Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 22:53:14 -0600 From: "Rich Limacher" THE UNLIKELY ADVENTURE OF KITSCHME SIOUXME AT THE SUPERIOR TRAIL 100 Part 10 Red Sky at Night: Sailors' Delight; Red Glowstick at Dawn: Yer Too Friggin' Close to the Edge! "From the startline he departed, Leading with him Laughing Water; Hand in hand they went together, Through the woodland and the meadow, Left the old man standing lonely At the doorway of his rental car, Heard the Falls of Minnehaha Calling to him from the distance, Crying to him from ahead afar, 'Gitche to Gumee, Kitschme Siouxme!'" --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (With edits as necessary, of course, for Y2K compliance) So I'm standing at the start line in the pitch dark, slack-jawed, pigeon-toed, and panty-waisted, staring down at my upside-down digits on the right bib, thinking it's pinned to the wrong thong, and not hardly being able to believe my ears. Medium-Sized-Running-Little-Bare is in my face, hollering. "You won, Kitsch! That's your number!" "Wow. Gosh. Does this mean I'm in Western States?" "No, silly! You've won the shoes!" Little then proceeds to relax my slack at the back of the pack and shove me, quaking and beaming all the way, like an absurd bird to the front of the herd. "Hey," I say to the freezing fox with the shoe box, "did you call number 1-0-4-4? That's me!" "That's great," she sighs. "See ya, eh? At Grand Marais. Tell your size to those guys. Bye!" And she's out of there. "One minute to race start!" I hear the bullhorn again and figure, alack, this front I can't hack, so I'd best pack my sad sack back to the pack with the slack at the back. On the way I bump--very slowly--into Little Bare. And I give her (natch) a little bear hug. "Good luck, Little," I whisper. "Don't wait up if I'm out all night. Me 'n' the boys are playin' poker at the Moose." "Right," she says. "And if you gamble away your car, DON'T be callin' your father or me to come get you." She winked. Or, at least I think she winked. Then the bullhorn guy said "go" and she went. And that's about the last I ever saw of Medium-Sized-Running-Little-Bare. And I have absolutely no idea about whatever happened to her boy Schultz. And I'm still not all that sure either that Butch ever made it out of that stall. (Well, I saw him eat a hamburger the next day, so he probably did.) (Although a hamburger *could* put you right back in it.) They say that even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Same holds true, I suppose, for one about nine hundred miles shorter. And so, rather than wait for somebody to add that much more distance to this race later, I decided to take my single step now. I raised my right foot, I extended it about fifteen inches, and then I set it back down. "Are we there yet?" Nobody, but NOBODY, laughed at my little joke. The 1999 Superior Trail 100 Mile Endurance Run began, looooong before dawn on September the 11th in just this way. More or less, of course. And I'm reasonably sure other participants with any memory left might remember it differently, but I personally believe I began on that right foot. Others, no doubt, started out on the wrong. But no matter even if you started walking on your hands, you would've had to start on Edison Boulevard, facing south, on a nicely paved residential street, where everybody else sane in the neighborhood was still fast asleep. Except for the police officers in the squad car. Would you believe this? The 1999 Superior TRAIL Endurance Run was started with a police escort--yes, a fully equipped modern squad car complete with radar, instant on-board vehicle V.I.N. and operator I.D., and flashing red and blue lights overhead. I thought for a minute maybe THEY thought they'd catch somebody speeding. Of course, there was not vehicle one on Edison Boulevard, nor were there any at all on Penn Boulevard onto which we all turned after only about a hundred yards. Nope, no traffic. 'Cept us. But I was grateful for the police escort anyway. Even though, of course, they weren't exactly escorting ME. No, the squad became the lead car, and it drove well ahead of the pack all the way up Penn Blvd.--for all of about another half a mile. By the time I got there, the policemen were outside the squad carrying big heavy-duty riot-control Mag Lites. Well, I really shouldn't make any more jokes about this. They were out there with their flashlights directing us all to turn onto the trail. The, uh, Superior Hiking Trail where THEY, uh, were not about to go. Let me just make one more observation about being escorted by police in full flashing regalia for the first half-mile-plus-100-yards of a trail ultramarathon. It was wonderful. And I say this for two very good reasons. First, it is comforting to note that our event (our insane and totally whacked-out pitch-dark JOGGING event) with fewer than one hundred participants (actually, just now checking the results, MUCH fewer--how 'bout 60!) nevertheless still merited the full support of the Silver Bay (soundly sleeping) community. And second, the squad car's flashing lights made it a lot easier to see where the hell we were going. That is, until we made the right-turn onto the trail. And then, had they been clerics instead of cops, you could easily imagine them muttering: "May God have mercy on your souls." Let me tell you, at that point next to Penn Blvd. in Silver Bay, Minnesota, the Superior Hiking Trail _ _ _ _s you without foreplay. And I mean, BOOM! No warning. No gradually more intimate precursors to heavily more heart-pounding exertion. No massage. No caress. No gentle limbs rubbing your thighs or raising your heat. No. Instead, I repeat: BANG!!!! ======= You're immediately climbing up huge monstrous rocks and you immediately know you've been screwed. Boulders! Big, huge rocky crags like you see on the sides of mountainsides. Horrible, ugly Mother Nature type stuff for which you'd just like to ask if she also supplies stepladders. Man, if we were all participating in a "jogging" event when we began on the boulevard, every one of us was doing a "crawling" event now. And, of course, you'd better have your own flashlights turned on, as well as your heavily breathing self. ("It's not nice to _ _ _ _ with Mother Nature," is it?) Well, without seeming too crude, I will now report to you the single most vivid thought that I, to this day, still remember--vividly--about the first part of that trail: "Man, if I gotta go 100 miles on s _ _ _ like this, I'm not gonna make it!" Perhaps you'll recall (of course, now I'm not even sure *I* do) how my original plan for the day before was to scout out this trail--to, you know, somehow "prepare" for the day afterwards (today, right NOW)--but somehow I got sidetracked. (It was well worth it, however. I now have more friends to remember this misery with.) So, anyway, I was still--right there on that trail--laboring along under the mistaken notion that somehow, somewhere, some way we'd be climbing those HUGE cliffs I'd seen in the post cards that overlook Gitche Gumee itself. And I also recalled the two or three words that I DID hear at the pre-race briefing the night before, which warned: "There are green glowsticks and red glowsticks both marking the trail. All dangerous cliffs are marked with the red ones." Hoo-boy! I'm climbing big, huge rocks, right? We're going straight up, right? We're next to Lake Superior, right? It's pitch dark, right? We're climbing a cliff, right? Well then: WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!! And it wasn't too very long after I'd actually made it to the top of one of those climbs when...BANG! There it was. Once again: no foreplay. A red glowstick. To my left: the void. To my right: the rock. Above me: my God! Below me: that baaaad ol' you-know-who. I decided to tiptoe straight ahead. But then, when I actually arrived at the summit of what I believed in my heart to be the top of one HUGE mutha cliff (but no, it did not overlook the lake; it overlooked some damn river to my left; a canyon maybe; a waterfall!!!)...so what do I see parked on the very TOP of this mother??? A tent. Yessir. A bona fide, for-real, completely pitched and zipped up camping tent...and inside? Not a creature was stirring, not even a moose. Wellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll... What does THIS mean, sporting fans? Has our hero--for real this time--REALLY stumbled upon people with rocks in their head? Who in their right mind goes camping on a cliffside? What sane civilized people would be goofy enough to perch a pup tent on top of a precipice? But, even more to the point, who among us (who would dare do such a thing) could possibly ever imagine that in the middle of the night in the middle of romance (maybe) in the middle of your mid-September night's dream--THERE'D BE 60 LOUD UGLY STUMBLING RUNNERS TRAMPING ALL OVER YOUR CAMPSITE??? (Not me!) (Whenever I camp, the first thing I do is call Motel 6.) Stay tuned next time, fans of life's absurdities, when once again we'll be back with another cheap-thrill-packed adventure of "Sackman and Throbbin, the Joy Wonder (Why They're Not Getting Any)." Try it sometime: in a tent on a cliff with your true love panting heavily all the while all around there's a hundred crazies pounding ground. ["Lovers Who've Teetered--next Oprah."] We'll air our feelings in Part 11. Kitsch Limacher TheTroubadour@prodigy.net