Introduction

"You can't be too analytical and philosophical

about killing yourself.

You just have to go out and run your damn ass off.

I did not think."

--Dean Crawford

The two visitors in my writing class--a father and his daughter--were special compared to the others who sit in because the father was the cousin of the university's president. They were visiting the campus as part of the daughter's college search. I remember thinking that having the president's relatives as guests in my class was a curious kind of pressure I hadn't experienced. We take pride in teaching excellence at Pacific University, and I knew I had to do a really good job that day.

The class was one of my favorites--a basic English composition class, but with a particular topic: "Writing About Sports." Students are able to investigate the many intriguing realms of sports while they also learn the basics of college writing. We had no idea that one of our visitors that day was himself a great sports story.

When the class ended, I chatted with the visitors and asked if they had any questions about Pacific. Both the father and daughter had liked the class--then he mentioned in an off-handed manner that he had a particular interest in these sports matters because he had run across the country just the year before. At first, I wasn't sure I had understood him correctly--"Ran across the country, you say?"

He looked normal to me--middle-aged but fit, average height and weight, a pretty good tan accenting the touch of grey in his hair. There was no obvious indication that he was an athlete with an unbelievable achievement in his background. His pretty daughter chimed in to confirm what he had said; indeed, she had been with her dad for part of his run across the country.

I had never met someone who had run across the country. In fact, the group of those who have done this is one of the smallest imaginable, as Dean mentioned later, more people have climbed Mt. Everest than have run across North America. We made some small talk about his feat. I remember thinking that I had had a great resource sitting right there in class and hadn't known it. I had missed an opportunity for the teachable moment.

We shook hands and went our separate ways. Eventually, the daughter chose to attend Pacific--where she won a national championship as a novice handball player. The proud Dad went back to work. Several months later, he telephoned me to inquire about collaborating on the story of his run across the country. Intrigued by the possibilities, I decided to give it a try.

I've been around sports most of my life. My maternal grandfather, who died before I was born, had been an accomplished baseball player in the Yankees organization. His example was ever before me as my relatives offered countless reminders, an invisible standard of excellence, frustrating, elusive. Then I attended Notre Dame, surrounded by some of the best athletes on the face of the earth. In my own teaching career at Pacific, I've been involved in coaching a variety of sports--cross-country, football, handball, baseball. Two of my books (with more to come) have been about sports. Some of my favorite teaching involves an academic approach to the phenomenon of sports. Something deep within me responds without question to the call of competition; I've been a tournament-level handball player for more than two decades and have coached ten national champions in handball in the last decade. I know sports.

In spite of sports being well within my comfort zone, I had virtually no way of comprehending what Dean Crawford had done to execute a successful run across the continent. After further consideration, I realized that most of my experience had been with competitive situations in which the opposition is more or less head to head, man-to-man, team against team. One up, one down. Of course, almost all athletes have to encounter and overcome that particular weakness that threatens their success. Baseball batters have to overcome that knee-buckling instinct in the face of a wicked curve ball or slider. Football receivers have to concentrate on the catch, rib cage exposed, while ignoring the impending collision with a hostile linebacker or the human version of a surface-to-air missile, the free safety. Basically, my experience in this area had to do with the athlete's overcoming some version of fear--fear of injury, pain, public failure, whatever. Fear caused by some external stimulus.

Dean Crawford lived with fear during his run. Much more will be said in this book about his justified fears for his personal safety. But there is another kind of fear, not one deriving from an external stimulus. This is the fear one has from the concern for meeting one's own standards. We know that fearful football receivers often use "alligator arms" just before a big hit while the ball is in the air. Not many average people would want to catch a football under those conditions, with a Ronnie Lott or Lawrence Taylor lurking predatorily in the vicinity. Yet strong safeties and linebackers are finite threats. The moment for action is known clearly and there is always the chance to beat them at their game, to put a move on them that earns that single step of advantage that turns into freedom and the long touchdown..

What about a continent? How does a man beat a continent? There is always the mind-numbing knowledge that it just sits there, passive, massive, indifferent, yet with all its many surprises, demands, and assaults on the physical and mental makeup of the runner. There is no avoiding it, no isolating the most intense physical moment to a split second when one's performance must be steady, sure, predictable, perhaps even brilliant. There is no readily perceivable target--no end zone nirvana just behind the defensive secondary.

Instead, there's the dim awareness that there is another ocean, one's goal, about one-tenth of the world away.

I do not really understand why someone would choose to run across the United States. Even Dean will admit that it's crazy. Nevertheless, he made the decision and then kept his focus clearly on reaching the Atlantic Ocean, in spite of countless distractions, incredible pain, and various daily threats to his security. In light of this, clearly something within him had to drive him--both drive him to the idea and drive him stubbornly to keep putting one bleeding foot in front of the other--across a continent.

I say "something within him. . . ." Dean clearly needed to prove something about himself to himself. Perhaps he also had to prove something to others. Perhaps the run was part of an extended exorcism of personal hauntings, those inheritances that stay submerged through a person's younger years only to emerge after years of experience and reflection. If so, they won't be visited here.

In fact, I am not sure what the story here is--a strange predicament for a writer. Dean used every available ounce of energy and concentration to meet his daily mileage goal. He was not out there conducting an opinion poll with the man in the street on the state of the nation, or recording the many beauties of the landscape. He was not observing nature. He was not writing a social history. He was not taking notes for a literary adventure. Instead, he was running--doggedly, insistently, madly running. Without frills. So, the country he ran through is not going to be realized in words for the reader as it might if this were merely travelogue.

Dean is himself certainly a major component of the story, but he's a private man, not given to sharing his innermost thoughts. Readers will find ample interesting material about the conditions he faced and overcame during the run, but they will not find an array of stunning insights into the man himself. All-Stars, Hall of Fame types, and world class athletes are often unable to articulate those most compelling aspects of self that place the self in jeapordy during competition. Or they have to speak in an arcane manner, a private language, that leaves almost all others, except the very few peers and initiates, behind, uncomprehending. To a certain degree, that is the case here.

The run itself remains as a possible core story. Yet, there are many difficulties with attempting to recreate an event as complex and sustained as this run. In spite of the massive presence of the continent itself, the run is composed of those 15-mile daily segments, slowly wending from San Diego to Jacksonville. If anyone is interested in what 15 miles means, Dean asks that you simply take your family car and find a fairly straight stretch of your average country road. Drive it. Not at Interstate speed, but say at 35 miles per hour. Take in the whole process. Watch the miles roll by--trees, farms, pastures, homes, businesses, malls, parking lots, churches, gas stations, bars, schools, playgrounds. See where you end up, 15 miles from your front door. Then, contemplate running those miles. Finally, ponder doing that six days a week for seven and a half months.

If you find that elusive as a concept, find your local high school's quarter-mile track and run around it, doggedly, 58 times. After your body recovers from that, then do it six days a week for nearly eight months.

Then you'll have the idea.

CHAPTER 1

PROBING: Modern humans are deeply insulated, perhaps unalterably alienated, from many of the countless natural elements of this world. We have warm clothing to protect us from frigid air, cutting winds, sharply slanting rains; readily available food sources with the leisure and technology to prepare them in countless delicious ways; instant sources of heat; walls, windows, and roofs that allow total control over what we allow to enter our lives; a vast array of electronic devices universally claimed to make life easier, avoiding the sharp pain of fatigued muscles and aching bones; and massive, numbingly efficient transportation systems that cross continents and oceans in a matter of several sterile hours.

With all of these devices and aids, no one really has to confront the world and oneself in an unmediated, raw encounter. We don't have to awake early in the day and contemplate , as Dean Crawford did, the particular day's task--a mind-numbing ten-mile run up sharp gradients, through drifting snow and cutting winds, followed by a five-mile descent, hip sockets, knees and ankles jarring with each step, knowing that there will be perhaps fifty more such challenges on the road ahead. No one really must do all that, confronting the inner self and wrestling with its understandable, insidious efforts to find the easy way. To avoid those moments, modern life equips all of us with myriad easy excuses.

It is a rare person, especially from the ranks of amateurs, who overcomes the seductions of the material pursuits of happiness to confront one's mental and physical weaknesses and limitations, the stresses of incredible pain, and the total indifference to human comfort of the natural order, for the purpose of facing a personally-defined challenge that will completely exhaust one's various resources. Instead, there are too many excuses, too many distractions, too many appeals to comfort and ease. The incredibly powerful allure of the Pleasure Principle should never be underestimated.

But one must wonder if life, perhaps life at its very best, was meant to be lived in that soft manner. We know of other cultures where the insulating factors are minimal, where individuals are routinely expected to search for the essential self, perhaps in a vision quest, or through an arduous hunt or other quest, to find a self not compromised by artificial, inhibiting social definitions. Humans have for millennia overcome nature through the powers of civilization to leave behind towering structures mutely attesting to our ingenuity, monuments to the majesty of human conceptions and human abilities to conquer the natural order. We have been taught by virtually all of our educational structures to value these temporary triumphs over time and nature. Of much less significance for most of us have been the invisible, interior achievements, earned privately, without public acclaim, leaving behind not one shard of evidence that a human being, on a private mission to overcome the myriad reluctances and infirmities within, ever passed this way.

A strong case could be made that most modern humans, with all of the advantages mentioned above, do not routinely have to come to grips with matters involving personal courage. To be sure, there are a few who directly choose to encounter opportunities and challenges that demand courage, and courage is purposively tested for the men and women who enter the military. It might even be said that it takes a kind of mild courage to move forward in one's education, or up the career ladder, but this is not the kind of courage I have in mind here. I am thinking of the courage needed to encounter whitewater for the first time, or to climb the sheer, frozen face of a mountain, or to face a wall of water as a neophyte surfer. Many cultures embed a ritualized set of experiences in the formative years that cause young people to come to know themselves in an intimate way, to know their capacities and limits, their failings and strengths. Once learned, these lessons are reinforced throughout a person's life and become part of what that culture passes from one generation to a younger generation.

Modern life has dispensed with the need for all people to learn of courage in a direct manner. Instead, we find ourselves able to participate vicariously, through television primarily, as we watch others who have chosen to encounter themselves and what life has to offer in the deepest ways. In short, we watch our heroes and heroines as they live their lives to the fullest. Content with that diluted kind of life, it is possible for most humans in the industrialized world more or less to go through life virtually untested--though there will surely be times when knowing one's full capacity to face the unknown would be highly beneficial.

Dean Crawford chose to call upon his reserves of courage in order to execute his planned run. He really did not know what he was getting into with this project--no accurate idea of the pain, dangers, frustrations, and logistics. Perhaps it was just as well. Because he had not pushed himself to the final degree prior to the run, he had only a dim sense of what his body would face. Once he started, he would have to face the unknown--about the conditions of the run, himself, and his own inner reserves. Short of surprises in our lives, we seldom go into situations with no inkling of the resources available to us. Dean Crawford knew he would need time, food, support, shoes, and his art. But he couldn't have known more than that. He would have to find out if he had what it takes.

CHAPTER 2

He is an artist, with an artist's temperament--impatient, idealistic, perhaps slightly haunted--with an acute eye for beauty, color, shape; the trained ear for the perfect note, the right lyric; always noting the unusual, even the ugly. He is an eccentric to boot. Purple clouds please him in the right mood. Why go with the crowd? That way lies the death of the individual. He is an impatient man, a bit of a loner, a driven man, although, as with most of us, the demons that drive him may not be fully known or understood. He is a successful businessman, familiar with the cruel demands of the marketplace. Above all, perhaps, he is a runner.

And it is while running that his whole person becomes fully expressed and comes into focus--the artist torturing his own body to create something from nothing--the Ahab figure driven to exorcise whatever demons afflict him--the highly organized, keen enterpreneur who looks for the profitable edge in any deal.

Dean Crawford, at the age of 48, up and decided to run across the United States. San Diego to Jacksonville. As he had reminded himself him many times, "There's no excuse." Crawford looks to such figures as Britain's Stephen Hawking, the astrophysicist, confined to a wheel chair with advanced ALS, who somehow manages to overcome his physical state to be one of the world's leading scientists. Such people somehow find a way, refusing to surrender to despair and passivity. Undaunted by life's surprises and cruelties, they don't look for the easy way out.

In any case, most artists leave something behind them, some evidence of their work, their creativity, their insights into reality. Painters leave their paintings, sculptors their statues, musicians their music, dancers and actors their performances, however evanescent, ephemeral, ethereal. Some artists, then, aspire to immortality by leaving behind some artifacts; others operate in realms where the performance leaves little or no evidence of its existence.

Running across a continent is like art that disappears as soon as the performance is over. Be that as it may, there is one stark difference between most artists and the artist of the cross-country ultramarathon. Painters, sculptors, actors, dancers, and musicians all do their work with some sense that someone will see and perhaps even appreciate their work. Indeed, in some ways, their hopes are met by those for whom art is a necessity--people who need art in order to live, just as they need air. Humans, as a corporate body, may need art in this very way. So, artists tend to exist in a world that is capable of appreciating their work, even if not all will do so, much less understand the work of art.

But the artist whose work is "the run"--in this case, Dean Crawford--cannot count on that knowledge. There are so many athletic attractions and distractions, so many that televise easily, the athletic effort trapped on a screen perhaps twenty-five inches wide. Replays capture the precise moment of the unbelievable move, the slam dunk, the breakaway run, the overhand smash, the birdie putt, or stunning failures, the precise moment when the athlete realizes that abject failure looms and can only brave the moment, go limp with the impact, spin out of control, hope for the best. Sports fans can see all this by merely channel-surfing in their living rooms and dens.

Art connoisseurs and sports fans seldom see all that goes into the finished product--in many cases, sheer mental and physical agony, debilitating fatigue, horrendous self-doubts, perhaps countless false starts and failed efforts, obstacles blocking their paths.

So, if the art work is "the run"--but we cannot "see" the run, perhaps only snippets of it--is the run, then, the totality of it, all 2,524 miles of it? Or is it that exquisite moment when the runner, the artist, finally dips himself into the Atlantic Ocean? Perhaps there really has been no audience other than the lone runner--the artist and audience in one?

"I'm going to Jacksonville," he told the exasperated state trooper near Lordsburg, Arizona. Dean had politely stopped at the trooper's request, aware that state law could stop him from running on the Interstate highway--laws designed to protect people like Crawford from the speeding, oblivious vehicles on their countless trips across the continent. The policeman was skeptical. "Gotta get to Jacksonville, officer," Crawford entreated, aware of losing time on this segment of the day's run.

"Jacksonville?"

"Florida. Gotta get there. I need to run here for a few miles, to avoid a long dog leg, and then I'll get off."

Lots of people can run a mile under ten minutes, but Crawford doggedly, sometimes maniacally, maintained that steady pace for seven-and-a-half months, for three-and-a-half gut-wrenching, agonizing marathons for each week of those grueling months.

He wanted to run a few miles on the interstate highway in order to avoid the smaller rural roads that traversed the country in a leisurely meander--not the kind of route a single-minded person would appreciate while running to Jacksonville. The trooper looked carefully at this strange apparition in his small office--sweaty, limping slightly, but trim, well-groomed, polite yet firm, not a threat to anyone--just to himself, a potential insect on the interstate's windshield of life. OK, he thought, it's his life. The kindly trooper let Crawford take the interstate detour and saved him about 50 miles of unnecessary running.

Crawford left immediately and started his run again, never looking back. His gaze fixed to the horizon, the pain, the future, the Atlantic Ocean, he said, "Thanks, officer. I'll be OK. Gotta get to Jacksonville. Can't have an . . .there's no excuse!!"

CHAPTER 3

Running nearly more than 2,500 miles across a continent does not leave behind much hard physical evidence. Oh, there will be quite a few drivers who motor on past the runner. Perhaps his presence will register with them, a slight variation in the monotony of their machine-aided journeys--"A jogger!"--especially in those places or seasons or conditions where such a sight is unusual. In flat terrain, an alert driver might be able to spot the solitary, struggling figure of the runner several miles out, will watch the tiny figure take on greater dimensions and human physicality, will perhaps appreciate the sheer physical feat of his running several hundred yards even as the churning vehicle closes the distance, the miles. Then, at highway cruising speed, the close encounter passes in a fraction of a second, the runner dopplering into the distance in the rear view mirror.

No driver ever sees a continent being run. It is not like looking at a masterpiece hanging on the wall of a museum, where the viewer can stand there and take in the full view, moving slightly from here to there to make the masterpiece come into sharper focus. Instead, with someone running across North America, a viewer sees a portion only, as if one were looking at a square inch in the lower left corner of the Mona Lisa. Under those circumstances, it's impossible to comprehend and appreciate the entire masterpiece.

This reveals a certain limitation to the socially dictated act of perception. We are not encouraged to see the process and the becoming, what ultramarathon swimmer Diana Nyad refers to as "emergence." We see only the moment, this spot of time, and have handy, ready-made nomenclature on which to hang it. When someone is running for seven months across a continent, the individual moment reveals the "jogger."

We miss the point.

The lucky ones, those with better awareness than most, those on a well-earned leisurely trip, might notice the same runner five days later, 67 miles down the road. Perhaps they stopped along the way to visit Aunt Matilda and Uncle Vernon and show the family's videotapes of the kids playing Little League. Or they went fishing, got off the highway, camped a bit, missed the big ones, then had to put a cap on the vacation. Everything seems regular enough, including that runner up the road. But he's the same guy. . . the one they saw last week. What gives? Perhaps a dim sense of déjà vu flits across their minds. Maybe they think they've hit a time warp, with Rod Serling's voice and "Twlight Zone" music in the background of their memories.

The brighter ones, good people, will wave and smile, or slow down and even offer a snack through an opened window along with a friendly word of encouragement. They still don't have the big picture yet; they have to engage to get that. Runners don't display license plates on their butts for the curious. But the people have a dim awareness that he was back there Monday and here Friday. They can do the calculation. With that, they may have some lingering admiration for what is going on. Perhaps it recalls physical achievements from their youth; they can identify up to a point. They have felt the lungs burning, the heart drumming, the muscles rebelling. But very few people today can identify completely. The roster of modern humans who have run across this continent is extremely small--perhaps the smallest special interest group on record.

The vast majority of the people who saw Dean Crawford on his run across the continent in 1992 were good people. They offered help when it seemed appropriate, or when asked. A lone figure running along a back road can strike a sympathetic observer as an extremely vulnerable figure. The sky stretches forever, plains undulate to the horizon, mountains dwarf the human figure, the bend in the river threatens to engulf. People are basically empathetic. When given the opportunity, they usually try to see themselves in another's reality. Strangers can be threatening to the native folks in many locales, but that is when it appears they are invading one's territory, threatening to become fixtures. But runners are transitory figures, plodding through one's consciousness and neighborhood, not raising a big fuss, but taking on the local dogs and insects, dodging the splashes from passing vehicles. They're here and gone.

But there are some cruel people who find a Dean Crawford to be a target. Invariably, they are among the most powerful one can find on the road. Encased in towering cabs, hauling huge trailers on eighteen wheels, or a load of freshly-cut pine logs strapped on the rig with heavy chains, Crawford found truckers on the back roads to be a pretty aggressive lot, often literally chasing him off the road, into ditches, culverts and shallow canals. In the South, he survived these roaring brushes with eternity by diving off the road into water filled with leeches or cottonmouths. And this is a man who hates snakes.

One must wonder why a few members of the knighthood of the highways felt the primal need to try to turn a helpless runner into human road pizza. Is it the sheer power of their rigs, gone to their heads? The uppers they ingest? Some arcane scoring system known only to them--with runners being among the most highly-prized targets? We may never know, because they were not articulate about their secret rages and yearnings to dominate. But make no mistake--a run across America will reveal an alarming incidence of animosity, ugliness, and hatred.

What is perhaps even more notable is that Crawford eventually began to play chicken with the big rigs. Perhaps he felt impervious to the danger, or had developed a certain kind of innocent trust in the truckers' reflexes and ability to judge distance and velocity in split seconds. Maybe Crawford's reaction was entirely predictable--after all, what kind of personality takes on a continent? But if a certain alarming aspect of America was revealed sitting in big cabs, another trait showed up in the frail, tired figure of a runner who, after two thousand miles, had simply taken enough crap.

Who runs across a continent? Perfectly sane people? Men and women off the street? Superior athletes? Former cross-country runners? Dogged individuals? Obsessive-compulsive types?

The figure that keeps coming to mind is Ahab--driven to chasing down that elusive reverse symbol, to him, of evil--willing to take a whole crew to their deaths in the demented attempt. On a crazy external mission, but one that ultimately plays out within the confines of the human breast, Blake's grain of sand revealing the whole universe. Ahabs cannot help themselves, cannot do but what they do.

What separates Dean Crawford from an Ahab is that Crawford was able to descend into the personal hell of self-inflicted torture, chase a continent, beat it, and come out of it alive, to tell us all, tell us all. With only average athletic gifts, but the kind of iron will that sends humans into the furthest reaches of experience, he kissed the Atlantic Ocean, after seeking it for more than seven months, but then returned to the kind of life that most of us experience on a daily basis. Ahab, the momomaniac par excellence, could not possibly have made the adjustment back to what passes for most people as the real world. Very few mythical figures have been able to do the full circuit, to hell and back, and if they do, what they have to say invariably goes unheeded, a crucial message that cannot be fully decoded. Western culture tends to model one-way figures. Ahab fits the model. Crawford, perhaps like many Native Americans--and not of mythical proportions--purposely put himself in touch with his deepest self, conquered his fears and doubts, and returned to mundane reality to go on with life.

What is the story here? At least three possibilities come to mind. There is the man, the runner, the unrelenting demands made upon a partially willing body. There is the continent, the country--California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida--mountain, valleys, deserts, ceaseless boredom, rivers, thunderstorms, clouds of insects, sleet, snow, enervating heat, and the people of that country, whatever ineffable qualities that bind them together, the Californian and the Alabamian. The run itself: not one step walked, fifteen robotic miles per day, at moments enough chest pain to make Crawford aware of the threat of a heart attack, nevertheless mumbling "Gotta get to Jacksonville!" in spite of the squeezing iron band wrapped around the inside of his chest, as if that hypnotic incantation were sufficient unto the task. Eleven pairs of running shoes consumed. Feet abused enough with bruises to be black for six months after the run was completed. Legs in so much pain that he couldn't walk without leaning on a support, without tottering--yet getting on with the project of making those same protesting legs function for yet another fifteen miles.

Some runners use objects in the middle distance as points by which to measure progress. They see that billboard up there in the distance on the right and check it out every thirty minutes or so. Gradually, the object takes on sharper delineation, looms larger, blots out more of the scenery, the sky. Others have the luxury of shutting out any distractions.

Imagine facing the daily grind of running fifteen miles. What markers are there? The Atlantic Ocean, from the vantage point of southern California, is impossible to conceive. The route from San Diego to Jacksonville does not lend itself to contemplation of a distant ocean. The brute reality of the run means crossing hundreds of miles of desert. Sealed in air-conditioned cars and trucks, buses and trains, Americans can safely ignore the desert. They don't have to force scalding air into their lungs, sweat so much that they eventually can sweat no more, losing the natural thermal relief in the process.

So, my task here is to make the reader come to some degree of understanding and insight even though neither the writer nor the reader were there. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Chapter 4: The desert

For hundreds of miles, Dean Crawford ran in conditions the rest of us do everything to avoid. Through parts of four states, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, he ran in desert or near-desert conditions, on scorched roads that passed nothing of an obvious nature except arid landscapes, cactuses, and an occasional lizard. After enough deprivation, Crawford started to talk to himself. It was often childish: "Wonder when I'll see another lizard? Come on lizard; let's just see one today. " In many ways, his time spent running in these conditions provide the sharpest possible focus for his effort. Crawford admits that his sole purpose, the thing he kept reminding himself, in these trying conditions "was not to crack."

One of the strongest impressions Crawford had of this portion of the run was of the sheer emptiness he encountered. He did not see another human or evidence of other humans living there for days or weeks on end. It reached the point where he had to ask himself, "What overpopulation problem?" Americans, in his opinion, had no sense of the distances involved in being one of the few continental nations in the world. Most Americans live in urban or suburban areas; they are accustomed to the many features of modern civilization--buildings, signs, traffic, businesses, and all the human interchanges that go with it. We are simply surrounded by all this and need it to feel comfortable, to feel centered in life.

Crawford found it to be so quiet that he could hear his heart pounding in his chest, straining from the demands of the run. He would be out there running for hours on end and have only minimal stimulation of any kind. Of course, there are things to see in a desert, but there's a sameness that is not found elsewhere. After hours on end, it amounts to sensory deprivation. Athletes often need to use their surrounding context to help in their effort. Pro basketball players know their arenas like they know their living rooms. It helps them, certainly at a subconscious level, in their shooting. Pro baseball players have to know the conditions well in their parks. It makes all the difference in Wrigley Field for pitchers and outfielders, for instance, whether the wind is blowing in or out. Batters anywhere need to know how high the infield grass is cut; infielders sometimes look like birds pecking in the dirt, hunting for concealed pebbles and clods of dirt that threaten to make a batted ball bounce erratically. Football players need to know if the field is fast or slow, or has soft spots in it that could hurt a cutback move. Runners and officials in track have to pay attention to the wind. These are just a few examples of the way athletes pay attention to their surroundings.

But running in the desert for Dean added up to meaning one of two things--he'd be running in high desert and very cold conditions, or if the temperature was bearable, then there was the bleakness of it all, occasionally relieved by some incredible rock outcropping. Dean would see little evidence of human life at all, not to mention other forms of life. And all of the time he ran in the desert he had only the Maggie and Naylor with whom to commune back at the campsite. It would have been different if he had had Walter Jones, but that's not the way it worked out.

Desert conditions also mean that there are no decent restaurants in the vicinity. Dean had to pay attention to his diet and HATES fried food, but it seems that having a restaurant in or near a desert required the creation of a menu laden with fried food. The physical demands of Dean's project demanded a diet high in complex carbohydrates, and fried food doesn't cut it in that regard.

There were other considerations--not being near good repair facilities if something went wrong, long distances between campsites or other distractions and recreational areas, terrible satellite TV reception (and no network feeds). The miles went by at about the same rate as anywhere else because Dean kept up a uniform pace, but psychologically these were long, slow miles, with few reference points to use to help measure a day's progress. All in all, running in the desert was more of a draining experience than almost any other conditions he encountered.

Dean came to be an expert at spotting emerging signs of civilization--signs, outlying buildings, heavier traffic, greenery--all those little things the rest of us take completely for granted. He came to have a sixth sense for the kinds of demands the desert would be making on him on a given day. Signs of life came to his attention in almost mysterious ways. Above all, however, in ways that most of us would find completely unacceptable, Dean Crawford came to know utter loneliness

Chapter 5: Naylor

[I need to know where/when he pulled the gun on you]

[Robert Naylor, her companion of sorts, had been boffing her sister, even mailing cards to her on the trip],

Dean Crawford knew he would run into various problems during the run, but it was a total surprise to learn that his chief nemesis came along with him from the outset.

The idea for running across the country came to him through an employee in Dean's gift card shop, Maggie Rhinehart, from England--a name she earned by marrying, for twenty minutes, some witless American guy she met in a bar so she would be eligible for a green card. Dean describes her as a "Mother Theresa" figure. She mentioned to him that was going to be leaving her job and moving back east. Crawford had regularly been running 40 miles a week and had been toying with the idea of something bigger. He wondered if Maggie would be interested in helping him in his dream project of running across the country while she completed her move east. He knew he would need a reliable driver as an escort. Maggie's partner, Robert, came to her mind--and he had a truck-driving background, so the fit looked good.

Crawford's plan called for the use of two motor homes, a smaller vehicle--an Isuzu, and the use of a series of campgrounds as bases for each leg of the trip. He would start each day's run early in the morning, with the driver taking him out from the base camp to the drop off point, marked by a small red flag (not used after the first month, replaced by whatever obvious landmarks were nearby), where the run would resume. During the actual run, these drop offs might be a hundred miles or more from the base camp--and the return trip would simply reverse the morning's outbound trip. There were very few days when the run actually started at the camp site, so the shuttle driver was fully involved in the process. For example, once a daily run had started, the driver would meet Dean at pre-arranged mile markers (at six, nine, and twelve miles) to offer Gatorade, V-8 juice, oranges, orange juice, or other needed help. At the end of the day's run, the driver would find the runner, Dean would set the marker flag or find a landmark, then return to the base camp, again perhaps nearly a hundred miles distant. As an integral part of the total effort, the driver would need a certain discipline, good timing, a good sense of direction, and an ability to empathize with the needs of the runner who would be so dependent on him.

Athletes need immense amounts of support--psychologically and emotionally, to sustain their efforts; physically, to assist them when their efforts are imperiled. Support personnel, such as coaches and trainers, come to know the athletes in their charge intimately--what makes them tick, what motivates them, what hinders their performance, and so forth. These people have to have strong inclinations to work with and serve others, combined with an ability and willingness to subordinate one's own interests to achieving the goals of the larger endeavor.

Robert Naylor, in fact, provided almost none of this. Instead, Crawford found that he and his project were afflicted with a moody, childish, violent-prone, functionally illiterate, irresponsible alcoholic in Robert Naylor. Other than those nagging problems, Naylor was just fine for the task.

Naylor had suffered a troubled childhood--having been kicked out of his home by his parents, going off to an orphanage and then bouncing from foster home to foster home, he never established the kind of comfort zone with a family structure that would provide stability and maturity. His schooling was substandard at best; apparently he never graduated from high school, a minor technicality in view of the fact that he was a functional illiterate. This benighted condition, unknown to Crawford when he hired him, partially accounts for the several times Naylor got lost or took wrong turns as the shuttle driver. Literacy helps as a credential for reading maps. At other times, Naylor may simply have been disoriented by the frenzied oral sex he had just put some black hooker through.

He seemed to have a fixation on violence. At one point in his life, he had run a pig farm. He told Crawford of the pleasure he took in slitting the throats of pigs. Even while on the trip towards Jacksonville, he kept looking for animals being slaughtered. He had an apparently unslaked thirst to see blood running. This was not a particularly comforting thought for Dean, especially in view of the weapons Naylor kept around him. To top it all off, Crawford knew that Naylor thought he was having an affair with Maggie--a ridiculous thought in view of the energy demands faced by Dean on a daily basis and the weakened physical condition he was in after his exertions.

It took Naylor only about three days out from San Diego to become lost the first time, something that Crawford couldn't believe. This meant, in practical terms, that Crawford had to run twelve or thirteen miles without his scheduled fluid intake. It was but a small harbinger of much bigger things to come.

In New Mexico, after having failed to convince a state trooper to let him run on a certain section of highway, Dean had to run eleven miles on railroad tracks. Naylor didn't get lost on this occasion, for he did manage to arrive on time with the expected orange juice. But Crawford was in for a surprise--off in the distance he could see his Isuzu, slithering crazily from rut to rut in the mud of the side road. Even from this distance, Crawford could hear the grinding whine of the trucks's gears--Naylor was speed shifting the four wheeler, trying to impress the terrified Maggie. So, here was Crawford having to jolt himself from head to toe on his railroad track detour, while Naylor was off goofing around in the Isuzu, threatening one of the most crucial components of the run.

Obviously, Naylor had little empathy for Crawford and what he was trying to do. Instead, he was almost totally concerned with his own creature comforts and showed little regard for how his behavior affected those around him. As early as the third day out from San Diego, aside from Naylor's getting lost, Crawford had seen Robert Naylor hiding beneath his motor home, or staring at him from under the chassis with a vulture's eyes. Even at this early phase of the journey, Naylor had demonstrated that he could not or would not help Maggie and Crawford set up the campsite, proving himself incompetent with the simple tasks of plugging into the campsite's electrical outlets and the local water. He could be counted on, however, to be nursing a glass of cheap red wine, Gallo, while the others worked on setting up the campsite. Worse yet, he often began to hit the sauce in the middle of the morning, reducing even further the little reliability he had.

Naylor smoked big, cheap, cigars incessantly, usually in Crawford's presence, another sign of his lack of concern for their shared undertaking. Crawford, who had quit drinking years before the run, a man who pays exquisite attention to his food intake and general physical conditioning, could barely suffer the clouds of foul cigar smoke Naylor emitted. He himself still enjoyed a good cigar at the end of the day, to help savor and celebrate his work for the day, but he never inhaled and he tried to avoid smoking from any source during the course of a daily run. Just leaving the smoke-filled Isuzu to start a day's run--even knowing the physical pain he'd meet--was a relief. Following a 15-mile run--exhausted, hurting, limping--Crawford had to face the prospect of sitting in the cramped Isuzu with the bilious Naylor puffing away on the soggy remains of his afternoon's cigar. These acrimonious return drives to the campsite could last seventy miles or more.

Back at the campsite, an exhausted Dean Crawford would sometimes have to be lifted out of the small truck and helped up the steps of his motor home, only then to crawl down the passage to his bed where he would peel off blood-soaked socks from bloody shoes. But even then there would be no escaping the baleful presence of Naylor because Dean could hear him, every night, raging at the harmless, trembling Maggie. Or he could look out the window and see their 33-foot motor home shaking to its foundation from his raging temper tantrums. Crawford wondered how she put up with the abuse, but she seemed to cower in Naylor's presence. At times, she seemed almost hypnotized by him, a condition Dean never quite reached. Crawford knew that he could put up with anything as long as he was meeting a goal.

Nevertheless, Dean has his limits. One of them involves having his life threatened by someone brandishing a firearm. As a young man, only a few years out of college, Dean had left a teaching job in California and moved to Nashville to pursue his dream of being a song writer. To keep alive he took another teaching job, this one involving the educable mentally retarded. His last day on this job was precipitated by one of the students pointing a loaded .38 revolver at his head and saying, "Mr. Crawford, I've got to kill you."

"Now why is that?" Dean asked, while he summed up the grim situation and tried to think of what to do next to save his life, lessons that his college professors had not included in their course syllabi.

"Because you won't let me hump my girl friend in the back of the room."

"But you're not allowed to," Crawford reminded--and then he swung his arm to knock aside the menacing pistol. Infuriated, Crawford pounded his disarmed assailant in the face, then rushed him up to the principal's office, where he used the school's paddle on him before throwing it out the window and summarily quitting. He had seen enough.

One week later, his assailant murdered a male prostitute in cold blood.

Crawford's brush with guns and violence impressed him enough to make him always seek a secure environment. He structured his life accordingly. So, when Naylor pulled a gun on him (which he did more than once), Crawford more or less knew how to handle it, but he wasn't dealing with a teenager he could take to the principal's office. He was stuck with the guy, at least until he could sever the relationship.

So, twenty years after his first brush with death, Naylor would also pull a gun on Crawford, in Byless, Texas--as good a place as any other for homicidal pranks. Near Byless, Dean found that he had to stop to rip his shirt up to use as a bandage to stop the bleeding of his toe, so he was off his stated schedule. He looked up and saw Naylor off in the distance. He had been shooting at a shooting range, then later at night Naylor did the Clint Eastwood thing, feigning blowing smoke from the barrel of the gun, smirking, wanting Dean to make his day. He would do it again later in the trip, just inside Louisiana. Blowing cigar smoke off his pointed index finger, Naylor smirked one time too many for Dean, then capped it with an ominous warning: "You'll never finish the run." It didn't take long for Dean to decide that Naylor was expendable. . . but how was he going to find a replacement out there in the middle of the country?

Maggie and Robert Naylor would thus not last the whole trip to Jacksonville. Tensions mounted, his erratic behavior continued, violence threatened, increasing the incredible pressures around Crawford to the point that Dean released them, given their need to return to California for a trial Naylor was involved in, just as the run had him getting out of Texas, making good progress through Louisiana. In almost a single stroke Dean left behind him the twin nightmares of the maniacal drivers of east Texas and the increasingly erratic, threatening behavior of Robert Naylor. As he ran across the bridge into Louisiana, into a new state and a very different landscape, Dean Crawford felt he had unburdened himself--he left a handwritten message in their motor home: "It's over. I'm gone." He hadn't yet found a new replacement driver.

And even after Naylor disappeared, he haunted Dean. His replacement, Walter Jones, would be staying in hotels and the like, not staying in the second motor home. Dean let Maggie and Naylor use the other motor home, thinking he had arranged it with them to take care of it and return it in good shape. But a month after the completion of the run, the FBI contacted Dean about the remains of a motor home registered in his name--found abandoned in North Carolina. It was a total wreck. Naylor had put an additional 50,000 miles on it, had run it into the ground, then walked. Because Dean had willingly let him drive it, his insurance company would not honor any claims--Dean was out $21,000. But even that figure was less than the emotional cost of having Naylor along for the whole trip.

Chapter 5: Materialism

The pavement in Mississippi shimmered and seemed to buckle from the heat with each step. Crawford had run in heat plenty of times, but this was beyond belief--as if the triple-digit temperature was matched by triple-digit humidity. That's impossible, of course, but the seeming is as real as anything could be. Even his own perspiration seemed too hot.

Walter was not scheduled to arrive for an orange juice stop for some time yet. Crawford had occasionally been passing by some shacks and cabins that seemed to lean in upon themselves from the oppressive heat. Battered cars rusted into nearby heaps without complaint, perhaps relieved to be out of action on days like this. The people, in spite of their lack of means, seemed friendly enough, though a bit shy around the stranger running through their lives. In his single-minded effort, Crawford was not paying much attention to anything except the brutal heat and summoning up the will to take the next step.

Suddenly, there was a figure beside him--"Mistah? Mistah? You want some of this?"

Crawford brought his attention to bear and saw a young black child running beside him, in the loose gravel beside the searing pavement. He was about twelve and had an earnest smile as he offered a big paper cup filled with orange juice.

It was like manna from heaven. Crawford drained the cup and offered his thanks. The youngster jogged along with him for a few minutes, a pair bonded through simple kindness. After a few moments, the child left off running while Crawford plunged eastward, toward Jacksonville.

The run had done something to Crawford. On some of his Sundays, the planned days off from the run, he would drive to the nearest shopping mall and just sit there on a bench watching the people, who were oblivious to his stares. He was like a kid in a large zoo--surrounded by interesting, exotic life forms. On the run, he was almost totally isolated from human contact. It had to be that way and he knew it. But it left him hungry for what he deprived himself of. On the other days, humans were reduced to staring pinheads peeping above the window line of speeding cars and big trucks.

Running through Mississippi and other parts of the South had left an indelible impression on Crawford of the region's poverty--some genteel, some totally dehumanizing. But most of the people rose above their conditions and showed a lively interest in the runner passing their modest homes. And invariably Crawford could count on them reaching out to him, with a kind word, a smile, some small but meaningful token of recognition.

He thought back to the ruined lives he knew in Laguna Beach or Ft. Lauderdale, people who placed their blind, unwavering faith in material possessions and mindless consumption. They measured their personal worth strictly in terms of income, real estate, jewelry, or being in the right yacht club. In their quest, they had lost or abandoned the human dimension, however. And once it was lost, it is almost impossible to replace. There were rewards for this abandonment of self, to be sure, but they were strictly material and transitory. Seeing this, Crawford wondered if this was really living. At best, it was artificial--true human relationships disappeared, replaced by attachment to things and lifestyle. A person's main efforts would go into further acquisitions, bigger deals, greater profits--while the essence of that person's humanity shriveled into dust and blew away--the topsoil of the personality gone forever, leaving desert conditions behind.

The people who lived on the edges of society had their own drives and hopes, but they seemed not to place their faith in acquiring more material goods. Instead, they tended to seek human contact and relationships, even to the point of sharing what little they had. Simply retaining stuff when one doesn't have much was not a behavior pattern for them. Without solicitation, they opened their hearts and gave of themselves. Crawford seldom saw that from wealthy people.

He came to appreciate simplicity--echoing Thoreau's demand, "Simplify! Simplify!" Crawford knows the problems--stress, complexity, ceaseless demands for more, more, more. He even reached the point where he stopped watching his beloved escape of baseball on TV, just turned it off, cold turkey, and threw himself into his art--no noise, no interruptions, no distractions--just quiet, peace, solitude, and private thoughts. A man with enough material possessions and personal success to meet the needs of most people, Crawford had nevertheless learned this lesson of simplicity and common humanity from people who did not even know they were serving as living examples. He would feel forever indebted to them and their basic goodness. This became one of his dominant memories from his journey--the many good people he encountered, the pride he took in the kind of country they contributed to.

Chapter 6: On the earth & Indian runners

In his very fine book about the Kiowa experience in Oklahoma, The Way to Rainy Mountain, N. Scott Momaday writes:

East of my grandmother's house the sun rises out of the plain. Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

As a Kiowa, Momaday knows that tribal legend has it that they left the Rockies in western Montana and journeyed to the great plains, to Oklahoma. They did not run the length of their long journey, as Crawford did on his trek, but they still performed quite a feat--moving across hundreds of miles of difficult terrain, through harsh weather conditions, amidst predators, all without benefit of industrial technology.

In the course of their difficult journey, and during their centuries in Oklahoma, the Kiowa came to appreciate the majesty and beauty and necessity of the land. They were not divorced from its sights, sounds, and the feelings it engenders. They knew the land and its denizens in intimate terms. They came to know all of the facets of the world around them in ways that are seldom practiced today.

Dean Crawford, much like the Kiowa, left a certain comfort zone in his urban American lifestyle to encounter the land of this country in its fruitful abundance, terror, magnificence, and sheer vastness. He came to know what the winter wind would bring with it in the mountains and how the brutal, glaring sun could wither life in the deserts. Bu