I’m back. I’ve been back for
almost a week, actually. Nothing bad happened to me out West, notwithstanding the
seemingly foreboding dream referenced in my previous post. But neither did my
ascent to celebrity begin in the Inland Northwest, as I fancied for an
exhilarating nanosecond that it might.
My 15 minutes of fame turned
out to be not even that long.
If you are a longtime reader
of this blog, you … are a member of an infinitesimal subset of humanity. But
also, if you are a longtime reader of this blog, you know that I have an ambition
that someone recently described as a bucket-list item. I guess it is, although
I’m not sure if it really qualifies as that, because I in fact have no list of
achievements I’m looking to fulfill in whatever time is left to me. I mean,
I have zero interest in skydiving, or hiking the length of Appalachian Trail,
or sweating my way through a standup act on some comedy club’s Open Mic
Night. (Were I to try any of those things, I’d probably suffer a heart attack
that would hasten the aforementioned bucket’s arrival. I’d kick it during the
flailing process.)
The goal to which I’m
referring is running in all 50 states. If you’re not a regular reader of mine, don’t
misunderstand. You’ve heard of people who’ve run marathons or even completed triathlons
in every state? Who crowd-fund these efforts and raise piles of money for
worthy charities by getting people to sponsor them? Who tie trips to far-flung
states with community service in each locale, leaving each place a little better
off from their presence? Well, what I’m talking about is pretty much the
opposite of all that.
You’re familiar with the
Latin phrase veni, vidi, vici? “I
came, I saw, I conquered"? Well, I come, I run, I go home. That is to say, I fly
somewhere, book myself into a hotel, get up early the next morning, “run” (plod
along at my own pace) by myself on local streets and/or trails for at least 60
minutes, celebrate my triumph afterward with coffee and maybe a bagel, sightsee
a bit, and then, within a few days, fly back. There’s a bit more to it than that—lately
I’ve been flying to border cities and adding two states each trip, for instance—but
that’s the gist of it. There’s absolutely no fanfare, no big to-do. I leave no
social imprint. Just a carbon footprint. (Sorry about that, environment.)
The goal evolved when I was
around 50 and happened one day to add up all the states in which I’d run. I’ve
always felt that a run must be of a duration of at least 60 consecutive minutes to “count.” Don’t
ask me why. Anyway, I discovered, to my surprise, that I already had logged somewhere around 30 states at that point. And Alaska had been achieved years earlier, when
Lynn and I had taken our belated-honeymoon cruise up that state’s Inside
Passage and I’d clambered off the boat at Skagway, Ketchikan and Juneau to slay
the Last Frontier three times over. So, I figured that running in
all 50 states was achievable. I thought, “Why not?”
Lynn graciously went along
with it—figuring, I guess, that this was a harmless enough pursuit, albeit one
that promised to get a bit expensive before it was completed. She indulged my
driving to Kentucky to add that state, acceded to our driving to New Hampshire
and Vermont while visiting her mom in Rhode Island one year, and—this was particularly
awesome—signed up for a Reiki workshop on Maui in 2013 partly so that I could
tick Hawaii off my list.
Last year around this time—per
an earlier blog post— I flew out to Fargo, North Dakota, which abuts Minnesota,
and added both of those states while visiting such local points of interest as the
tiny Roger Maris Museum, which is tucked into a shopping mall. This year I
staked out Spokane, Washington, near that state’s border with Idaho, and booked hotel rooms in Spokane and in Coeur d’Alene, which is about 35 miles away.
I'll throw in a little travelogue shortly. But first, let me get back to the five-or-10-minutes-of-fame
thing. My first two nights in Spokane, I was staying at the Hotel Ruby, which
is a refurbished motor lodge with a cocktail lounge, lots of funky murals and a
decidedly hipsterish vibe. It’s the kind of place where you’re not all that surprised
to find a group of Native Americans checking in when you arrive, although it turned
out they actually were Native Canadians, from Toronto. There was an indigenous peoples
film festival going on in town that weekend, I discovered.
This would become significant.
I passed a stylish, dude ranch version of a fisherman one day while running along
the Spokane River. He turned out to be an independent filmmaker from Seattle
who was there to document the indigenous peoples festival. He recognized me at
the hotel a couple of days later—he was staying there, too—and engaged me in
conversation. He was in his 40s. He had the requisite hipster eyeglasses
and over-the-top enthusiasm for anything he deemed even remotely offbeat or
fresh. When he learned that I was in Spokane on a 50-states running quest, his
eyes lit up and his wheels began almost visibly turning. He was stoked—clearly seeing
in this dorky mono-handed guy from the East a possible ticket to documentary cachet
at Sundance or South By Southwest..
My excitement grew along with
his. Although my running trips are so under the radar as to be utterly
undetectable, I’ll confess that I’ve always kind of wanted to be “discovered,”
or at least to get a little bit of local press, or something. I’ve thought more
than once, for example, of trying to interest a local journalist or TV crew in
my story when I finally reach my 50th state, wherever and whenever that comes. I mean, this whole pursuit is
kind of an offbeat thing to do, right? Never mind that I’d have no proof whatsoever
of what I was saying, meaning that the local journalist or reporter would be
taking on faith a tale that’s only dubiously compelling in the first place,
then deciding to devote several column inches or minutes of air time to it.
Soon came the inevitable
moment when the indie filmmaker realized my story needed an angle in order to
work. “Uh-oh,” I thought. This is when he started asking me what charities my
efforts were supporting, which community projects I was engaging in while in
town, what hashtag I’d engaged to crowd-source my adventures, and so on. His
enthusiasm plummeted as he fully realized I was nothing more than a lone guy flying
to distant states to do something obscure and random for himself and nobody
else. In desperation, finally, he asked, in so many words, if I hadn’t at least set this goal as a restorative
quest after having lost my right hand in some horrible way—like perhaps after having triggered an IED in Iraq, or having stepped on an old landmine while serving in the Peace
Corps overseas.
When I uttered the deflating words
“I was born that way,” it was as if I’d told him there is no God—or, maybe, that
I liked only big-budget Hollywood action movies, or vastly preferred Bud Light to
craft beers. I could see in his crestfallen face that the jig was up, that he
was eying the exits. When I later told Lynn about this, she said I should have
invoked Seinfeld and pitched my story
as a wry documentary about nothing—the idea being that my non-story, about a nonentity
traveling far and wide to do something a little offbeat but ultimately prosaic
was, in fact, the real story. I doubt
that would’ve worked, but I wish I’d at least tried it. The best I could think
to do in the moment was ask the guy his name. Maybe, I reasoned, I could win him over yet with witty email banter
that might enhance my Quirky Character cred.
Even that gambit failed.
Rather than tell me his name, he took my business card and promised he’d contact
me. Hey, guess what? He hasn’t.
I probably could track him
down through the film festival people, but what would be the point of that? That
ship has sailed. Or rather, that Mini Cooper has returned to Seattle, where its
owner presumably is hanging out in a cigar bar somewhere.
None of which is to say that
my trip was anything other than a success. In fact, by most measures it was outstanding.
I ran in delightfully crisp fall conditions along a elevated trail in Spokane that
afforded fantastic views of the river below, and I jogged beside beautiful Lake Coeur d’Alene in
that charming Idaho town that’s known as Resort City. I reduced to an even
dozen the number of states that remain un-run. I vastly enjoyed my walks through
lush Manito Park and Botanical Gardens and historic Greenwood Cemetery in
Spokane, my boat tour of Lake Coeur d’Alene, and my hike up nearby Tubbs Hill.
I had a great, totally unexpected conversation about our mutual vegetarianism
with a young bartender on the boat.
I love seeing new
places and sharing texts and photos along the way with Lynn and certain friends. Even just staying in hotels remains a kick for me after all these years. I
like getting ice from the ice machine, dialing the front desk for a wake-up call,
scooping up the complimentary note pad for future use at home. I’m interested
in getting the lay of the land through the local TV and radio news.
Maybe I should have
availed myself of legal marijuana once I realized that Washington state has it.
And perhaps I should have capitalized on the relatively short distance across
Idaho’s northern panhandle and tried to shoehorn in a Montana run, too. But
those are minor things. It really was a great time.
Even if it didn’t bring me
the acclaim that I fleetingly envisioned for myself.
