Explain the World to Me, please

This latest blog edition comes to you from the banks of the Colorado River, a few miles upriver from Arches National Park in Utah, at a BLM campground where dogs have more rights than they do with the National Park Service. The last week or so was spent in Steamboat for the final days of ski season and where I finally spent more than two consecutive nights in the small condo I purchased here in December and rented out most of the ski season while I wandered parts of the globe. I finally had time to stay and settle in the place for more than a night, and start compiling a list of home improvement projects. In the end, I removed, reconsidered, then re-hung,then reconsidered some more, then re-removed a cabinet door, added some trim and stain and called it good.  I also attempted to figure out a new tile or hardwood flooring choice, got fatigued by the trivial differences between “canyon birch,” “sandy summer”  and “morning desert” and left for Utah with no clarity on the future floor of the condo.  

I rolled into the town of Moab earlier this evening, needing to pick up a few groceries for backpacking, and briefly checked out a few motel rooms since setting up camp in the dark can be frustrating. The first three motels were full. The fourth had one room left for one night. Perfect. It’s one of those motels where the check-in clerk magically appears from a curtain behind the front desk, which is actually an entry to where she lives. Living at one’s workplace sounds awful to me, and I admire the motel proprietor who can do it. The conversation was brief because she had to be somewhere, so she handed me a key and asked me to come back later to fill out the registration card,make payment, and so on. I love those moments of trust between strangers. 

I parked the car in front of the room, which had an outside entry and also shares a wall with three other rooms. And in the scorecard of unsavory and unpleasant noises coming from the walls, I went three for three.Behind Wall #1 was a hair dryer and a Michael Bolton tune, I think. Behind Wall#2 was a very loud Judge Judy on the television chewing out some pathetic guy who didn’t pay his half of the rent to his girlfriend with poor grammar. And in classic bad-motel stereotype fashion, the sounds of Wall #3 were the grunts and moans of bad sex.  Based on the configuration of the rooms, I’m certain that the ones having sex were also serenaded by the sweet sounds of Judge Judy. If we measure how good everyone had it based on the volume and excitement of the voices, seems like Judge Judy was the big winner that evening. 

I left the motel to go the grocery store and gas station,and it was dark by the time I started my way back. I drove right by my motel, although it looked familiar but I concluded that I wouldn’t stay in a place that looked so trashy. Until I realized that apparently I would stay in a place that looked that trashy.  Fast forward this story: I went back to the room, the previous noises from the three walls were replaced with equally unpleasant ones, so I packed up the car and left.  Setting up camp in the dark isn’t so bad when it’s free from Judge Judy, hair dryers and other people’s bad intimacy.

I had about six hours of drive time today from Steamboat to Moab, most of which was filled with play-by-play radio coverage of the manhunt near Boston.  I would change the station sometimes when the coverage would get repetitiously sad, or have nothing of actual value and seemed to be just about keeping the story going (“can you tell us how high the helicopter is hovering” a journalist asked a witness), but would usually get sucked back in within a half hour or so.

I’ve got a barrage of unorganized thoughts about this week’s events in Boston. When the news first broke that explosions occurred near the finish line, my reaction was first through the lens of a runner, one who has participated in the Boston Marathon.  The runners this year were denied the amazing feeling that comes with participating in one of the world’s greatest sporting traditions. I remember writing a bucket list for a class when I was an undergraduate in which we had to write down 50 things we wanted to do in our lifetimes, and then narrow it down to 10, and the Boston Marathon was in my final 10 (along with meeting  the voice of “Gonzo” from the Muppets. No joke.).

When I ran it in 2004, it was unseasonably warm and the race didn’t start until noon in those years;  it has since been moved to a morning start. Slogging through 26.2 miles in 80+degree heat was one of the toughest challenges I think I’ve faced.  It hurt.  It hurt bad. The last few miles were spent trying to separate mind from body, to ignore the strong message my brain sent my body to just stop already.  At the finish my eyes swelled up with tears. I remember crossing the finish at the same time as a runner with a Chinese flag on her shirt, and she just fell into my arms as soon as we crossed.  Those ensuing minutes were a blur, as runners congratulated each other and cried with each other in both agony and celebration. The Boston Marathon is more than a sporting event. Like the Olympics, it is a demonstration of international goodwill.  

I ran it again in 2005. That year my sister and good friend Pete Flynn also ran it.  At the time, it was my best ever marathon finish, which I owe to Pete’s regime that he put me through during training. Pete is a crazy good runner, and training with him was perhaps the best and worst decision of my running life. It was the best because his training led me to perform at a level I didn’t think was in my grasp. It was the worst because during those training months I puked multiple times during a workout, and also dealt with a bout of hypothermia on a 21 mile run that resulted in me being brought back from the brink of death by handfuls of carrot cake frosting (a story for another time).

So my initial reaction was one of tremendous empathy from one runner to another, that their memories of the Boston Marathon would be etched with a scene that they would prefer to forever forget. As the news about the event continued to unfold, the extent of the injuries to nearly 200 people, many with lost limbs, and then the ensuing days of a city brought to a halt by the uncertainty of where the suspects loomed and what they might do next, my reaction changed from that of a runner to that of an American and someone who, like so many others, wants to remain hopeful about the world.

Having only lived once that I know of, I don’t have any comparison point to know first-hand if the frequency with which super bad shit has happened during my lifetime is normal or not. There’s obviously been world wars, assassinations, and other horrific events endured by previous generations.   But I don’t know how often this storyline has unfolded in the past in which one individual or a small group of individuals catches all of us off-guard and does something completely unthinkable and unanticipated.  9/11. Columbine. Within the past 9 months, horrific killings at an Aurora Movie Theater. At an elementary school for god's sake, in Newtown, Connecticut. Boston Marathon.

As I stated before, I have a ton of unorganized thoughts and emotions in my head about all of this, one of which is anger.  One of my basic tenets in life is I won’t allow fear to be a motive for my behavior. I simply find life to be more fulfilling and less stressful if I’m willing to extend a little bit of trust and belief that most people are generally good, and the likelihood of me crossing paths with those that are bad is miniscule. I want people to believe I’m a good person -- even if they don’t know me -- and so I need to do the same. This has generally served me well, though around this time last year I didn’t lock my front door and came home around midnight to a super-drunk and completely unknown college student passed out in my living room.  And he was only wearing underwear.   I didn’t feel threatened but I was definitely unsure about what to do and called 911 for some input.  By 12:30am, my neighbors stood on their porch amidst the lights of one ambulance and two squad cars in front of my house, and watched the passed out nearly-naked college student hauled out of my house on a stretcher, a scenario which I had to re-interpret for them the next day.

I’m angry because every time something like the attack atthe Boston Marathon happens, it provides evidence and rationale for living in fear. The adages “you just never know” or “better to be safe than sorry” are more justified, and I despise those adages.  They narrow our comfort zones and force people to prove their goodness to us.  Living that way makes us skeptical of the person at our door soliciting donations fora charity. It makes us reluctant to help someone with a flat tire. I remember an email going around awhile back about a crime spree (which turned out to bean urban legend) of would-be criminals putting a speaker with the sound of a crying baby on people’s door steps, and urging people not to answer the door because it was a set-up for some kind of robbery. Who on earth wouldn’t open the door if you heard a crying baby?  That’s not a world I want to live in.

So my trip to Utah is well-timed. I can use the time while backpacking to sort out the mess of emotions and thoughts, and hopefully be able to contribute in some sensible way to dialogue with others who are also struggling at present with understanding what kind of world we live in. 

On a much, much more positive note, late this afternoon I met a guy named Mack who is on a one-man and nearly 200 mile river trip from Fruita, Colorado to Lake Powell, Utah (just before the Grand Canyon) on his oar boat on the Colorado River.  I had pulled into a riverside rest stop to take in the view and to let my antsy dog out of the car, and Mack pulled his raft over and asked for a weather forecast and spare reading material.  Unfortunately I’m mostly on e-books these days but I offered him a copy of Steamboat’s free daily paper which I had picked up in the morning, and a Steamboat dining guide magazine. He declined the newspaper but took the magazine.

“Reading the news works against my intent for doing this trip, but the magazine will be good for starting campfires.”

Mack (pictured below) has the right idea. Especially this week.