We start at the Founders Park, and my own preference is to avoid Fifth Street and its traffic in favor of the driveway through a development called Highlands Manor, and then through this little shady gravel path into one of our nicest residential areas, Village Walk.
I like this little shortcut; the lawns are manicured, and there are beds of flowers everywhere featuring different blooms in different seasons. This morning we spotted Black-eyed Susan, Shasta daisies, and a tall, delicate, red flower that I did not know but that Karen correctly identified as Lucifer's tongue.
From there, we climb Chestnut Street, where the road to Bearpen Mountain begins. Its relentless grade beckons to me on Monday mornings, but not at the beginning of a long Saturday run.
A right turn down Sixth Street takes us on what this morning was the coolest road on the entire route, completely shaded with trees and often featuring a cool breeze that I suppose is the result of the air currents coming down Bearpen Mountain. At the intersection of Sixth and Horse Cove Road is Highlands Townsite Apartments, where Anne Sellers normally spends her summers. We do miss her this year! And in fact many of the units are unoccupied due to quarantining and the dangers of travel during this terrible time of Covid-19. We have enjoyed many pleasant times with her there in the screen-in porch over the past few summers!
The route continues across Horse Cove Road, right on Smallwood Road, and then left on Leonard Drive. Just across from Townsite Apartments, I have marked the pavement in 200-meter intervals, all the way around to the School Track, and I often recall while running here the hard workouts I have run on this marked section of the route over the years. It is here that I would run, in addition to the 400-meter intervals I still complete, 800-meter intervals and mile repeats, and most difficult of all, "tempo" runs of three, four, and five miles, uninterrupted and at slightly faster than race pace. I was glad on this Saturday morning to be running a leisurely seven miles at an easy pace, chatting with Karen and Fred the whole time. We even persuaded Fred to take some walking breaks.
On Leonard we run by Harris Lake, which this morning was glassy still in the morning light. But I have often seen it rippled with waves in the wind, and sometimes frozen, as it was on this frigid winter morning many years ago. I can remember ice skating on this lake, an activity that for me consisted of taking a hesitant series of clumsy, shuffling baby steps while trying to avoid falling. I once imagined that it would be nice to be able to fly around the ice as others do, hands clasped confidently behind their backs. But that's not me.
Leonard Drive is another pleasant part of the route, shady and relatively flat, and it is where I have been running my 400-meter intervals. It climbs at its end gently upward to the entrance to Satulah Ridge, a subdivision where Martha's sister used to live. The road goes sharply downhill and takes two sharp curves, and this little driveway with a gate is on the left. I well remember three years ago while I was running here, on that side of the road, when I came upon a large black bear standing in the driveway, so close I could have touched him. And the gate was closed.
On around the curve, where I believe I may have clocked my fastest interval in my lifetime on that day when I encountered the bear, is a house occupied for ten years by my Mom. We moved her from Florida to Highlands in 2003 after my Dad died, and she lived here until she moved to Indiana to be with my sister in her final months, where she died in 2013. While she lived here, a group of us who ran every afternoon after I got off work would sometimes see her sitting in the sun on the front porch (now shaded by trees the new owner planted), watching for us to run past. I rarely pass this house without remembering her.
The house faces Pierson Drive and a flat, fast, unshaded section of the route past Highlands School, which on a morning like this was hot but into which during the winter a wind is often blowing. I remember running into such a wind some winter days when we would have to turn and run backwards, just to keep our cheeks from becoming frostbitten.
I believe it is still the case that this is the only "K through 12" school in the state, and our daughter Katy attended all of those grades; it provided her a fine education which encouraged her, the Class Valedictorian, to go on to a degree at Chapel Hill. Martha grew up in a little house a little to the right of this building; it burned down years ago, before we moved to Highlands, but I often hear her tell stories of her time in that house.
There is a track there, too, but it is only one-sixth of a mile, the curves a little too tight to run fast on, which is why most of us rarely use it. Photographs of the graduating class were hung on this fence this year to compensate for the absence of the traditional graduation ceremony. It is somehow a moving sight, and I often pause and walk here during an easy run, reading the names of these young graduates facing such an uncertain future, many of them familiar to us as the sons and daughters of families we have known for a long time. That cute little class mascot, Riley, is the grand-daughter of good friends of ours who used to regularly run with us.
Just past the track is a short, steep little hill that we used to call Hospital Hill, because at the top on the right is where the old Highlands Hospital was located until it moved in 1993 to its present campus outside of Town on the Cashiers Road. The building is now the Peggy Crosby Center, and it contains the offices of many of the non-profit organizations in Highlands, including the Land Trust and the Center for Life Enrichment. But when we first moved to Highlands, our doctor had his offices here, and Martha was in fact born in this building.
If one were to continue straight over the hill, he would run past the Presbyterian Church on Main Street, which contains many memories as well and where I don't think we have missed a Christmas Eve candlelight service for the past 37 years.
But on the usual route, we turn right on Smallwood Avenue, past the other shore of Harris Lake, and then retrace the same route back to its beginning. Sometimes there are fishermen on the shore of the lake, and there is also a fairly large flock of geese who have been known to honk threateningly if runners pass by too closely.
I have always liked a quote about fishing that I used to believe Isaak Walton said, but have since learned is a Babylonian proverb: "The gods do not deduct from man's allotted span the hours spent in fishing." I sometimes think of that when I run past some fishermen, and I am optimistic enough to believe that the same rule might apply to the hours spent running.
So there it is: "the usual route." We are fortunate to live in such a beautiful place, and to be able to run on these quiet streets, filled with so many memories, greeted by so many friends who live along the way, meeting walkers and other runners enjoying the pleasures of being outdoors in such a place as this. And I have promised to myself never to take it for granted.
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