It started with a book

It started with a book.  Obsessions always start with a book with him.  His mother would tell you the reason he ended up in Wyoming was an obsession with a book called The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie.  It was a story about mountains, fur trappers, Native Americans and freedom.  I don’t think she was right; he would have ended up in Montana if that book had obsessed him.  He just fell in love with Wyoming and decided to stay here.

In the mid seventies, when he first moved to the valley and was just a crazy flatland hippie kid, he picked up a book in Boulder called Cross Country Downhill. It was a book about the sport better known as Telemark skiing. He read the book, put the beartrap bindings on some downhill skis from the Salvation Army and voilà! He was good to go. He used them on the ski slopes during his breaks and a life operator.  People shook their heads and laughed ‘you can’t ski like that’ but he was headstrong and self reliant, he didn’t need their advice. That was when winter was deep here and most of the residents didn’t bother to get to know your name until you had weathered at least one.  Two if the snow had not closed the road for at least a couple of weeks.  He stuck around and kept skiing although he did transition into true Telemark skis once they started selling them in Laramie.

Then there was the book on log building, he read it then headed up into the mountains for standing dead and hauled them home in his yellow, 1953 Chevy truck.  By then he had lived in the valley for about seven years, logged, been a carpenter, worked at the ski area and survived.  He looked at the drawings in the book, peeled the logs, notched each one, set them all with only a chainsaw, an adz, a monstrous chisel and some handmade calipers.  The result was a sturdy, warm, twelve-sided log home.

Now he is staring down sixty and running.  It started with a book called Born to Run about a guy named Caballo Blanco.  That guy ran here, outside of Laramie on Pilot hill, but they didn’t know each other.  He didn’t run then.  But now, after three broken backs he is running.  Miles.  He read the book, about a man who loved to run, and a group of people who live in Mexico, the Tarahumara, who ran; all of them smiling.  They don’t just jog a couple of blocks over lunch, they run miles, fifty and hundreds of miles. Smiling.

I would like to tell you he researched or at least asked other runners how they approached running before he started but the truth is he didn’t.  He did check out a few You Tubes of the Tarahumara and noticed they made their own sandals. But he passed on that.  He was thinking that maybe his skateboard shoes would work. They have great traction.  Finally he settled on some running shoes but had to customize them by taking off the wide heel with a knife. 

He runs behind the house, on the state land.  The neighbors began to catch glimpses of him this summer, up on the ridge tops by Sheep Mountain.  He and his crazy Australian shepherd cresting the limestone hogback before they dip behind it. 

‘Is he running out there?’ they asked simply.

‘Yeah.’

‘Thought so.’

There are cougars on the mountain, and the night I arrived home after dark to find the dog in a frenzied state; running at me then towards the mountain.  He came back in the dark, smiling and with the high that seems to accompany his jaunts.  He explained that there had been a noise, that the dog growled and headed back home but he felt it was probably nothing and he should just go on ahead.

‘Listen to the dog.’ The old-time neighbor said after he heard about the incident.

It’s winter now, the mountain is closed due to snow.  Now he runs on the road. 

You can’t miss him, he has a look based on warmth and not hampered by style.  Aforementioned altered, yellow, running shoes, green canvas shorts over black fleece pants, a vintage alpaca Fair Isle sweater over a black turtleneck and his French trapper hat (usually the olive green one).  To calm my fear of cougars, he now carries a stick, a heavy hedgewood thing.

The neighbors don’t really give him a second look now, although he does get stares from the snowmobilers and snowboarders who use our road as a shortcut to the Snowies.  They slow down, bewildered, uncertain if they should offer a ride or step on the accelerator.  A few have taken pictures.  I wonder what their caption might be.

The obsession had morphed into something else I think although I am reluctant to put a name to it.  It isn’t strained, it doesn’t take time from other things.  It feels more like a missing piece has found its place.

He says he runs for all of us; a prayer for his son, his neighbors, the deer.  And he smiles.