My Year of Running Dangerously by Tom Foreman

Author:Tom Foreman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Over the next couple of weeks, I hit the same trails repeatedly. I kept falling. I kept twisting my ankles and knees in all sorts of unpleasant ways. I kept cursing nature as if it were my personal enemy. Which, when you think about it, is true for all of us. Gradually, I improved.

“You know,” I told Linda one morning as she dropped me off, “I realized that there isn’t just one trail near here. There are dozens of them!”

“Uh-huh,” she said, as if this weren’t intrinsically fascinating.

“They cross, and loop, and stop, and start, all over the woods. Some of them actually lead to pretty cool places.”

“Like?”

“Like to a scenic overlook.”

She eyed the tangle of woods. “Nothing looks all that scenic in there.”

“It’s relative. You know how we always say your cousin Nicky is pretty? You know that’s only compared to her corgis, right?”

“I get your point.”

“Anyway, some of the other paths just lead off to nothing. You follow them, and gradually they fade out until you’re just lost in the weeds, wondering where the hell you are.”

“I guess that makes us even.”

“What?”

“Every time you take off into that mess, I wonder the same thing: Where the hell is he? Is he coming back? How much will the funeral cost?”

I dismissed her wisecracks, but I understood. Just a few weeks earlier I had tried branching off into a new area, following a promising trail past a little creek, up a hill, and into oblivion. As smoothly as a magician’s trick, the path vanished beneath me. I looked ahead: nothing. Behind: nothing. I had no idea when I’d left the trail or where it had gone. I trotted on, pushing branches aside and peering into the underbrush for any hint about where I belonged, and finally stumbled into a clearing, where I found two lost hikers. They looked worried.

“Where is the trail?” I asked.

“We thought you might know,” they responded.

Another day I had blasted out of the woods and into a camping site, rumbling up on a tent full of people who shrieked as if a bear had charged from the mountain laurel. There were a few cryptic old signposts, which were as useful as Egyptian hieroglyphics. Still, I began sorting out all those paths in the woods—sometimes by their condition, sometimes by landmarks, and sometimes with a growing sense of the forest itself. A step at a time, the right way just started looking right.

“I didn’t get lost! Not even once!” I crowed to the family one day as I burst, sweating and dusty, through the front door. “I came to that same series of forks where I always go wrong, and I remembered this big rock next to two trees and knew I had to go left, and then I saw the creek, turned right at the log, climbed over that boulder, saw the rotting hut, reconnected to the towpath, and here I am!”

“Good for you,” Linda said.

“Nice,” said Ronnie.

Ali smiled. “Way to go, Magellan.”

The miles added up.

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