Forgotten

I wanted to say something as I passed. I wanted to ask them if they knew this was the very spot where life on earth had begun, that all of evolution crawled from this particular bog. That’s why I run here, I would tell them, to visit my distant relatives. Why couldn’t it have been here? Why couldn’t this place have existed before we were here, before anything was here, even before the Rusty Wheeled, Deflated Tire era of mankind, a remnant of which lies just upstream.

The two women stood by the swamp while their dogs’ curiosity fractured the pristine mirror of the water’s surface. I wanted to say these things to them, but instead I simply offered a friendly “good morning” as I passed. The pond was visibly different: felled trees lay partially exposed in the water, slowly decaying, feeding the next. A beaver lodge, large enough to comfortably accommodate five healthy adults and a few children towers in the center and the water seems more impenetrable than I remember. The place has evolved in the year since I first began to understand; unfortunately, I feel as if my own evolution has stagnated.

As the pond narrowed to sluggish stream and the trees drew nearer to the edge of the path, I listened. The rhythm of my footsteps moved from the snapping and popping on coarse gravel, to near silence on the bare, dense and moist soil, to the familiar soft crunch of the finely ground, black shale that covers much of the trail. A light wind moved air without sound over the hollows of my ears, and birds that were not there before began tentatively speaking to each other from the cover of branches. My easy pace gave me the feeling I could go on indefinitely.

I almost didn’t come today. I felt tired earlier and I’d hedged; maybe I’d run the four-mile section I thought, or maybe only two, or maybe nothing at all, or maybe I’d drive to the lot and then decide. Once there I was certain I’d do something, maybe.

The parking area was nearly full when I arrived, just a few spots left at the end where large tree roots abbreviate the undesignated spaces. I looked north toward the paved trail, and the potential for just under four and a half miles, then I looked south, through the woods to the railings of the first bridge, and the thoughts of the hill falling away and the pond and the markers at point five, and one point five, and the other end and I started off that way slowly, cautiously, unconcerned about time, or distance, or whatever else I had to do today. I decided to run at the pace I used to, when all I wanted was to finish, when all that mattered was the act, the doing: the feeling and the seeing, and the understanding that came with it.

I’ve spent the last year looking ahead and looking back, checking my race times, striving, wallowing in the misery of an unchanged and seemingly unchangeable situation, never feeling as if any of it was enough, as if anything I could do would ever be enough. The year has erased my memory.

I looked down just in time to spot a manure pile and a small, flower print hat. I dodged them both and moved on. The halfway point came quickly: I turned and began the three-mile trip back to the parking lot. Just ahead, the sun penetrating the spring canopy fell in unfocused, unconnected blotches on the path. I thought of Seurat: I thought of how this scene was creating itself from light and tiny specks of gravel and dirt and forest debris, and how his simple voluminous shapes could never approach the depth and the density and the subtle shades of what lay beneath my feet. Above me the sky that brought the light that penetrated the canopy was a bright, uniform blue, almost as if all this was housed inside of a perfect hemisphere.

An elderly couple on bicycles came toward me. The man held the colorful hat in his hand. He asked how far I was going. All the way back to the parking lot, I replied without stopping. He handed me the hat as we passed: “there’s a woman with a baby walking along the trail, she lost this without realizing”. I saw her on my way, I said as I grabbed the hat with my right hand.

The pond returned and I retraced the awkward steps that avoided the water spreading across the trail. It seemed as if the people I had passed along the way had all vanished, or had turned back shortly after our encounters. I was alone, keeping to my pace, moving easily, gripping the hat firmly, seeing, smelling, tasting, breathing.

It took some time before I spotted the woman with her child in tow. He or she was in a backpack, explaining how the hat could have been lost without the mother’s knowledge. I said something as I handed it to her, what it was that I said is only vague memory now. She also spoke.

Something changed as I released the fabric. I suddenly felt as if my legs were being pulled, as if I wasn’t running at all, but some thing, some force was drawing me forward. It was a sensation I’ve never felt before. There was a weightlessness about me: I was a marionette on strings, my knees moving higher than they would ever need to, my feet never actually touching down.

The last half-mile or so was cushioned by soft, decaying leaves that lined the forest floor: once living parts of trees that now fed the roots of those same trees. I tried to feel the hair falling from my head and then being drawn back into my veins through the soles of my feet.

I looked ahead, trying to spot the second bridge, not knowing if I was even close, and in doing so stumbled on a protruding root. Don’t look too far ahead, I always told myself, you’ll get there eventually, and never look back, you might stumble and fall. The words I’d relied upon were spoken metaphorically, of course, but here I was, literally looking too far ahead, and literally tripping and nearly falling. It was almost comical. Everything I’d learned during that final run last summer: all of the knowledge that brought me one step closer, or one step farther away from understanding, I would have to learn again.

Normally, when I begin a run I have a goal in mind: a time, or a distance, or both. Today I had neither. Success and failure wouldn’t be making appearances, even in cameo roles. If this day had not been unscripted, I would have focused on the unimportant and the mundane and continued on without ever realizing all that I had forgotten.