Lawrence Block - Step by Step

The song was one of four I contributed to a revue called Applesauce, and together they earned me $58 the following year when the show had a string of off-off-Broadway performances. But I wrote it without dreams of wealth or glory. It was, like all my songs, just something to sing to myself, off-key and out of tune, while I rode around the country.

Aside from Alaska and Hawaii, both of them off Greyhound’s route, there were four states I’d managed to miss over the years — Iowa, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho. I sat down with Running Times and a map and worked things out, and once I’d mailed in my marathon application, I was on my way.

My first bus took me to Columbus, Ohio, where I fit in a run before boarding a connecting bus to Chicago. I got a room at the Y and ran an 8.9-mile race in Lincoln Park. (For some reason I ate nothing but fruit for the week before the race, and this particular nutritional experiment turned out to be a disaster; I ran utterly out of gas during the race, and realized afterward I’d probably been perilously close to collapse.) My time running was no better than I might have managed on a good day racewalking, 1:35, and I was lucky to finish at all. (On the other hand, that’s my PR for the distance, and will likely remain so until another 8.9-mile race comes along.)

I went from Chicago to Iowa City, where I stayed a few days in some sort of hostel. I met a fellow there around my age who was also working things out after a relationship had failed. “These things take time,” he said. “You can’t rush them. I’m not ready to get back into things yet, but I can tell I’m making real progress.” And when exactly had his relationship fallen apart? A little over five years ago, he said, and my heart sank.

I hitchhiked to Des Moines, where I stayed overnight with my old friend Ken Bressett. In 1964 he’d hired me as an editor in the coin supply division at Western Publishing, and I spent an enjoyable year and a half in Racine, Wisconsin, until it dawned on me that I had other things I’d rather do in my life. Now, seventeen years later, Ken had relocated to Des Moines, where he was working for a major coin dealer, and he surprised me with a job offer. That was heartening, but there were still other things I’d rather do with my life, and after breakfast I went to the bus station to do them.

My next stop was Fort Dodge, where I ran a five-mile race, then caught a bus to Sioux City. I tried for a room at the Y but the front desk was closed, and a fellow outside pointed me toward the downtown hotels. “But you don’t want the Swan or the Bus,” he said, “because there’s nothing but drunken Indians there.” I went straight to the Hotel Swan, and when they proved to be full I tried the Bus Hotel, where my room cost me $6 for the night. If there were any Indians there, they must have already been passed out. I didn’t see them, or anybody else, and in the morning I went out for a look at the Missouri River and then got on a bus to South Dakota.

I stayed a couple of days in Brookings, spent a memorable afternoon with the Harvey Dunn paintings in the South Dakota State collection, then thumbed a couple of rides to Clark, where their centennial celebration was to include a 10K race. The little town was packed, every living graduate of the local high school had evidently returned for the occasion, and there were no rooms to be had. I slept the night before the race on the big lawn in the center of town, and still turned in a decent performance in the race.

A few years later I got to know Harold Adams, a Minneapolis resident who wrote a fine series of mystery novels set in Clark in the 1930’s (although he called it something else in the books). I mentioned my own connection to Clark, and later on he reported that he’d checked, and the locals still remembered me.

“There were hundreds of people there,” I said, “and I didn’t do anything remarkable. Why would they remember me?”

“Well,” he said, “as far as they could make out, you were the only person there who showed up for no discernible reason.”

My next stop, for no discernible reason, was Fargo, where I managed to find a room for $7 a night — or $20 a week. Years later I read a scrap of Internet flotsam that told of some poor fool who’d subsisted on a diet of nothing but beans and cabbage; he lived in a room without windows, and allegedly farted himself to death. The Snopes Urban Legends site assures me that this never happened, but when I read it all I could think of was my room in Fargo. It was tiny, and it didn’t have a window, and a person wouldn’t need too much in the way of beans and cabbage to replace all the room’s oxygen with methane.

Windows or no windows, I couldn’t resist a bargain, and took the room for a week. I stayed for five days, and spent most of each day on the streets of Fargo, preparing myself for the upcoming marathon an hour or two north of there in Grand Forks. I ran through attractive residential neighborhoods for as long as I could, then went back to my bargain paradise and rested up.

The North Dakota Marathon was to be my long race that summer. All I knew about North Dakota was that it was flat, and I figured that made it the perfect place to run a marathon. The course turned out to be as flat as I could possibly have hoped. It was an out-and-back race; we ran out on a two-lane blacktop highway for around ten miles, turned left and kept going to the 13.1-mile halfway point, then turned around and retraced our steps to the finish. Every last bit of it was straight as a die and flat as a fritter. There may have been a wind blowing, there almost always is in that part of the country, but I can’t say I remember it. Nor do I recall anything you could classify as scenery, beyond the endless fields filled with what must have been amber waves of grain. (No purple mountains’ majesty, however, not even off in the distance.)

While I’m sure many runners would decry the course as monotonous, I was too busy running it to miss uphills and downhills and glorious vistas — or cheering spectators, for that matter. I was able to run for twenty miles before my knee forced me to change my gait, whereupon I switched to racewalking and pushed through the remaining six miles. My time was my best yet, 4:26:23, seventeen minutes faster than Madrid and fifty-six minutes better than London.

I went straight from the finish line to the local Y, where shower facilities were made available to marathoners, and from there to the bus station; I just had time for a meal before boarding a bus to Fargo, where I switched to another heading west. I positioned myself so that my legs were as comfortable as possible, and I looked out the window at a huge purple cigar-shaped cloud that I remember more vividly than anything about the race itself. I watched it until darkness rendered it invisible, and then I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until we rolled into Billings, Montana, early the next morning.

Iowa, North Dakota, Montana. I’d now been to three of my four missing states, and had only Idaho to go. I took a room at the Hotel Nevada and trained for three days on the roads north of Billings, in the shadow of the rimrocks. I went to Great Falls, where the race listed in Running Times turned out to have been canceled. From there I went to Missoula, and that’s where I spent the Fourth of July, with some new friends who invited me to a picnic.