This must be the same thrill baseball people feel in the stadium.
I crossed dusty trails Thursday to reach the starting line of my sons’ cross country race.
It’s mid-September. Gold cottonwood leaves caught the tilted sun.
Our school holds its home cross country meet in the woods surrounding a pond, where mountain men and Natives swapped animal hides for gunpowder 190 years ago.
I can’t think of a more Riverton place to have it. Somehow survivalism, explosions, fishing ponds, and running all stitch a proud central-Wyomingite thread through the ancestral fabric of my being.
I parked astride a weedy ditch and met The Husband at the ponds so we could catch the starting gun.
I grinned.
“Isn’t this great?” I asked.
“Mm-hm,” grunted The Husband.
The temperature hovered around 90 degrees. No breezes stirred, and the crowd of parents migrating to the starting line hoofed up dust clouds.
The Husband wiped sweat beads from his brow.
“Everything’s so gorgeous,” I gushed.
The Husband nodded. He still wore the full-length blue jeans his job requires. We greeted a half-dozen people we know.
Then we saw two of our children, our twins, running warmups in their jerseys.
“Run hard, guys!” said The Husband.
I pressed my forehead to one boy’s temple. Then did the same with the other boy.
No need to heap more words onto the majesty of the perfect sport. Save that for the contests of brute strength, yellow flags and infinite rules, I figured.
The boys filed to the starting line. I could pick out my twins’ curly hair from the mass of middle schoolers.
My heart stuttered. The moment in which intention meets action approached. The trial lay ahead, for my boys.
Running is the best sport because, first of all, nature exists.
And second of all, you can RUN in it.
You don’t need more audacious grandeur than that.
But we could also revel in the brain synthesizing its own cannabinoids (runner’s high), the quiet of the road (sweet escape), and the quirky land secrets known only to the lonely foot traveler (wild fruit trees).
The gun sounded. My boys thundered into the trees.
“Let’s go!” said I to The Husband, with a mind to follow the runners.
The Husband held my hand and stood, brick-outhouse still.
“Oh, you wanna find more shade?” I asked.
He nodded.
“OK! Let’s go to the finish line and find a GOOD spot,” I said.
The Husband followed. We found a good spot, you know, out of the way of all the other parents so we wouldn’t end up in one of those gradual edge-up battles where everyone’s creeping forward for the perfect video of their kid crossing the flag.
Cross country is the ideal sport because it pits the runner against one of humanity’s fiercest foes: time.
“Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race,” wrote John Milton in about 1632. “Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours/ Whose speed is but the heavy Plummets pace/ And glut thy self with what thy womb devours.”
In the end of that poem, Time loses.
Time also loses when anyone crosses the land without its permission. You’ve got this life on Earth, bookended with clock hands, whirling under a metronome; set to a waltz.
But you can cheat Time by busting out of the clock and teleporting, with just a little prop-work by your legs and lungs, to any certain elsewhere that Time wasn’t watching.
And you can do that under somber, yellowing trees that are too weary to tell on you.
“Wooh, buddy!” we applauded when the first twin loped into the chute.
“Yeah, boy!” we whooped when the second twin followed.
“Gosh,” I mused aloud to The Husband. “Isn’t that the PERFECT spectator sport?”
I thought I saw one of his eyelids twitch under the shade of his Red Sox hat. But maybe I imagined it.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
