Jogging Envy

Now that the weather is back down into the low 80’s and high 70’s, and not quite as sweltering as in the past few weeks, I see more and more people out jogging on the streets of Chicago. And I’m jealous.

I never thought I would ever see the day when I regretted not being able to run. It’s been ten days since I last laced up my running shoes and pounded the pavement with my long, loping strides, but that “pounding” part seems to have been the problem. Until my plantar fasciitis clears up, which could take a few more weeks, I won’t be running again any time soon.

I ran track and cross country in high school, and hated almost every minute of it. I did it mainly because Dad said I needed to do something active with my free time. I knew he was right, but that didn’t mean I really wanted to run. We lived in a tiny town in the very rural southwest corner of Michigan. What else was I going to do? (I played basketball in the winter for two years, in 8^th and 9^th grades, before I staged my version of rebellion by deciding I needed my winters off). So I ran.

At the time, I took for granted the excellent physical shape I was in because of these pursuits. Not every high school kid can run a mile in five minutes, 30 seconds (which I only did once, which was quite enough), or run 3.1 miles in 19:30, but there were plenty of other runners who were faster and more resilient than I, and I tended to judge my accomplishments vis-à-vis theirs. I never felt like a very good runner, which was one reason I didn’t really enjoy it. The monotony was another reason.

Back in March or April, I finally decided to do something about the weight I had gained in the past few years. In college, I did a karate workout at least twice a week, and there were some years when I also lifted weights regularly. I wasn’t as trim as I had been in high school, but I stayed fit. My gut stayed behind my belt, where it belonged.

Then came two years of getting a teaching certificate, which included one very stressful year of student teaching. This was followed by a year and a half of ultra-stressful teaching on the South Side of Chicago. My gut wasn’t huge (I never looked pregnant or anything, a look I desperately never want to sport), but I had grown tired of it pushing against the buttons of my shirts. It was time to slim down.

I was too cheap to join a gym, but I had a decent pair of running shoes, so I bit the bullet and started running. As usual, I pushed myself way too hard my first time out. After only about half a mile, I felt like puking. I only made it a mile that day, one very sweaty, achy, gaspingly uninspiring mile. I quickly changed my tactics: a slower pace, permission to walk a half-mile for every mile I ran, less pressure on myself to make some kind of arbitrary time.

Soon I was up to a mile and a half, then two miles, then two and a half miles, then three miles. Every time I went out, I enjoyed myself a little more. The monotony was still there, but this time I taught myself to savor the runners’ high, that rush of endorphins right at the end of a run that makes the senses clearer, the mind sharper, the step light and brisk. Dinner always tasted better after a run.

The other good part came months later. I’m as vain as the next guy, so when friends, acquaintances, and people at work started asking if, and then outright saying, that I had lost weight, I felt another sense of accomplishment. I might never have a 34-inch waist again, but my gut wasn’t pushing quite as far over my belt, my face wasn’t quite so round, and to top it all off, I noticed other health benefits, too: I was sleeping better at night, even if I got fewer hours of sleep; I was more relaxed during the day, and had deeper reserves of energy.

Nine days ago, I ran 3.5 miles in about 33 minutes, without stopping, for the second day in a row. The next day, I limped from morning ‘til night because my right heel hurt badly, as if someone had sunk a nail deep into the muscle and bone, a nail I drove deeper with each hobbling step I took.

When I was seven or eight, and running a mile with my dad before he ran his daily six, I would have welcomed the excuse not to run. Back then, I only ran because I knew Dad wanted me to, and I felt guilty if I didn’t. So I’d have to “tie my shoe” every few hundred yards. Or I’d see “something interesting” on the side of the road that I’d have to stop and check out. I hated running. Didn’t want to do it.

I never thought I’d ever say this, but now, not running is driving me crazy.

First Day of Classes

I started teaching my two online sections of English 101 yesterday. Some of my students have even started their work, or have at least emailed me with questions. Tonight was the first night of my one face-to-face section of English 101. I haven’t taught 101 at this college before, so I was a little nervous. I shouldn’t have been. When I get in front of a class, it feels like I never left, even if all of the students are new. This is what I need to be doing full-time. Gotta keep sending resumes out.

Harry Potter and the Re-reading Critic

The best thing about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is knowing that there are six more books after it that more fully develop the story. On its own, Harry Potter 1 is a rather bland read. It is intriguing enough, however, that the promise of more depth and detail in the following six books makes it worth the few hours takes to read the first short novel. The story of Harry’s development from a child into a young adult is, of course, timeless and engaging, but just from a technical standpoint, anyone who enjoys arc-driven storytelling will find plenty to admire throughout the course of all seven books.

From the first, I was dead set against reading any of the Harry Potter novels. They were children’s books; I don’t read children’s books. Widespread hyperbolic comparisons to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a saga I absolutely adore and have read many times, didn’t help any. It sounded to me like blasphemy to state that anything could be as good as—or even worse, better than—LOTR. Such comparisons are ridiculous, of course, since HP and LOTR are very different literary animals. LOTR is a heroic saga in the mold of the ancient sagas of myth and legend (especially the Norse sagas); HP is a seven-volume coming-of-age tale. The two books share some themes and, of course, magic as a plot device and reality of their literary worlds, but otherwise, comparing the two is like comparing Star Wars with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

When I did eventually give HP #1 a chance several years ago, I wasn’t impressed. After re-reading it in the wake of finishing the seventh book, I am a little more impressed by Rowling’s skill, but the story of the first book, on it’s own, is still fails to move me significantly. In it, Harry is 11 years old, and the story is written to that level of reader: descriptions are suggestive rather than detailed, dialogue is sometimes stilted, and the plot is episodic in the extreme. Each book covers one year in Harry’s life at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; the first book is only 309 pages long, and in it, Rowling has to plant many, many seeds that will enable the following six books to flower effectively. Every character (and there are dozens of supporting players) is new and therefore must be introduced quickly, but effectively enough so that when they show up in later books (and some don’t show up again until book 7) they will be remembered. The plot of HP #1 has to work on its own, yet leave enough unanswered questions to keep readers coming back at least for the second book, which then has to hook readers even more deeply so they’ll come back for #3, and so on. And perhaps most significantly, Rowling has to create an entirely new world and make it believable. On all of these counts, Rowling succeeds in an efficient, workmanlike fashion.

Harry, the Dursleys, Ron, Hermione, and various other “minor” Hogwarts characters like Neville Longbottom, Draco Malfoy, and Severus Snape are efficiently and colorfully brought to life—and although they have small roles in book #1, they will play important roles in the books to come. Even characters who only show up once in this book will play a significant role in the final book—but to tell who they are at this point would spoil the fun. The story these characters bring to life does work on its own—Is the powerful sorcerer’s stone being kept at Hogwarts, and is Snape out to steal it for his old master, Lord Voldemort?—but, since Harry is only 11 years old and just a novice at magic, he gets by on luck as much as he does skill. His bravery, a central characteristic of Harry’s, also get him through many tight spots, but most of his bravery is geared toward things an 11-year-old boy, magical or not, could reasonably accomplish on his own: breaking school rules, standing up to bullies, jumping on the back of a rampaging troll (well, OK, the last one isn’t typical 11-year-old behavior, but even in that scene, he survives mainly through luck).

Of course, Harry and his friends are triumphant at the end of the book (like there is ever any doubt in the reader’s mind they won’t be), but Rowling leaves plenty of unanswered questions: How will the evil Lord Voldemort threaten Harry again? How will the inevitable showdown between Draco and Harry happen? Who is going to be the next Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher? Why did Hagrid get expelled from Hogwarts? Some of these questions get answered in book #2, but even as the old mysteries get solved, new ones crop up. In this way, Harry Potter #1 reminds me of the first season of J. Michael Straczynski’s science fiction “novel for television” Babylon 5: lots of exposition and world-building crammed with new characters and plot points, some of which get resolved that season, some of which get resolved in the next season, and some of which carry through four more seasons to the end of the series. And the whole way, more plot points and characters get introduced, develop, and even die. Like the first season of Straczynski’s masterpiece, the first Harry Potter book often seems clunky, bland, and uninspired. But these kinds of problems are almost unavoidable. Stories have to start somewhere, and the effectiveness of the threads used at the beginning cannot be fully judged until the entire story has been laid out and the full tapestry can be appreciated in its entirety. In this sense, re-reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is most enjoyable because of the seemingly insignificant details dropped in—a name here or device here, a plot point or setting there—that anyone who has finished the series will recognize as extremely important later on.

Much of what becomes important later on in the series is the wizarding world that Rowling has created: Hogwarts, of course, and Quidditch and Muggles and wands and potions and the Ministry of Magic and an entire history going back hundreds of years that is only hinted at in the first book, but no less real because of it. Harry’s non-wizarding life with the Dursleys is painfully real (they hate him and make him sleep in a cupboard under the stairs, for starters), his wonder at discovering the wizarding world of his birthright is just as believable because readers are introduced to it through the simple faith of an 11-year-old’s eyes. The prose, stilted and bland as it sometimes is, perfectly captures Harry’s point of view and acceptance of a magical world parallel to the regular, Muggle world we are all familiar with. Once Harry accepts it (which he does easily), we do, too. Still, the first book has to cram so much of the world into so few pages that we only get a quick glimpse of this intriguing place, and the best thing about this quick glimpse is that it whets out appetites for more.

In short, Rowling gets the job done, creates a mildly entertaining story, and leaves room for plenty of development. Were it not for the assurance that in six more books all of the characters, settings and plots would get more detailed and more complex (by at least one or two orders of magnitude), the first book would hardly be memorable at all. Every book is longer than the previous one, except for books 6 and 7, which are both a hair shorter than #5, but by that time, Rowling has planted almost all of the seeds she needs to plant to make Book 7 the immensely satisfying and mature conclusion of what started with a mildly entertaining and efficiently-written little children’s novel.

A Thoreau-ly Relaxing Weekend

The trouble with having a secluded and difficult-to-find camping spot is that every time I myself try to find it, I have difficulty. I tramp around the dunes, looking for my little stand of pine and poplar rooted in sandy soil, sweat pouring off my forehead, soaking my shirt, and even soaking the padded straps and hip-belt of my 60-pound frame pack with all the gear I require for a weekend—or a week—but, eventually, I find it. And I am never so happy as when I have set up my camp there.

Everything I need I have carried in strapped to my back. I could set up “home” anywhere, and I usually choose this spot, about a mile further south along the Lake Michigan shoreline than most people camp, in a sparse copse of jack pine, the silvery, uprooted tree stump exactly where I left it from the last time I was there, about three feet from where I will build my fire. The ashes of my last fire are never visible. I drown and then bury them, hoping to leave the spot as pristine as when I found it. The only evidence that anyone uses the spot at all is difficult to find: a few scattered bits of deadwood, no thicker than my forearm, that I neatly sawed into nine-inch lengths and camouflaged in tufts of dune grass because I never got around to burning them. And, of you look carefully at the thinner end of the stump, you will see another sawed log, about twice as thick as the others, about six inches long, propping it up, making an almost level, single-person bench.

Soon, I have my tent pitched next to one of the few poplar trees in this wide and sandy grove, my pack hanging on one of the pine trees, my food suspended from a high branch to keep it away from hungry and mischievous animals, and, after a trip over the short barrier dune and into the lake, two collapsible buckets filled with water that I will later filter for drinking. The breeze, when it comes, makes a soft rattle in the poplar leaves, and carries the sweet, soft susurration of Lake Michigan surf to my ears.

Sometimes, during the day, if I climb the short barrier dune between my campsite and the lake, I can see others, in pairs or small groups, rarely more than ten people total, often fewer than five, swimming in the lake or playing on the beach. But toward sunset and after, when gray twilight and then star-pierced darkness drapes across the sky, I feel I am the only person for a hundred miles. It’s not true. There are others within a half-mile, usually; certainly within a mile. But it’s that feeling that counts: utterly alone, reliant only on myself, accountable only to myself, needing only myself and the Boy Scout motto for company: Be Prepared; and I am.

During the days, I hike all over the dunes, all through the forest further inland. I’ll hike to Big Sable Point Lighthouse and into Ludington State Park. I’ll converse with complete strangers about the weather, the trails, the park, the view from the top of one of the few lighthouses on Lake Michigan to reach 100 feet (although our shoes, as the helpful informational plaques say, are only 92 feet up). In other words, the weekend as a whole is hardly the exercise in complete solitude I always imagine it will be when I set off from Chicago, city of 3 million people.

But in my campsite, I’m alone, and that’s good enough for me.

Dune grass, waves, and sky

Still point of the turning earth

Thoreau solitude

Still Officially a Geek

It’s always nice to wake up and read an email that reaffirms your place in the world. In this case, it was an email from my sister:

Hey Geek-Squad,

I am typing this from my own computer--I somehow got the thing to connect! I was up early, mad about the computer, so I decided to try it again. I went back to the beginning and installed the NetGear card. It took me through installation differently than it did last night, and then it found the wireless network. With your help last night I was able to figure some things out this morning, and voila! Internet access! Thanks for your help. Don't put away your pocket protector just yet. . . . You really did help me figure this out, and your idea for the NetGear card was brilliant!

If my younger sister says I’m brilliant, it must be true, and it makes me happy. Hell, I’d be happy even if she hadn’t said I’m brilliant—I was right about the NetGear card! My geek instincts have been vindicated!

Geek Squad Wannabe

I’m the tech support for my family: something goes wrong with Mom and Dad’s computer, they call me. Tonight, the call came from my sister—who was calling from my parent’s house. She had taken her boys to Michigan for the week; she had packed her laptop, too, and it couldn’t connect to Mom and Dad’s wireless network. Something about the password needing to be either 40 or 104 ASCII characters, something that was never a problem on my computer or the folk’s computer. I had run into the issue with Anne’s computer before, and I knew this was trouble. My geek credentials were about to be sorely tested.

In the past, Anne’s computer has been able to connect to Mom and Dad’s network, but that was before the Geek Squad, the real Geek Squad, came out to set up their new Vista-running laptop, and set the wireless network password for them. Admittedly, setting that password is something I could have done for them ages ago. I just never did, because I knew from past experience that Anne’s laptop, for whatever reason, wouldn’t be able to connect, and I didn’t figure there were a whole lot of computer hackers living in a sleepy Kalamazoo condo subdivision. I had avoided this issue in the past, but with my sister on the other end of the phone anxious to have her computer work the way it had always worked before, it was time to face the mystery of the uncooperative encryption.

I did a quick Google search and came up with a possible reason for the problem—the hardware in her laptop wasn’t set to use the same encryption as the router—or even capable of doing so. Since neither one of us really wanted to mess with the settings of Mom and Dad’s network (at least not without me there to fix any problems that my tinkering might create), that meant we had to find a solution within Anne’s laptop. And then it hit me—Mom and Dad’s old computer used a removable wireless network card! We could insert that into Anne’s laptop, and viola! problem solved!

It wasn’t, of course, that easy.

The first glitch in the process was human error. After a little rummaging through computer disks and peripherals that he hasn’t touched in years—accompanied by, Anne relayed to me over the phone, a little under-the-breath swearing—Dad found the CD with the device drivers, and Anne slipped it into her laptop—but the New Hardware Wizard couldn’t find the drivers. This struck me as odd. The wizard always finds the drivers when (then it hit me) when the right CD is installed.

“Hey Anne, eject the disk and tell me what it says.”

“Um . . . ‘Netgear Wireless Router—’”

I cut her off. “Nope. Wrong disk. We need the disk that came with the adapter.”

“Dad, we need the disk that came with the adapter.” Pause. “He’s swearing some more.”

The swearing must have helped, because Dad quickly found the right disk, which made installing the drivers much easier.

As it turned out, that was to be the only easy part of the whole process, and also the only successful part.

With the new drivers installed, we then disabled the built-in adapter and restarted the computer. So far, so good. But then we couldn’t figure out how to get the damn thing to connect to the internet. Anne was still getting the same error message, something about the password needing to be 40 or 104 ASCII characters long. By this time, we’d been on the phone for almost an hour. Anne kept saying “I know you have better things to do with your time,” but the OCD in me didn’t want to give up. I know we were on the right track. We had disabled the built-in wireless network card. We had restarted he computer. But all to no avail, and I was fast running out of geeky ideas.

After about an hour of fiddling with various control panels and still no internet connection, Anne decided to call it quits. My OCD tendencies would have kept me at the problem for at least another hour, but it was an hour later in Michigan, Anne had had a long drive earlier in the evening, and she finally just resigned herself to not getting her computer to work.

I felt like turning in my pocket protector. Christopher’s Friendly Family Telephone Tech Support had been thwarted by 40 (or maybe 104) ASCII characters.

It’s not that Anne can’t check her email without her computer. She can always use Mom and Dad’s. But as a stay-at-home Mom, she’s gotten used to having the internet just a few steps away while she watches her sons, ages 6 and 3. When they all visit Mom and Dad, the boys play in the finished basement, where the only internet access is wireless. Anne herself said the lack of connectivity wasn’t a big deal, it was just a convenience she had gotten used to, and she could get used to going “old fashioned” for a week. Technology is not the be-all and end-all of our existence.

My sister is right. A break from technology is a good thing. When I’m camping this weekend, there won’t be a computer (or indoor plumbing, for that matter) anywhere nearby. Just me, my gear, and miles of pristine Lake Michigan shoreline. And I don’t need 40 or 104 ASCII characters to enjoy that.

Nostalgia Camping

Without my father’s encouragement, I never would have joined Cub Scouts as a child, and then never been a Boy Scout, and thus probably never grown to love camping as much as I do. So it is entirely appropriate, even necessary, that I head out for a roughing-it weekend at least once a year with Dad.

It’s been four years since our last camping trip, and before that it must have been at least two years. As we’ve both gotten older and our lives have changed (he’s retired, I live in Chicago), we’ve had less and less opportunity to pitch a tent, hike all day, eat hobo pies, and toast marshmallows over the pulsing coals of a campfire. But this year, despite our busy schedules (in his retirement, he works part-time for a former retail giant; after quitting a steady high school teaching job, I now work two jobs that keep me busy 24/7), we made the time for a weekend at Yankee Springs State Park in Middleville, Michigan.

My first hike in the woods was probably at Yankee Springs. I grew up in Hastings, which isn’t far from Middleville, and Dad still has, somewhere, a picture he took of me and my sister sitting on a carpet of brown pine needles near smooth trunk of a pine tree; an army-surplus backpack lies open at our feet and I’m holding a half-full bag of potato chips. Anne’s holding a half-full two-liter of Pepsi. In those days, I guess that was Dad’s idea of a good trail snack. I’m not sure exactly where in Yankee Springs Dad took that picture, but I’m sure it was at Yankee Springs, somewhere near Hall Lake, on the Hall Lake Trail, a hiking route Dad and I have trekked many times since, including this past Saturday.

We’ve upgraded our trail food in the years since then. I’ve always got at least two bottles of water and a couple of granola bars with me; Dad carried the trail mix this time. But one thing hasn’t changed: Dad still loves to take pictures. Years ago, he had a Minolta Maxxum 5000 SLR camera with a wide-angle and a telephoto lens. He took that thing everywhere, took pictures of everything: the scenery, his children, other people, his students (he was a sixth-grade teacher and then a principal), and he’d even set the self-timer and get into the frame once or twice himself. But as he got older, the camera got heavier, and I “borrowed” it for a photojournalism class or two in college. He stopped taking so many pictures. In some ways it was a nice break. In others, Dad just wasn’t Dad unless he was snapping pictures of everything that caught his eye.

A few Christmases ago, Anne and I went in on a Kodak digital camera for him: smaller, lighter, and with an almost unlimited capacity for pictures (sure, there’s a limit, but not even Dad takes 200 pictures on one trip). This thing fits in the palm of his hand, and has almost as many settings as his old Minolta (which is now sitting in my closet somewhere). He loves it, and puts it to use at every family function: his grandsons’ birthdays, holidays, when we built a retaining wall around the deck a few years ago, and, of course, whenever we go camping.

During this outing, not only did Dad take pictures of our campsite, our tent, our backpacks as they hung from two trees, various odd-looking trees around our campsite, a family we don’t even know as they fished from a skiff on the lake, but Dad took pictures of me, and of us, in the same spots, in almost the exact same poses, as he did four years ago. For some reason I have yet to figure out, Dad has a special affinity for old, large, many-branched trees that look like something out of The Wizard of Oz. As we passed one such tree, which I recognized as soon as I saw it, our conversation went something like this:

Dad: Let’s get a picture of us near this tree.

Me: You mean just like we did four years ago?

My smile as I said those words started out sardonic, but soon turned cheerful as the shared memory passed between us on the quick and good-natured you-smart-aleck-type-glance that Dad shot me as soon as the words left my mouth. Yes, we had taken pictures near this same tree four years ago. And yes, we’d do it again, because this was a new camping trip, and because taking pictures is what we do on camping trips, and camping is what Dad and I do together.

And when I camp solo, to wilder and rougher places than Yankee Springs, places too far out of the way for Dad these days, I take pictures of my campsite, and my tent, and my pack as it hangs from a tree, and strange-looking trees and vegetation, and every so often, I set the self-timer and get into the frame myself, because I know if Dad were there, that’s the kind of picture he’d take.