Nice

Yesterday I ran outside for the first time ever, it seemed, out the door from the locker room, stretched against a lamp post, and jogged off across the parking lot. It was a little past eleven and the sun was hot, the air warm with Spring, like a nice drink just chill enough to remember when it had ice cubes. The air in April is a tall glass of water. In summertime it will be hot tea, scalding and dangerous.

I ran down the road watching my step, staying off my heels, not letting my knees bang with the impact but letting them be springs. When on the treadmill I fear running in the real world because I will step on a pebble and turn just enough to miss a curb, crack my ankle, sprawl before an onrushing bus. Death awaits me out there sometimes, I don’t know why I let it. I run through it and keep going.

The road was a four lane thing they poured ten or fifteen years ago down a wasteland of mine tailings. The mine tailings are now almost all gone, dug and scraped and subsumed under development, under office buildings and houses, a veneer of imported soil, a sprinkling of fashionable landscape trees and bushes and rolled out lawns. A hundred years ago men worked hard here, turning the wide ancient riverbed for gold dust that nature had deposited in so many ounces per ton. Now we get soft in air conditioned offices and eat snacks, and just a few weird ones run along the sidewalk.

To my left, mounds of old rock, smoothed and rounded by running waters unimaginable numbers of years ago, lifted and piled high by the gold dredgers. Then a century of lichen and topsoil and stunted digger pines taking root. Then bulldozers tore into them where the road needed to be. Nothing is left but a thin ridge between the road and the freeway, and I wonder who last walked atop that particular ridge, had lunch next to that sun-blackened boulder before the road and the freeway were even thought of, way back when the big steam dredgers floated in their migrating ponds, how long ago was that, what was he thinking? If he had magic glasses and could see a hundred years ahead, what would he make of this half-naked man running nowhere and back – and if I had those glasses, what would I see on this old road a century hence?

To my right, the road itself, four lanes of sparse traffic beyond which low-rise office buildings and cheerful chain restaurants straight out of Office Space squat between new lawns and blinding parking lots. I barely glance at them. At the bottom of the hill, I do a little spring-heeled turnaround dance in the shadow of the new railroad crossing arm and commence trudging back uphill. I’m halfway through and think, damn, I might make it after all, this outdoor running gig isn’t so bad. It’s nearing noon and traffic increases and I am shirtless and sweating and starting the seasonal tanning process and aware that drivers glance over maybe to idly wonder what the tattoo is supposed to be, and I decide it would be the ultimate shame to be seen walking; so I create a rhythm with my swinging arms, an upper-body waltz that goes LEFT-right-left RIGHT-left-right LEFT-right-left and it keeps me going, focused on every step and every gained inch of elevation.

A worker from another building floats into view, coming downhill, slim and lithe. A small polite smile as she passes by, gliding over the concrete like a chocolate elf over snow. The old rock piles, now on my right, aren’t so interesting anymore.

Back at the gym I feel large like a blown up balloon, damp, using all my lungs. The place is crowded and noisy and smells of sweat and I see several people I know. It’s nothing like early in the morning, it’s a party by comparison. I go through some exercise routines, this, that, whatever feels right. The point is to feel great and you know what? I do. Back at my desk I google up a map and find I ran three and a half miles. Well, that sounds about right. Maybe it’s time for a new routine, at least until it gets too hot out.