My run this morning was a good one, and so was Martha's. For one thing, we both finished up without ending up in a downpour at any point (my other pair of shoes are still wet from Saturday). And although it warmed up quickly and the humidity rose, conditions were still very nice. I have been trying to avoid running the same route every day, so once again I took a long circuitous route, circling around the downtown area and back through the Will Henry Stevens covered bridge in the opposite direction from last week. There were plenty of walkers out and I felt unusually good, perhaps because of the cooler temperatures and my new shoes.
About a mile or two into the run, I passed Duncan Greenlee, owner of Yardmongers, a lawn service in Highlands, unloading a lawnmower from his truck in a driveway. Duncan is an interesting man, a fellow Presbyterian whom I have known for a long time. His occupation belies a surprising education, which includes a fine arts degree from Cornell University - he is well-known for his cartoons in the local newspaper. I happened to know that he had undergone knee replacement surgery last year on both knees, and I paused to speak to him and ask him how the surgery had gone. "Oh, it went well, but now I've got problems with my feet." I shrugged philosophically and said, "If it's not one thing, it's another, as I well know! The important thing is to just keep moving forward."
"Siempre adelante nunca atras," he said (handily providing me with the title for this post). "What's that?" I asked, and he repeated it. "Always forward, never back." Duncan employs a lot of hispanic helpers and knows Spanish well, and I reflected that this was advice that a man who walks behind a lawnmower for miles and miles would take to heart. I thought about that phrase during the next four or five miles. It's a good motto for a runner. When I returned home, I discovered that it is the title of a book by Mary Luz Bermudez, which in turn is based upon the motto of St. Junipero, a recently-canonized Franciscan friar who founded several California missions, including the San Juan Capistrano mission. It also has political overtones in describing the difficult struggle that hispanic people had in California, and still have in many parts of this country today.
I finished my run at the same time that Vicki and Fred, running separately, were finishing theirs, and we all stood and chatted for a little while. Fred said that he had encountered "his" bear again, a young male who keeps going after his bird feeder. "I saw him this morning, coming across my lawn, and I ran up to the porch to grab my bird feeder and take it inside. He just stopped and sat down and glared at me!" It turns out that this hungry young bear is part of Fred's neighborhood on the summit of Big Bearpen Mountain, which I have written about many times in this blog. "He sleeps out behind my house," Fred said. "I see him nearly every day. And he's starting to get big!"
"You've got to stop feeding him, Fred!"
I have not run up Big Bearpen in a couple of weeks, and now I am thinking I may avoid it until Fred's friend decides to hibernate for the winter. I have encountered bears up close more than once while running, and it is always unnerving to face a wild, unpredictable creature, who can climb trees and can run a lot faster than I can.
"Always forward, never back," I thought. "Until you see a bear."
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