Still Waiting for My Close-up

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.