Running with the Pack (14 page)

Tolstoy, I think, is right to this extent. Any satisfying account of the meaning of life must be capable of redeeming life. Life is horrific in ways that Tolstoy identified, and also, I think, in ways that he did not. Running may point to intrinsic value in this life. But a meaning to life would require more than intrinsic value in life. It would require that this intrinsic value be important enough, big enough, to balance — in our dreams, perhaps even outweigh — the horror of life. Can what is valuable for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else do this? Can I infer meaning in life from value in life? I am not sure. To do that, I must think more about the horror of life. I must reduce it to its most basic principles. I must identify its essence.

We are in the home stretch, Nina and Tess still cling grimly to my heels and I give them each a little pat of encouragement. ‘Nearly home now, a big drink of water for you when we get
there' — that always gives them a little boost. The ears prick up and they press on with new enthusiasm. We run beside the royal palms that line this part of 77th Avenue. This really is a world away, and for Nina and Tess it is a lifetime away, from the hedgerowed lanes of Kinsale when they were still young dogs and charged up that hill with me day in and day out. Over the canal bridge we go and in through the gates of the community. When we reach the bottom of the driveway, I stop at the mailbox. Someone has left a business card there, someone who apparently pressure-cleans roofs. On the back is scrawled a terrifying handwritten message: ‘Roof mold eats tiles — call us.' Ah yes, fear — the greatest friend of the tyranny of purpose. Back to work.

5

The Serpent of Eden

2009

Scrub oaks, gnarled and twisted, scowl down on either side of the narrow path; a path clogged with rotting leaves and the fallen fronds of royal palms. In the tropics, there is no winter: the leaves fall from the trees in the spring but are quickly replaced. In Miami, it is early morning in early May and already there is the heat. It scours the forest for the last hiding places of the night's steamy cool, searching under stones, digging down into the fissures where the rattlers live. Its moist and persistent fingers reach into my mouth, my nostrils; slithering their way into my lungs, insinuating themselves into my blood, thin and quick.

The path beneath me is old coral, shattered and withered, laced with the roots of trees, the jungle's hardened arteries that knot the path together, binding and penetrating the coral. Every twisted root looks like a snake; every new step is a leap of faith. A tropical forest is life in fast-forward. Here, we live fast, die young. This is a forest gorged on life, choked
with life, and the hot, wet stench of decay that clings to everything is the mocking response of time, laughing at life's impatient futility. The forest knows lives as Rimbaud knew lives. They are the
worms that crawl on a banner of meat that bleeds, under a sea of silken flowers
.

In Tuscaloosa, the heartbeat of the run was a solid thump-thump into the softened summer tarmac. In Ireland, on the Rathmore Peninsula of Kinsale, the heartbeat was thud-shh-shh-thud-shh-shh, as my steps quickly faded into the enveloping wind. In suburban Miami, it is the whoosh of the cars and the slap and whir of the garden sprinklers. But here in jungle Miami, the beat is utterly distinctive: thud-rustle-pitter-pat-thud-rustle-pitter-pat. Every time my foot hits the ground, an anole — a diminutive but ubiquitous indigenous lizard — scurries away into the deeper undergrowth, its tiny feet tap-tapping on the leaves. You quickly learn the frequency of the anole on the leaves. When the frequency diminishes — a longer rustle, no pitter-pat — then you stop. You stop dead, because that is a snake.

Hugo is a German shepherd, and on the day of this run he is a little over eighteen months old. On the following page, he is pictured in the garden of our Miami home. The picture was taken earlier this year, just after we had returned from one of our morning runs. He is now requesting that I throw his Frisbee, a laconic canine comment on the feeble four-mile run I was able to offer him. Is that the best you've got, old man? Of course, this picture was taken back in the Miami winter. At this time, he had only just matured enough to run regularly, and he hadn't yet had the pleasure of footing it in a Miami summer. Talk to me again after that, son.

Hugo is tall for a German shepherd, around thirty inches at
the shoulder, and lean — weighing about eighty pounds. He'll fill out to around ninety when he is fully grown; no more than that I think. His feet are still a little too big for him, which adds a certain ungainly charm to his movements, especially when he switches from canter to sprint. He is dark — his body black, except for the red of his chest, underbelly, legs and feet. Hugo is from Germany — a foreigner like me.

Not only outsiders, we are minor outlaws. Our little runs are in defiance of the law. Miami is the most dog-unfriendly place I have ever heard of, let alone lived in; although, from what I gather, everywhere is becoming dog-unfriendly (part of a more general unfriendliness, I suspect). One's every turn is dogged — no pun intended — with a draconian set of laws that require dogs to be leashed in all public places. Except, of course, in the specially designated dog parks — I think there are three in the entire city, tiny faeces-strewn enclosures, where one can barely swing a cat let alone walk a dog. And anyway Hugo needs to run, not walk. And at his pace, not mine — not tied to me like a prisoner. If he can't run, his soul
will die. And so we find ourselves running where we can't be seen.

I have grown old and young again many times. When the pack that runs beside me grows old and can no longer run with me, I stay at home and grow old with them. Today I am becoming young again, although that is not how it feels. Growing young again is hard work — harder every time. Once I get my youth back, running will once again be a treat for both body and soul. Today, that's only half true. If I can keep going long enough for the pain in my knee to subside; if my back doesn't seize up, or my calf give out on me; if I can just put up with the pain in my Achilles for the first mile or two, it will usually fade after that; if I can just get enough air into these ageing lungs, get this ancient and cloudy blood gushing through stiffening arteries — then maybe once again my body can have a little party on the endorphins. But that's unlikely on today's run with Hugo in snakeland. I have only recently started running again with Hugo, after a long, long lay-off.

This lay-off was the result of two things. When we first moved to Miami, I tried running with Nina and Tess — just once, because it was clear they couldn't do it any more. So they stopped running and consequently I stopped running. It was the guilt: I couldn't deal with the reproachful looks every time I tried to leave the house in running gear. Why aren't you taking us? What have we done? Tess passed away in February of last year. She was ten years old. Nina was twelve when this happened and a very old, very frail dog. I really didn't see just how old and frail. Nina hung on for three weeks after Tess died, rattling around the house looking for her old friend, and then suffered massive organ failure. I'd just returned from a speaking engagement in the Netherlands — a long-standing commitment I couldn't get out of — and I'd been away for
three days. Emma told me that Nina was a little off-colour, but I put it down to my absence coming so soon after Tess's disappearance. My diagnosis was apparently confirmed when she perked up on my late-night arrival, and we split a small pizza. The next morning when we came downstairs, she couldn't stand. I carried her into the vet, just as I had done for Tess three weeks earlier. It was awful for us that they went so close together, but without any doubt the best for them. And I'm happy it turned out that way.

After a while, we acquired Hugo as a tumbling eight-week-old puppy — a first-birthday present for our son, Brenin, was the spin I put on it. And, it is true, Brenin had known Nina and Tess since he was two days old — his first word was ‘dog' — and he missed them when they went. That was around a year ago — you should not run with a big dog until he's at least a year old; his growing bones are just not ready for it. Putting together the absence of a dog that needs to run and the night-after-night of sleep deprivation that goes hand in hand with a restless and demanding baby boy, I just could not manage to persuade myself to run. At least, not regularly — and if I don't do it regularly, running becomes a deeply unpleasant slog: work not play. And so I stopped running completely.

So it has been a long time — two years all told — and this is the first time I've got back to running regularly since we moved to Miami and since I became a father. I have become a fat and slow father. With the run of today, I'm slowly working my way back and the former experiential perquisites of the run just haven't started happening for me yet. When I am in better shape, and the rhythm of the run holds me in its spell, my thoughts will dance in a way they never seem to do when I am not running. But that will not happen today. The thoughts that come today are slower, languid, like the gentle
rustle of snakes in the undergrowth. These are thoughts that come from exhaustion without rhythm. Perhaps these are thoughts that would not appear — thoughts my brain would not allow — when I am in a less weakened state. Meditation through mortification of the body: an ancient tradition that lives on in this little part of south Florida where Hugo and I run today.

I hope Hugo enjoys these runs. I think he does. His young life is certainly impatient enough to be on the road in the mornings. But perhaps he understands that the longer I dally at my computer, recording and inspecting whatever ideas the night has offered up, the more the growing heat will make us suffer. Perhaps he wants to be out and safely back home to the swimming pool before the snakes come out for their midday bask on the paths and boulders of coral that a younger sea has sprinkled through the forest. If so, I share these sentiments.

Hugo presses on. When we are in the woods, he must run behind me. The woods are alive with snakes. If I'm bitten, it's going to smart, but ultimately I'll be okay, probably. If he's bitten, then the prognosis is less clear. A bite to the legs or snout — he'll probably survive. A bite to the torso — his chances are not so good. But he is young and impatient, and he wants to see what life has in store for him further up the trail. He presses at my heels, nearly tripping me up. ‘Back!' I snarl, gesticulating with my thumb, but smiling inwardly at this echo of years gone by. He dutifully drops a few paces back, a resolution that he will soon forget.

For obvious reasons, I'm teaching Hugo to fear the snake. It's not hard: I fear the snake. And one thing we parents are very good at is transferring our fears to our children. I'm
not as bad as Emma. She has a general-purpose, context-independent, turned-to-stone terror of snakes. You merely have to say the word ‘snake' and she blanches. Once, a number of years ago on our first holiday together, we were eating at the Hard Rock Cafe in Key West, and a man — a street performer — appeared with his boa constrictor. ‘Would you like a photograph with my snake?' It took every ounce of my powers of persuasion to convince Emma not to throw up in her lap (and I had to pay the snake-handler to move along a few blocks). I once told her about Sam, the snake of my childhood, and she nearly left me. Here in Miami, there's a black racer that lives in our garden — residing in the shrubbery at the north-east corner of the property. We have been living in this house for two years, and I still haven't told her about it. If I did, I suspect we would be on the next plane back to London.

My fear is more bound to context. When I'm running with Hugo, I rationalize. There are forty-five species of snake found in Florida, only six of which are poisonous. So I tell myself, with admittedly sloppy logic, the chances are 13—2 against any snake we encounter on our run being venomous. Actually, it is better than that — there are only four species of poisonous snake in this part of south Florida. And within each species, the numbers of venomous snakes are relatively sparse compared to the non-venomous ones. So the odds are heavily slanted in my favour anyway. I know this. In addition, most snakes in the vicinity, poisonous or not, will hear my leaden-footed thudding and skedaddle off into the undergrowth. I know this too. If I do manage to get myself bitten by a poisonous snake it may inject little or no venom. And even if I get the full monty, it's overwhelmingly likely that I'm going to survive. I know all this. But when I hear the tell-tale
rustling of a snake that is somewhere nearby but I can't be sure quite where, then all that I know evaporates before my eyes, disappearing in a little puff of irrelevant smoke.

When I was growing up in Wales, in addition to Boots, I had another companion: a garter snake who hailed from the US and whom I, accordingly, baptized Sam. Boots was not entirely enamoured, but I liked Sam, and so I tended to give him the run of the house. Sometimes he would disappear for days on end. When he reappeared, it would almost invariably be at my mother's expense — she'd be doing something like rooting through the cupboard in search of a can of something or other, and out he would spring (or so she alleged). My mother was actually quite fond of Sam too. But when a snake pokes his little head out at you as you are rummaging through a cupboard, then your heart rate is going to shoot from seventy to seven million and there's nothing you can do about it. No matter how much you suspect Sam is going to be there — no matter how much you rationalize the situation — when he does appear, something basic and biological takes over; and it really doesn't care about your rationalizations. That is how I feel about snakes. When the high-frequency pitter-pat rustling of a lizard on the leaves gives way to the languid rustle of a snake, my scrotum attempts to beat a rapid retreat up inside my abdomen as if to say: take the husk, but spare the gene line. Spare what is immortal in this body. And then all I am aware of is fear — visceral, irrational and overwhelming. That is what I have done my best to bequeath Hugo.