Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

I have become a runner. Every morning, after a sunup breakfast, I put on a very lightweight pair of track shoes that Ben convinced me to buy (he too has gotten the running bug) and go out for a five-mile jog to the water. My route rarely changes. Houses, avenues, road, more houses (the initial stretch of neighborhood modest, the next expansive and expensive), a bridge, trees, open spaces, rolling green lawns, then that telltale white marine light announcing that I am close to the water’s edge.

Running suits me. Solitary, singular, very much bound up in a daily negotiation with how far you’re willing to push yourself; the frontiers of your endurance. At first, when I decided that, yes, I would force myself out for a daily run, I was a mess. I could not get myself further than a half-a-mile, and I would frequently find myself winded, or suffering the sort of physical agonies that beset neophytes to the jogging world. Then Ben — who’d become so smitten with the sport that he ended up on the university’s cross-country team — told me I should come spend a Saturday with him at Farmington, during which he’d take his mother out and teach her a few tricks of the running trade. Actually my son bettered that promise, as he convinced his coach — a very nice young guy named Clancy Brown (very thoughtful and cool in his non rah-rah way, and clearly pleased to have a talented young painter as one of his star runners) — to spend an hour looking over my form. He helped me rid myself of all sorts of bad habits I had already picked up.

Since then, Ben and I run together whenever we see each other (which is about once a month — not bad considering that, when I was in college, I only went home at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter). My form has considerably improved. Five miles is now the quotidian target — but, as Clancy recommended, I do take one day off a week. I also pace myself with care, as I don’t want to court serious injury or the sort of burnout I read about all the time in the running magazines to which I now subscribe. Now I can do the five-mile jog in around an hour — and I’m pleased with that. Like Ben, it is the ability to lose myself in the tangible physicality of running — coupled with the rising endorphins which brighten life’s darker contours — that has made me such a convert.

And this morning — given the meeting I must attend in a few hours’ time — an endorphin rush will be most welcome. The fact that the daybreak sunlight is so radiant certainly helps. So too does the fact that, at six-twelve a.m., which is when I started my run this morning (I now always regard the digital readout on the watch on my wrist before starting), the city of Portland is only just waking up. As such I can make it to and from my apartment on Park Street to the lighthouse in Cape Elizabeth before the bridge traffic begins to build up.

My apartment: a two-bedroom place in a reasonably well-preserved Federalist building on what I think is the city’s nicest street. When I came to look at it around some months ago, my first thought was that the houses here are very like the sort you find on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Immediately I found myself having one of those moments of encroaching melancholy that became so predominant after that weekend, and which I finally took steps to curb (the jogging being one of the ways out of the darkness into which I fell for a time). But I still adored the street — and the apartment was, at $1,150 per month, not exactly a bargain. Just under one thousand square feet. A little homey, a little old-fashioned, a little bit scuffed up. But the owner told me (via the realtor) that he knew it needed a paint job and sanded floors and revarnished kitchen cabinets and a bunch of other home improvement details. So he was willing to knock off two-fifty per month from the rent for the first two years if I would undertake it. Again it was Ben who stepped in. We set a parts and labor budget of around $4,000 — absolutely all I could afford. In August he and two college friends literally moved in with air mattresses and sleeping bags. They did all the work in three weeks, pocketing $1,000 each. They left me a very clean and airy place of white walls and varnished floorboards. I then worked twenty hours a week overtime for the next two months — and through judicious shopping at several of the quirky secondhand stores around town, I managed to furnish it in a style that is largely rooted in mid-fifties Americana, and which Lucy deemed ‘retro cool’ when she first saw the apartment put together. Frankly that’s a little generous on her part. It still feels very much as if it is a work in progress, just one step above basic. But there’s a room for Ben or Sally when they come visit. And Ben surprised me with a gift of an original painting of his: a blurred series of blue geometric shapes, on a grayish-white background; very Maine marine light in its sensibility, very much using that Tetron Azure Blue I scored for him. I had to hold back my tears when my son showed up with the painting, telling me: ‘Let this be your water view.’

He’s right: the apartment itself doesn’t have much of a view (it faces the rear alleyway behind my building and is on the ground floor). But outside of the occasional weekend revelers who stagger down the rear passageway late Saturday night, it is fantastically quiet. And it does get the most sensational early-dawn light. And it’s been such an important bolthole for me.

Coffee and muesli finished, I washed up the dishes (I still don’t have a dishwasher), then reached for my nylon running jacket on the back of the stool at the little kitchen counter-bar where I eat most of my meals. I am very conscious of the time this morning, as the meeting in question begins at eight-thirty, and is a ten-minute drive from here. I’ll need to shower and wash my hair and put on the one suit I own beforehand — which means a good hour when I get back from my run. Which means I must leave now.

October again. The first Thursday in October. A year ago to the day, it was the eve of my leaving for Boston. And now.

Now I run.

Grabbing my keys I zipped up my jacket, locked my door behind me and hit the street. A perfect day. The sun gaining altitude, that bracing autumn chill underscoring the morning, the city still hushed, the elms and pines on my street truly golden. I turned right. Two jogging minutes later I was down by the port. Another right-hand turn, a hard uphill climb on the pedestrian pavement that accompanies the car ramp up to the bridge, then a spectacular run at suspended altitude across Casco Bay. Then a stretch of shopping centers. Then an extended neighborhood of middle-class modestness until I reached that stretch of grand homes fronting the water. The homes of the city’s top lawyers and accountants and the few captains of industry that we have in the state. Homes that speak of discreet wealth. No ostentation. Just understated ocean-view reserve. Beyond this small enclave of serious money (and there are so few of those in Maine), there is a public park built around Portland’s venerable lighthouse. It’s a ravishing public green space; a hint of savage sea just a short distance from the city center. My run takes me right down to the water’s edge, then up a path to the lighthouse: a white beacon standing in crisp silhouette against the angry majesty of the encroaching Atlantic. I read somewhere that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — when resident in Portland — used to walk here every day. In my darker moments some months ago — when I had just moved into the apartment, when the gloom that had encircled me for so long like a particularly bad weather system was still refusing to blow off into the next county — I couldn’t help but wonder if Longfellow had plotted out his most famous poem, Evangeline, while following the same lighthouse route along which I jog almost every morning. And given that Evangeline is a sort of American Orpheus and Eurydice tale of separated lovers searching for each other amidst the continental vastness of this once-new world. well, life has its attendant ironies. Even when jogging.