Visions of Joanna
The road out to the Paine house wandered for about a mile an a half, or longer. I had no sense of it. I’d already run about 16 miles and intended to go another 4 and all was particularized in a set of small divisions I’d imagined. That is to say, I’d planned it, but it was a fairly loose plan and I was deviating.
The pavement was hot. On the way out to the point a blister had developed, soon into the run. I refused to acquiesce. The overall plan I would maintain if not the fractional details. The blister would not steal the moment.
So I continued. And of course the pain worsened, and the blister widened and took over my thinking. I would not yield. Off the tarmac and onto the Wollastonite near the tip of the point, where the wide lake meets the narrow bay and its fragile cliffs, everything intensified. I was awake there.
But then, miles later, on the road out to the Paine house, I devolved. I thought of Andy Paine, the summer camp counselor who read the science fiction novel he was writing to us as we fell asleep. I could see his blond hair and hear his calm voice as I ran towards his ancestral home on his ancestrally-named road. I could not remember a word of what he read, but I could remember what it smelled like in that cabin, Beetle Bailey.
It was the only cabin right on the lake, complete with a deck and rope swing. I’d exultantly swing from it every morning I could muster the courage at 5am or so. The lake was a cocoon of cold and remains as the concrete station of my childhood. Nearly everything good I can think of began in that lake.
I stopped thinking of the lake and looked at my foot, the one pounding and pounded, and I stopped to rip my shoe off. To stare at my skin and face what I’d made. I did not make it all the way to the Paine house. I put my shoe back on and ran back to the house we had rented and after all those miles returned to see all my cousins and parents and wife and children and, finally, I had to speak. And it was over.
Whenever I think of Joanna Newsom, I think of this. And how I listened to her that day. And was not myself. For a few of those miles at least.
