There are some boxes you should never open (we know what happened to Brad Pitt in Se7en), but Pandora's box of music-genome goodness is always worth exploring. Thanks to the Internet service's wondrous algorithms, Bob Seger's "Against the Wind" commandeered my Eagles channel the other day while I was plodding along on a freelance project. It's a song I heard a zillion times growing up, but I never listened to it very carefully because, well, I was 9.
I paid more attention to Bob's forewarning his time around. I realize now that he had been graciously offering us a prescient salve for life's difficulties, a preemptive strike that I soundly rejected for the flashier ideologies of Duran Duran, early INXS, and Lipps Inc. (ROI on "Funkytown" = zero). Seger's words finally hit me in their intended metaphorical way (ZOMG LIFE GETS HARDER AND MEANER AS YOU GET OLDER!), as well as in their more literal sense — if I have to run against even a slight breeze up whatever mountain exists in Tuxedo, N.Y., in June's Spartan Race, I'm screwed.
I started thinking about what drives people to run in marathons and in the more frivolous "adventure races" I enter on occasion, and all the running against the wind we do in our daily lives, and all the running we do in general. We run away from stuff — crappy jobs, confrontation, relationships (some of which we shouldn't have run from, others that rightly spurred Usain Bolt-like sprints). We run to stuff: to friends for advice, to the grocery store, to the hills.
In fact, an international consortium dedicated to promoting higher standards of living and social progress worldwide through entertainingly useless memes recently produced the graphic shown below, which concisely explains what people around the globe run to and what they run from. You'll have to click on the source link to see a magnified version, because I need to run to The Learning Annex's next image-resizing class.
Anyway. Many of us regularly run amok (at least I do), run our mouths (at least I do), run ourselves ragged (OK, I'm stopping), run interference (for friends, colleagues, partners, children), run for office (not me, but maybe you). Some people run with the bulls, though I might not be able to be friends with you if you do that, because that's just mean. Despite our best intentions, we can't stop running with the devil, running afoul of the law (let's talk about that over a beer sometime), running on empty (world record-holder here), and my personal favorite, the Tom Petty–inspired runnin' down a dream.
Some of us even run away in the Looney Tunes sense, complete with accompanying bindle stick and petulant foot-stomping. I "ran away" once, though you could never really run away in the small town where I grew up. At the time of my transgression, my mom was an engineering student at Columbia University, and my dad worked there, running the heating-and-cooling system that kept students and faculty in relative climatic comfort. I hated visiting this steamy underground labyrinth, because there was a lot of hissing and sputtering and other ghoulish HVAC sounds, but especially because my dad had told us that he could sometimes hear the resident vermin scurrying about when it got quiet(er) at night. He would usually take me to Mama's Place for lunch on these visits, though, if I kept my whining to a minimum, and Mama's Place had the best steak fries.
But Columbia University's boiler room isn't why I ran away. Monday through Friday, my parents endured a miserable four-hour roundtrip commute from the North Shore of Long Island to Harlem and back in their industrial-gray Dodge Ram van. Before you get too excited ("Seriously, you had a Dodge Ram van?!"), let me note that it wasn't a cool Dodge Ram van with pinstripes or a sunroof or reclining leather seats.
This is what it looked like:
We also had a shit-brown Ford Pinto, similar to this one:
Now that you have a sense of the Dickensian vehicular times we lived in, back to the running-away narrative (I didn't skip out because of our automotive situation, either, though that was another challenge in Lenox Land — our neighbors were rolling, literally, in Rolls-Royces and Bentleys). My parents worked hard, disappearing down the unforgiving Long Island Expressway every day for their hellish 15-hour slog, and they were generally (and understandably) pretty cranky during the workweek. Being the selfish, self-absorbed jerks we were, my brothers and I had no appreciation for such toil. We wanted our Hi-C and Hamburger Helper, and we wanted it now.
Spring semester, 1985. One of my mom's instructors assigned a complex final project that involved building a circuit board from scratch. This wasn't like one of those flimsy snap-circuits kits my brothers tinkered with in the backyard. This one had to power, like, a real computer. I assume this project probably made up a good percentage of my mom's final grade. She worked on it for weeks, tightening her connections, cutting copper, fortifying the insulation** — in the evenings, on the weekends, during whatever "free time" she could carve out.
And my brothers found the circuit board, and they fucked with it. They extracted it from wherever it was hidden in my parents' bedroom, violated it, then ditched it in a window well. The outside elements annihilated all working parts overnight, so the perpetrators' next strategy was to relocate the broken unit to the coal bin. (We had a coal bin, and a coal stove, and I had to stoke the fire and empty the ashes every day after school, and one time I couldn't find the metal ash bucket, so I thought it would be a good idea to dump smoldering ashes into a paper bag from Gristedes, and the ashes dumped all over the front porch, and ashes are not easy to clean up, and I got in a lot of trouble for the mess. I totally wasn't kidding about the Dickensian stuff.)
My mother discovered the fried circuit board later that week when she went outside to replenish the indoor coal supply. She came back inside white-knuckling the sad assortment of eradicated components, her face pale with a rage usually reserved for my father. She didn't yell. She didn't freak out. Instead, my overwhelmed mother whispered, "Get on that couch and don't move until he gets home" (she didn't even have to use his official paternal title), and then she wisely went upstairs to lie down so she wouldn't punch us all in the face (not that she ever did, but I wouldn't have blamed her in this case). I had nothing to do with this circuit board business, but I knew I was in trouble, too, because I was the oldest and The Responsible One and I had fantastically failed at my babysitting duties. My brothers stared at me without blinking, waiting for me to say something, to scream at them, to call them idiots like I usually did when they did something stupid. They knew this was bad. I knew this was bad.
After about 30 seconds, I stood up, said, "See you later" to the two dumbfounded boys on the sofa, and hoofed it three miles across town to my best friend's house. That evening, I went on a date with her and a prep-school drip named Louis. We dined at L'Epicure, a froufrou French restaurant overlooking the Long Island Sound on the Bayville boardwalk. It was very romantic. It was also very awkward, but I still knew it was better than the shitstorm that was raining down two miles away on Peacock Lane. I wish I could tell you where on Peacock Lane, but we didn't have a house number, because we lived in the middle of nowhere and it was easier to just say "we're the house with the giant wrought-iron gates at the head of the lane." Kind of like these folks in rural West Virginia still do.
When my parents finally figured out I had gone missing and started calling around town looking for me, my friend's mother covered for me, then strategically dumped me at my grandparents'. My parents eventually called over there, and my father told my grandparents to make me walk the long mile home. My grandfather refused, my parents showed up in the Pinto a few minutes later, there was lots of screaming among the grownups, and words were said that resulted in my parents not speaking to my grandparents for several months.
My parents (mostly my father) yelled at me the entire way home about how worried they were and what was I thinking and why would I do something like that and did I have a screw loose or something. I stared out the window at the secluded manors and servant cottages and Quaker farmhouses set far back from the edge of Overlook Road. As we cruised past the McLain estate, I thought about how I liked going over there because Susannah McLain's mother always presented us with seedless oranges that were cut in perfect halves and served with tiny dessert spoons (they didn't peel them and devour them in mangled sections like we did). We neared St. John's Episcopal Church at the bottom of the hill, and I peered into the leafy canopy of Old Tappan Road, wondering if Laszlo was on the courts that day playing tennis. Laszlo had just moved to Lattingtown from Romania and was dating one of my tall friends and was always playing tennis because he was going pro.
We passed through the gates and into our driveway; I bolted out of the car and up to my room. My parents didn't bring up my infraction again, except for the next day when one of my friends called and I heard my dad say, "Let me check if she's here or if she took off again." My parents eventually reconciled with my grandparents. I never heard anything about the circuit board.
I don't really know how this explains why I, or other people, want to run in races. Maybe it's a natural extension of the running we do in our lives, or a physical manifestation of the junk we're working out in our heads. Maybe we need visual proof of how far we've come. Except in races, the rewards are more extrinsic — a medal or a turkey leg or an XXL T-shirt that you'll never wear again. Plus it's guaranteed that if the wind's against you going up the mountain, it'll be at your back going down.
One other final takeaway? Never dump hot ashes into a paper bag.
**I know absolutely nothing about building circuit boards because I inherited zero engineering genes, so all details listed here are cribbed from my favorite content farm's "How to Make a Circuit Board."
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