the gig bent each time I tried to spear one. Did not need it anyway. The direct approach was better. We simply reached over the side and lifted the sagging fish into the boat. Soon the boat bottom was full of flopping carp.

Getting our haul home was the next hurdle. We strung the fish up in three bunches, a small one for Pee Wee. To do that, we slipped a cord through their gills and out their mouths. Their lips would open and close in gasps, kissing the air. We each slung a string of limp fish over our shoulder and starting walking. The fish hung down our backs, nearly dragging the ground.

The weight was too great. The cord cut into our hands and shoulders. We had to stop and rest every few steps. Two miles seemed a long way. Finally, half a mile from home and just past our spring, we lightened our load, throwing some of the fish in a cornfield for the crows.

I arrived at the house with a lightened but still heavy haul. Harold and Pee Wee walked on with their share. I started cleaning fish, squatting in the backyard, working on a board. I figured that if people buy whole fish from Carson, they would give even more if the fish were already cleaned and sliced. Somebody would.

The fish scales were big and coarse, and scraping them off was hard work. My pocket knife was not big enough, and I had to borrow Momma’s butcher knife. Even with her big knife, it was slow going.

I put slabs of coarse, white meat into a pan. The pan filled slowly. I worked until nearly suppertime and still had fish left to clean. After working so long I was tired. I gave up on cleaning the last few fish and flung them over the fence, a present for the hogs.

Nonetheless, I had managed to build a hefty stack of fish slabs in the pan, and Momma agreed to fry some for supper. The rest I stored in the refrigerator until I could find buyers. I was hungry and ready for the payoff.

It did not come. The fried fish tasted just like the mud they had lived in, impossible to eat. I think Momma expected that. I had to throw away all that fish, all my hard work. A mouth full of that fish was like a mouth full of mud.

Jamaican Children Caught in Downward Spiral

There is much to love about Jamaica: the beaches, the friendly people, food, steel bands, and Reggae music, legacy of Bob Marley. The sun going down is perhaps too strong an image to use in a story about the future of its children. Recent news, however, detailing near open warfare breaking out between drug gangs and the police, offer little encouragement that much has improved since I wrote this piece following a trip there in December of 2004. From the Herald-Citizen, March 20, 2005.

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On the day after Jamaica’s Reggae Marathon, I took a walk south to Negril’s Towne Centre. It was about two miles from my room. The sun was bright and hot, and my legs were sore.

A small bridge arches over the Negril River at its estuary, and then the road enters a roundabout. Yesterday’s early-morning marathon had made a turnaround here before dawn and headed back north. I wanted to see the place in daylight.

Afterwards, walking back to my hotel, the sun got hotter. I waved at a cab. He pulled over.

“How much to the Tree House?”

He stretched across the seat, laboring to roll down the window. He started to say three but then changed it to five in mid-sentence when he looked up and saw an old gent. It came out like:

“Thre-uh-five.”

“Five? You said three the first time.”

“Three? No, I didn’t say three! Hee hee.”

I pressed the point, derisively.

“Is that five Jamaican dollars?” (Roughly one US dime in 2004)

“Hee hee hee. No, not Jamaican.

He knew he’d messed up. He also knew that it was a buyer’s market. If he left, there’d be another taxi along shortly, and he hated losing the fare. Finally, he said,

“How much you wanna pay?”

I’d won the argument. The ride was mine for three. So, I announced,

“I’ll give you five.”

I sat down beside him. I wanted to be generous; it’s hard in Jamaica.

“It’s hard in Jamaica,” he said.

I don’t mean for you, he told me—for us living in Jamaica. I asked him why it was hard. There’s too much unemployment and lots of poor people, he said. He appreciates tourist coming down. He wanted me to know that. He made the point twice. He rarely gets to the states, to Miami occasionally.

My generosity turned out to be a good investment; the man opened up. Money won’t buy anything, he said. I told him I knew about the Jamaican dollar falling. You go to the grocery store, a thousand dollars won’t buy anything—three little sacks, he said. He could remember when a thousand would actually buy something. A thousand dollars is only worth seventeen US dollars now.

With the decline of Jamaica’s economy has come an increase in drug trafficking, and other crimes, further sucking the lifeblood out of the country. A Kingston paper, The Sunday Gleaner, proudly shouted some news in a tall red two-word headline: “KINGFISH JACKPOT.” The story was about teaming up with Scotland Yard to catch some of Jamaica’s ‘Kingfish’ drug lords. Upon careful reading, the front-page story details more the hope of catching Kingfish than the actual catching of them. It reports only one caught so far, and he was caught, charged and tried in Great Britain, not Jamaica.

But officials are optimistic and upbeat. I don’t know. My thought is that for every Kingfish caught, likely two more will be waiting to take his place. Crime pays. And for drug trafficking, Jamaica lies conveniently placed, just 90 miles south of Cuba, a perfect transshipment point for cocaine traveling north from South America to North America and Europe.

A separate problem originates within the country—the illicit cultivation of cannabis, one confirmed by my earlier encounter on the beach with a man selling “smokes.” The government has a cannabis eradication program, but, as usual, corruption is a problem.

And what accompanies the drugs? The Gleaner reflects that, too: HIV, murder, social upheaval, and so on. I only have to scan the story titles: “AIDS, Disability and Insensitivity,” “A Crisis in Human Sexuality.” Numerous columns, stories and letters pursue this particular theme.

Kevin O’Brien Chang’s column on murder is eye popping. He said the murder rate was poised to top 1500 for 2004. He contrasted that with only 423 in 1989. He went on to note that “…Kingston is quite possibly the murder capital of the world….” (Perhaps Mexico's Ciudad Juarez holds that dubious distinction now.)

That is not the title Kingston needs when Jamaica uses the “One Love” theme to promote tourism, and it is not a title befitting the home place of its late author, Jamaican hero and musician, Bob Marley.

Caught in the swirl of all this ugliness are the children, the beautiful little children, standing roadside in clusters waiting for the bus, smiling in their school uniforms—khaki shirt and trousers for the boys, khaki skirt and maroon blouse for the girls. In the education of the children lies Jamaica’s hope for the future. But fear rests there too—the fear that those same children may not escape the grip of drugs, HIV and shootings already raging across the country.

On my last afternoon in Negril I sat in the beach bar looking north along the shore. A few feet away a little Jamaican girl, about seven years old, worked hard in the sand, digging with a green plastic shovel. She eventually built herself a sandcastle and then excavated a moat around it. She knew a moat should be filled with water, and she tried to coax the waves into doing the job. She lay beside the moat. Each time a wave ran up the beach toward the castle, she attempted to swipe some of its water into the trench. Her little hand didn’t catch enough to fill it.

Her little sister, maybe four years old, had an idea. She waded into the surf and filled a black plastic shopping bag. Then she ran up the slope with the bulging bag, jets squirting from holes in it, and dumped the contents into the moat. The older girl caught the idea and likewise filled a cardboard carton. They both ran back and forth, working hard and seriously, ferrying water to the moat. Finally the box softened and the bottom fell out.

They gave up then. All was lost. All the water they’d managed to pour into the moat seeped into the sand and drained away.

A Steel Band in Flight Is the Human Heart Singing

Conditions have changed little since I wrote this story, I expect, except the exchange rates, which can, of course, change very quickly. From the Herald-Citizen, Cookeville, TN, March 13, 2005.

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The last morning before the Reggae Marathon, I figured a walk along the beach would be relaxing. So I struck out down Negril’s seven-mile beach, pride of western Jamaica. The sun was bright and warm, unlike the foggy December day I’d left behind in Tennessee.

Then a guy tried to sell me dope. Here he came, a stout young man wearing black droopy shorts, dreadlocks and a heavy ring on a gold chain around his neck, bling for the beach. He checked me out by offering a ride on the para-glider. But I wasn’t interested in any excitement. From my white beard, he concluded he faced an unreformed hippie—leastwise, a safe bet.

“I know a guy. I can get you some good smokes,” he said. I knew he could.

“No thanks, I wouldn’t care for any,” I said.

“It’s good stuff."

“No, I don’t want any. Thanks.”

“You don’t want that?” Puzzled, he turned and walked away.

His offer came on top of the female companionship a guy had tried to sell me the previous day, when I was in the airport restroom at Montego Bay.

The two trifling incidents maybe reflect a bigger problem for Jamaica: The economy is shattered. And where poverty goes, drugs, HIV, murder and other crimes follow.

A third of the population falls below the poverty line; the inflation rate hovers in double digits, and so does unemployment.

The Jamaican dollar is slipping. During the late nineties, 35 Jamaican dollars (J$35) bought one U.S. dollar (US$1.00). Lately the slide has quickened. As I planned my trip I saw an exchange rate of J$50. By the time I actually made the trip a few weeks later, it had reached J$60.

That may be good news for the traveler, but terrible news for Jamaicans. When their dollar falls from J$35 to J$60, their ability to buy groceries and other things likewise falls. Since this island country must import most of her staples, devaluation of its dollar hits doubly hard. Finally it takes a sack full of money to buy anything.

A gallon of gas costs J$140, a soda J$150, a beer J$200 and a speeding ticket J$10,000.

“They love the ‘American’ dollar,” a fellow traveler told me. Little wonder—the U.S. dollar represents lasting value, while the Jamaican dollar erodes away like sand under foot. Realizing that, I paid for most of my purchases with U.S. dollars.

Despite the hardship around me, my days passed pleasantly. I sat at a table on the veranda of my villa working and reading. A garden of shrubs and flowers comes up to the porch. Walks to other villas criss-cross the garden. Maids and maintenance men go about their work, singing as they pass. They love to sing—pop songs and reggae tunes mostly. But in the distance, briefly I heard a man’s voice booming two lines:

When we all get to heaven,
We will meet on that beautiful shore.

Not waiting for the sweet by and by, I promptly went down and sat on that beautiful shore.
The singing and the friendly demeanor of the Jamaicans that I met seemed at odds with the difficult conditions they face. A wide smile and a, “Yah Mon,” are typical.

But it was not always so pleasant. One day I sat working, reading and writing. An angry argument flared up between two men in the driveway near my porch. Although I couldn’t see the two men for a picket fence, the sound was more than enough.

The volume hit a shrill pitch I thought only the hard shock of a 9-mm would end. Or maybe a scream gurgled by a sharp blade. It was like a taunt rubber band stretched to the limit. The invectives screamed out in Spanish came in waves, and the altercation gradually drifted down the drive to the road. I hoped they’d take it a mile on down the road. But it continued there.

A car passed and drowned the argument under the loud wailing of Bob Marley. But just for a few seconds. Then the argument resurfaced. It was more than wearisome—it was unnerving. In it all, I hear two reasonable words shouted out en inglés.

“Shut up! Shut up!”

After twenty minutes it finally played out, from sheer exhaustion I guess. While it lasted, the strident Spanish set my primordial reflexes a-twitch, and I couldn’t concentrate on my work. I was working on my Spanish assignment.

Tourists are important to Jamaicans. They want you to come back. Tourism is one resource they do have. But, of course, lots of other places have the stuff of tourism, the beaches and sunshine. But Jamaica has something more, something no one else has, and something no one can claim or take away: Bob Marley.

Or rather Bob Marley’s legacy. His dreadlock image is everywhere—in photographs, on woodcarvings, on tee shirts. Though he died in 1981 his reggae music lives on, celebrated with fervor in Jamaica. His song, “One Love,” has become a Jamaican anthem, if not a world one.
Besides running the marathon, my main goal was to search out a place where I could hear live reggae music played by a steel band. I need not have worried. Race organizers had arranged for the Caribbean Regal Steel Band to play in the park at the pre-race supper. The ten-member mixed-gender group filled that space with music. I pulled my folding chair up to the front and center, and let the music wash over me.

In one stretch they played—what else—“One Love,” swung into—I swear!—Glen Miller’s “In the Mood,” sailed into “Rocking Robin,” and chased that with “Tequila”—something for everyone. Their music was complex, melodic, joyous, clear as a bell. I believe they could have played Beethoven’s ninth.

Oil drum: The ordinary 55-gallon steel barrel. Detritus of petroleum the world over: it took the descendants of slaves in nearby Trinidad to fashion it into a musical instrument. They cut the end off and hammered it into a concave surface, making a drum that sings. Strike it at different places and you make different notes. Shape another drumhead differently and you get a different tonal range. Ten such drums make a band spanning several octaves, one that can emulate a grand piano.

From oil drums, music, from oppression, joy. The human spirit wrenches beauty from bleakness. Is there a better example than this? A steel band in flight is the human heart singing.

The night after the marathon, I sat at the resort beach bar ready for supper. The electricity went off. I read the menu with my key chain light and ordered curry goat, a treat. The food is cooked in a separate building, one that I hoped had some kind of power. The bar’s concrete floor extends to the ocean; the waves wash gently against the edge where I sit. The restaurant has a roof but no walls. Beach walkers can drift through, and they do.

A young man suddenly sat down at my table and stuck out his hand. We shook. His approach was direct.

“I’m hungry,” he said.

He’d been in jail. The police arrested him for selling peanuts and cigarettes, he said

“They did? Man tried to sell me peanuts today.”

“They arrested me for selling without a license. You have to have a license.”

“Have you talked to the folks at the restaurant about working for food?”

He knew the answer to that question too. His situation was critical. He’d just gotten out that day. Unlikely, I thought, since it was Sunday. The earnest man wanted to raise enough money to get a bicycle and ride up and down the road to see if he could take tourists to the water park.

“You just got out today?”

“Yes.”

I handed him J$ 500 and wished him luck. He headed on down the beach, but stopped under a beach light—the power was back on. He stood there, head down, counting his money. Suddenly he turned aside, and sat down with two tourists resting in the shadows.

I could’ve given his spiel.

I Survived the Road to Negril

Keep your mind quiet, save energy, avoid drama... Good advice, all, for a runner on a trip to race a marathon. Good or not, the vicissitude of travel often leaves one vulnerable to intrigue. Where will you find shelter?

For purposes of my column the Running Journal required more "running" than this story contains. But that's okay. I can put it here. From the Herald-Citizen, March 6, 2005.

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The three old men are drunk, and getting drunker by the mile. It appears they had a few drinks on their plane, and now they’ve brought a few beers on the bus with them, in a cloth cooler managed by one of their wives. She occupies a jump seat in the aisle beside me, stowing the cooler underneath.

Eighteen of us are packed tight into a Toyota bus not much larger than a soccer mom’s van. The last row of seats is piled high with luggage. We wind up a mountain overlooking Montego Bay heading toward Negril some 56 miles away.

The Caribbean is on our right, blue, sun-dappled and white-capped. The mountain, lush and green, is on our left; the road clings to the side of it. I have a window seat just behind the shotgun position, which is on the left in Jamaica, where cars travel the left side of the road. From my angle, every truck coming down the mountain seems on a collision course with us.

The inebriated old men aren’t worried; they raise a din of raucous banter, uproariously funny to them. They are from Michigan, something they remind us of frequently. They discuss people back home as if we on the bus want to hear about them. One complains about some woman there.

“Tell her to get a glass belly button so she can see where she’s going when her head is up her ass,” the head geezer says.

“Hee-hee-hee….” They have a laugh on the absent woman.

Head Geezer has a stiff white beard, and wears his baseball hat cocked high. He sits just behind the driver. The T-shirt stretched across his enormous belly asserts, “I survived the road to Negril!” That’s the road we’re on now.

I know next to nothing about Negril, except that the town advertises a beach and a marathon. Either one is a good enough excuse to come here on this December day. It is, however, the 26.2-mile race known as the Reggae Marathon that has drawn me to this tropical island.

Our driver wears a pinched look of perpetual worry. He shifts to third, and the Toyota crawls up the hill growling. While he loaded luggage prior to leaving the airport, Head Geezer was leaning across the seat, impatiently honking the bus horn, claiming it didn’t work. He continues badgering the man for operating a bus equipped with a horn that won’t blow. He won’t let it go. Finally the driver tries the horn button.

“It works,” he says earnestly. Geezer can’t hear it for the ringing in his own ears.

“Know what David Crockett said at the Alamo?” Geezer asks.

“Where’d all them damn roofers come from?”

“Hee-hee-hee.”

Our driver is a patient man. Put dreadlocks on him and he would be the stereotype of Jamaican Man—slightly built, small bones, small head. His cap puckers in the back like a fifth-grade little leaguer. He looks hungry.

His lean frame is the same as that of the great African marathoners. I expect you’d find strong roadrunners in Jamaica, if young men—women, too—had the requisite opportunity. The driver’s endurance today is of a different kind—abiding beer-drinking tourists from North America, geezers gone wild.

The young woman in front of me has fuzzy blond hair, bare shoulders and a diamond planted on the side of her nose. She seems to be helping our driver with his cell phone duties. One problem is to find it among the pile of litter on the console between them. I lean forward and ask her if she works for the bus company.

“No, I’m on holiday. I’ve been traveling around. This is the place I decided to hang out.”

She’s from Scotland, she says; her accent confirms it. I take it she is a part-time resident of Jamaica.

“It looks like the place if you like water and you like warm,” I say. She does.

I drop it. I don’t need to waste any energy socializing before the race. I especially don’t want to get caught up in the men’s circus across the aisle. The silent matron sitting between them and me provides insulation. I keep my marathon plans and my easy-to-remember name to myself.

This marathon hangs over me like doom. This will be my twenty-fourth race this year—a few too many. My body is worn out, and I feel myself sinking. I need a break from it.

So I can’t expect much in this race, especially in view of the heat here. My main hope is to get through it without a crippling overuse injury. Afterwards, if I can walk away, it will be like ducking a bullet.

This race has been on my calendar for months. There is nothing I can do now—except get the rest I know I must have. That means avoiding the orbit of the partying men. The emotional uproar sucks out energy worse than shoveling coal.

I want to look at the countryside. I gaze quietly out the window. The scene is a bit disheartening. The slopes are rocky and steep. Little frame houses propped on blocks tell a story of poverty. Most of the land is uncleared. There’s an occasional pasture—I spot a few cattle and some goats. A dozen horses stand listless in a pasture grazed to the bare ground. Elsewhere, vegetation is rampant, lush.

At one lush place, a naked man stands in a pool of ankle-deep creek water taking a bath. Head bowed, arms upraised, he pours water over his dreadlocks. His virile black body glistens under a burning sun. He rises from the water like a primeval god reigning over Eden. The image is at once innocent and sensual.

The striking scene slips past my window. I wonder if I am the only one who saw it. Bushes concealed the man until the bus was near him. You had to be paying attention at the right time. I listen, but no one says a thing about it. Certainly the Michigan beer drinkers didn’t see him; it would have touched off a barrage of salacious one-liners.

I wonder if any woman on the bus saw it. Will she remember tonight? And tomorrow on the beach when gentle waves whisper and a hot breeze lifts her hair, will she lay aside her book and gaze into the distance? Will she hold the secret in her heart, never telling anyone?

I don’t know. I’m just a man, not qualified to speak for any woman. All I saw was a man taking a bath in a creek. When I was a small boy my maternal grandfather and I did the same thing.

The men from Michigan, apparently ignorant of the bathing man, carry on with the same kind of rowdy comments as before. Harmless fun mostly. They’re just a little drunk, is all.

“How can you tell when David is lying?” Geezer wants to know.

“When his lips are moving,” the friend answers.

Our road winds through three towns. The streets are narrow, sometimes lacking even a sidewalk. The buildings come right up to my window. I look through the open doors into the stores and bars.

At one place a round woman in a cotton print dress wobbles heavily along a walk. At the precise moment we pass she angrily slashes a shrub with her machete. What does the gesture mean?
Geezer figures it out.

“Damn! You wouldn’t want to jump her!” he observes, reasonably enough. That touches off a round of predictable comments.

“Hee-hee-hee.”

The Michigan wife next to me endures her husband’s road show without a word. Twice, in passing, I make a friendly comment to her. Each time she meets me with stony silence. She hardened like concrete years ago.

Negril turns out to be seven miles of two-lane blacktop next to a beach—further south is Towne Centre, I will learn. From the road you can’t actually see the beach most of the time for the intervening trees, resorts, villas and restaurants. To the east is the Great Morass, a canopied swampland stretching to the horizon. The mountains have drifted away.

It has taken us two hours to cover the 56 miles. It seems longer. The driver makes the rounds of the resorts, dropping people off.

“Of all the things I’ve ever lost, my mind bothers me the most,” Geezer says.

I have successfully kept quiet and not spoken with the Michigan men. Despite that, at least one has learned what I am up to. The bus pulls up to Negril Tree House, where I plan to stay. As I get out of my seat, the man’s eyes meet mine.

“Good luck, Dallas,” he says.

How I blew my cover, is another story.

Whatever Happened to Guadalupe Santos?

A story that describes the interior life of a runner on his way to a marathon would be, I thought, a running story. The Running Journal disagreeded, however, and rejected this piece. They want more running. No importa. I understand their reasons, and I substituted another. But I love words and stories for reasons beyond running. And I still love this story. From the Herald-Citizen, Jan. 23, 2005.

* * * * * * * * * *

At the age of 13 she was raped and then sent to prison for killing the creep who did it, a crime she did not commit—if, indeed, you could call it a crime; but then the event happened in Latin American. In prison, Guadalupe Santos discovered she was pregnant, and gave birth to a daughter whom she had to surrender to the care of her older sister, a woman who later betrayed her.

After serving fifteen years and with credit for good behavior, her release date was drawing near. But calamity struck again. To save her life and the life of her best friend, she was forced to escape from prison. On the run, she worked her way north and crossed the border into the United States.

Rebuilding her life here, she met a man and fell in love. He didn’t know her awful secret. Whether they had a future together seemed doubtful. She remained a prisoner of her past.

How things eventually worked out for Guadalupe will be forever lost from me. With remarkable bad timing the last three episodes of Prisionera air while I, myself, head toward Latin America.

This December Thursday of 2004 I am riding an early morning flight from Nashville to Memphis, the first leg of a trip to Negril, Jamaica, where I plan to run the Reggae Marathon. I sit idly reflecting on the coincidence of my trip and the program’s conclusion.

In an attempt to augment my Spanish lessons, I’d started watching Prisionera, a telenovela on Telemundo, only ten days earlier—I certainly needed the help. I’d never watched a soap opera before, and I thought they went on forever. I happened to pick one, however, that not only aimed to end two weeks after I started watching it but would manage to do so precisely while I make an unlikely December trip. Once again the ready occurrence of the highly improbable gives me cause for wonder.

With several shows to choose from, why did I pick Prisionera? Simple—Guadalupe Santos. She grabbed my attention like a magnet grabs a compass. While maybe not the great beauty that some of the show’s other women are, she is nevertheless bonita enough. But her attraction comes from something beyond mere physical perfection.

I decided to read about the character—another Spanish lesson. Telemundo’s online literature described her as noble, strong and dreamy. I was surprised at how well those descriptions fit my impressions. The actor, Gabriela Spanic, who plays her, is able to convey those qualities without doing much of anything at all.

She can just stand there. When she cries, tears streak down her cheek and drip off her chin. Even her smile is tinged with sadness, and she seems to gaze into the distance. Her eyes are big, maybe too big, but all the more poignantly expressive. Her lips pout and her profile suggests comic petulance.

Her beauty is flawed, and therefore the more exquisite.

This December morning I ride along, gazing out the Airbus window, my thoughts rambling in daydreams about beauty, about what it is—and why do I care? In an expansive mood, it seems I find it all around.

I pick up a book about Alaska I’ve brought to read during the warm days in the Caribbean. The book is titled Coming into the Country, by John McPhee. It’s a book full of rugged and beautiful images. McPhee’s language has rare power. I read the book slowly, trying to make it last, scanning the words like a prospector looking for gold. I find a glittering nugget on every page.

He is describing a canoe trip on the Salmon River—one of thirteen Alaskan rivers so named—in the Brooks Range of northern Alaska. I want to be there with him. His party flew to the put-in with a helicopter pilot from the flat country of Louisiana who got them all lost. While they flew up and down river after river, the pilot handed the map to McPhee, a passenger and non-pilot, asking for his help in finding their position. Of the map, McPhee says, “…the mountains looked like calves’ brains over bone china...” He describes the immensity of the wilderness: “…if anyone could figure out how to steal Italy, Alaska would be the place to hide it.”

McPhee is skilled at evoking vivid images. He tells about a barber who was a lousy shot going on a bear hunting trip. He emptied his rifle and only hit the grizzly once, in the foot. “The damage the bear did to the barber was enough to kill him several times.”

A woman runs a small boarding house made of cottonwood logs at Talkeetna where mountain climbers stay. She works hard, enforces strict rules of behavior and prepares meals for which people make long drives. “She is dour, silent, stolid as a ceramic cat.” Ceramic cat! No one can use that simile again. McPhee uses it up right here in this book.

Alaska is beautiful, but dangerous—beauty with a price, a price only a few are willing to pay. The flaw of danger is what protects Alaska’s beauty. But is it enough?

I look up from the book and gaze out the window, savoring McPhee’s thoughts. Thirty thousand feet below I see not Alaska, but west Tennessee. It is cold this morning, even on the ground—thick fog hindered my predawn drive to Nashville. The sun is up now, spilling a warm glow over the sleeping landscape.

I notice a scene unlike any I’ve spotted before. A river valley meanders endlessly through a velvet woodland. The valley is filled to the brim with fog, but not a droplet over. None spreads out over the surrounding countryside; it perfectly outlines the valley’s imprint. From this height the fog looks solid. The slanting sun reveals its surface texture by shadowy shades of gray, like a glacier of dirty snow.

For some reason I suddenly remember John Dodson, conductor then of the Bryan Symphony Orchestra, telling me why he likes the music of Gustav Mahler. It was like explaining Newtonian physics to Porch Patrol, the tan Shar-pei. I understood it poorly, and I can relate it only crudely.

He said Mahler’s music unfolds with beautiful promise but then somehow falls short—by design, I took it. It seems headed toward the perfect moment like when you hit the ball thock! on the sweet spot and you know you’ve nailed it. Mahler instead pulls back, turns, preferring to introduce a deliberate shortfall, the perfect imperfection, a feature that makes his music intensely interesting. Some might consider that to be a flaw. If so, to John it was an exquisite one.

Then he said something surprising. “Amy is like that.”

He was talking about Amy Dodson, my running colleague, who was then his wife. I hope he - and she! - doesn’t mind my mention of his comparison; I thought it was endearing. When he said it, we were standing on Laycock Bridge in Smith County, while a movie crew of some fifty people filmed Amy running, beautiful and brave, across the shaky old bridge for a television commercial.

As she ran along the wooden floor, Amy’s exquisite flaw was apparent to all—a graphite device that replaces her lower left leg. Perhaps John sensed that it is that very flaw that helps drive Amy to accomplish the feats she has, both as a runner and as a person. She had already become the first woman leg-amputate to compete in the Boston Marathon, a prestigious race with a 100-year plus history. She has since gone on to set the woman’s marathon world record for a one-leg amputee. She will go on to finish Ironman races, 100-mile ultramarathons, and to win a triathlon world championship. Remembering her searing courage helps drive me through hard marathons such as Reggae, where the Caribbean heat raises the challenge.

This morning’s flight to Memphis is brief. The pilot must have gotten clearance for a straight-in approach. We’ve dropped steadily and I doubt any turns at this altitude. The morning sun is behind us. The angle is just right for me to watch our shadow sweeping the ground. It slides over the pastures, wafts through the bare woods, flicks across the freeway and swipes the roofs of warehouses, all the while growing larger and larger until finally—over grass now—it comes up and thump bumps into us.

We’re down. First leg finished. I look around. The passengers are anxious to get off the plane. I don’t know anybody. Next stop, Montego Bay.

Come Home, Hokie

The 32 stones encircling the reviewing stand in front of Burruss Hall forms a memorial dedicated to the 32 students killed on the campus of Virginia Tech, April 13, 2007.

*

Once again, time for the Boston Marathon rolls around - the second Monday in April, Patriots Day in Massachusetts. It's unfair to that storied race, but each year its arrival triggers a different kind of memory for me - the murder of 32 students and scholars at Virginia Tech. Both events occurred on the same day in 2007 - Monday, April 13.

Today, a semi-circle of 32 "Hokie stones" fronts the stone reviewing stand in front of Burruss Hall. Buses stop there and tourists walk around taking pictures of the memorial, just as I have done.

When tragedy brushes close you pause, or stop, or maybe even make a turnaround. But then you go on. Because that's what humans do. You go on, but you don't forget. Going on is required. Forgetting is not part of the deal.

So I go on, but I remember. This was my tribute to the fallen Hokies. This is my memory. From the Herald-Citizen, April 29, 2007.

*

When the gunman carried out the bloody massacre at Virginia Tech Monday last week, his shots pierced the hearts of Hokies everywhere. A scattering of that mourning community lives in Cookeville.

But you don’t have to be connected to that university to appreciate the enormity of the tragedy. The gunman snuffed out 32 of the best and brightest, and injured several more. Scan the list. You only have to look at photographs of their engaging smiles, reaching out from a time now snatched away, and read their biographies to see that these fallen were extraordinary. Their talent and accomplishments humble me.

Here is one: in high school he ran track, played football and basketball, played the trombone and was valedictorian. To mention even one is to unfairly omit the others. Nonetheless, here is another example: he was scheduled to graduate in a few days with a triple major and a 4.0 grade average. A leader in the VT band, he spent his summers working at a camp for special-needs kids.

The list of gifted victims stretches out, including also a number of staff members. Some, like the two professors from the Engineering Science and Mechanics Department, had drawn international attention for their research.

All snuffed out.

The loss! Our country can’t replace such gifted persons. Their university can’t replace them. And now their stricken families and friends can only mourn their passing. It is a loss the whole nation feels. One of the e-mails pouring in to VT said simply, “We are all Hokies now.”

I myself dug out an old hat I hadn’t worn in a few years. I wasn’t sure I still had it. But there it was, mashed flat at the bottom of the stack. I smoothed it out and pulled it on, a white hat with the familiar maroon “VT” on the front. It’s the hat I wore when I first ran the Boston Marathon, a race, incidentally, held again, for the 111th time, this Monday last, the very day of the tragedy at VT. Once more, I wear that hat.

We are all Hokies now.

That Monday morning I had just finished my last track workout before the Country Music Marathon, the hardest one I attempt, running nine long intervals at 5k pace. I walked into the snack area and the TV was on. It showed a squad car and police running with drawn weapons. A shooting had happened. This time it was at Virginia Tech.

“That’s where I went to school!” I said to the only person present, a young woman sitting at a table watching. Then I left. It is a sad measure of how familiar such scenes have become that I don’t even remember if the TV reported one or two dead.
Just another day in America.

When I got home, I decided to check the story again, and switched on the TV. I watched incredulously. The fatalities climbed past 20, heading toward the eventual total of 33, the number we all now know.

A shaky video a student made with his cell phone showed Norris Hall while the shots rang out. It showed the corner windows on the second floor that belong to the office I occupied when I was a professor there. The shots were coming from the classrooms a few steps from it. I watched in disbelief.

Most of the slaughter took place in those second-floor classrooms. I knew the rooms so well. I had both taken and taught classes in them, taking graduate courses toward a Ph.D. while teaching undergraduate engineering classes. Eventually I earned the degree, accepted the professorship and moved from my graduate student cubicle to that corner office.

The student’s video yanked me across the misty stretches, back to that long ago time and place, back in spirit to Norris Hall—now become a scene of unfolding horror. The shots rang out time and again. I sat in my study sobbing.

Altogether I’d lived out three and a half intense years in that building, afraid I’d never master the arcane mathematics of continuum mechanics, pursuing what seemed at times impossible dreams - dreams no different from those snuffed out with each student cut down. Madness honors no dream.

Burruss Hall, the main administration building, sets adjacent to Norris Hall. In front of Burruss a stone reviewing stand looks out over the drill field. On Sundays when the campus was quiet, I’d take my son to that place. He was old enough to be in grade school then. We’d launch our rubber powered model plane out over the field. The little model sailed across an expansive view of sunshine and grass.

And peace. The timeless stone buildings stood silent guard, speaking not at all about the horror fated to unfold there. Spirits of the fallen fill that space today, buoyed by the defiant cry “Let’s go Hokies!”

One day the peace will return.