| Gundy caught me right at, like, the 20k mark or thereabouts. On an uphill, naturally – he being of a mind and belegged such that he has the choice to go up some pitches jogging when I can only walk. About 20k by my guess. Or maybe a little further on. It’s an approximate thing, as there wasn’t some gravestone or the like indicating I’d been scythed at this or that point. Just happened. I’d had a half hour lead on him, what with him being caught all up in a bad Bay Bridge traffic snarl on the way to Oakland. It’s not like I was racing at all, just looking for some time on my feet at an easy effort. But still, you don’t want a fella catching you in about 12 miles after he’d given you as much as 30 minutes’ head start. It’d be more humbling with some, but Gundy’s just alright and I didn’t mind so much. So he caught me, said hello to me and we fell in together, talking about this or that, but mostly about this: Badwater. Badwater, which Gundy’ll be running a third time this summer and to which I myself have affixed a dreamy marker, hoping to one day collect. I suspect I’d like to be out on a desert road with a lot of miles behind me, brain baked and deeply unlucid, just waiting for that enormous, speckled and incorporeal nightsky to sweep me up. I’m an ultranaut, I think – more that than a pure runner. Not a great ultranaut, mind you, but that’s my tilt anyway. What I mean to say is, when I’m lucky, the compass points up, not north.
A pause, one freighted with a sense we’d passed below salt, saunas, miles per week.
Told me he was glad he caught me. He was vexed, was Gundy. I admitted I’d spent a great portion of my life vexed, was least vexed only when I was asleep. Between the two extremes were sweeter, more benign moments here and there -- moments like “No, all of your peas, Missy. And don’t be so dainty about it, either, you’ve still got math homework,” or “CSI always gives you nightmares. How ‘bout we watch the bass fishing channel instead?” My wife’d tell you that I’m not reliable on matters of vexation, not a person to turn to. She’d tell you I’m solid for questions like how long to cook a hot dog in the microwave, but venturing beyond that’s like asking a boiled turnip to do math. It isn’t part of a fresh turnip’s constitution, let alone a boiled one. Those are her words, not mine. But Gundy hasn’t met her yet. In my comments about Badwater, he said, he recognized a man given to probing the great questions in life, said further he’d come across one in Death Valley that had worried at him ever since. When he shared his question, I told him, “About 90 seconds for most people, but I like ‘em a little chewy, so for me, two and a half minutes.” Gundy said that was as good an answer as any he’d come up with himself but that it didn’t have the satisfying ring of truth for which he’d been searching, hoping. I said we should ask Wendell when we got back to the finish. Wendell would know.
We dropped out of the 50k, Gundy and me. Decided against the final 20k loop, so vexed were we. I told him he ought to ask Wendell his question without me there because Sarah and Wendell had already met my wife. As a result, they don’t serve hot dogs at their events and so it does not play to my strengths to engage either of them in deeper conversation much. I’m at a disadvantage, usually.
Gundy went over to Wendell and I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the latter smacked the former with his clipboard, threw it down and stomped off. Wendell must have thought I had something to do with it because after a minute he came over as I sat in my post-race wonder. He said to me did I ever wonder if he was a violent man, one likely to punt another grown man as far as he could. Chewing my bread, I pointed at him with a crust, said I had not ever had that impression of him, though I knew everyone had a dark side and if his dark aspect was a man-punting one, then I thought his finer qualities more than offset this. I told him it was, however, a great hope of mine just then that he was not a man-punter. He didn’t punt me, but it seemed like that was something he wanted to do.
Gundy shouldn’t ever have run Badwater that first time. It put that question in his head. It’s why he has to go back, year after year. And now Wendell’s stuck waiting another year before he can fill in the application and go back himself in search of the answer. All I can do is dream of it. My wife says when Oscar Meyer becomes a race sponsor, then maybe I can go. The answer is out there in Death Valley somewhere under that big sky; it has leaked through a hole in the celestial canopy. And what was the great spiritual question of our time? You’ve probably already guessed it:
“Do you think the Terminator went to heaven? Not the bad Terminator. The good one from Judgment Day that dies in the end.” |
