Friday was gorgeously warm, so once I'd got enough of what I felt I had to get done that day, I stripped down to shorts and my barefoot shoes, jumped on my bike and headed for the river. It was late enough in the day that rush hour was building, and zooming downhill against static traffic coming out of DC, thousands of desperately bored suits trapped in their cars, felt like surfing a long wave of Schadenfreude.
I locked my bike on the bike path along the Potomac River, stretched for a few minutes against a young sycamore tree, savouring that dry-rich spring scent, when the ground's warm but the plants are still just cresting on spring, barely budding forest canopies, and brown/tan landscape of dead leaves and grasses.
This is a path that curves and banks, follows the river through forest and rocky waterfall outwashes, cliffs and floodzones. I've been running it for years, know it well and am still often surprised by the next corner. Trail-runs like this are some of my favorite nature-immersion moments, where I move through the landscape at the pace of skill and strength, heart and skill, carefully aware of each step and blurring past century-old trees, and age-old rocks, a world reshaped after each flood, that's older than humanity.
And for all I might grumble about the various human debaucheries that have desecrated this world, I love my Vibram Fivefingers shoes. I've been trailrunning for 20 years, and doing it (occasionally) barefoot for over ten. Running barefoot has a sensual intensity and vulnerability that takes a trail run to a whole new level, but takes trust that I don't always have. Shoes are nicely protective but lose a lot of awareness/responsiveness. I'd resigned myself to the dichotomy until I bought a pair of barefoot shoes. They're gorgeous but I'm not going to waste more than a paragraph on them.
At the beginning of a trail like this, I want to run forever, want to chase the source and then run it back to the sea. I feel infinite, exuberant as I bank around trees and leap streams, flying low like a forest bird, while the river gnarls and streams beside me. After a mile or so, I'm past the road noise, and running into an almost-empty river valley, few signs of humanity beyond the trash. Which is at a tolerable level.
Trailrunning like this requires more awareness than effort, and even scrambling up and down steep parts, polished burls of roots, fraying trails, and shorp-edged rocks and river-smoothed boulders, I'm focussed on grace and balance, on finding my path like a falling leaf, on every next step, on a constance of movement to match my bloodbeat.
I stop a few miles in, sheening sweat, breathing hard, in pain, walk down to the shoreline and find balance sitting buddha on a rock. A fish leaps in the distance, enormous, but I just catch a glimpse, the after-splash. A blue heron grawks away, offended at my intrusion. Cormorants float half-sunk downstream, others fly up-valley towards their evening roosts. Everything slows. I breathe. The river runs.
Water curls and riffles, flowing fractal lines of force and when I'm calm, I stand and jump in, sudden shock of cold and darkness and I'm back out, river pulling at me as I reach for the rock, chilled by the evening breeze, sky going orange and my path in shadows, but once I start running I'm warm again within minutes, following the memory of the me I was, the thread I've chased hundreds of times before, in snow and summer, ice flood storm and darkness.
And moments like now. Moments of beauty.
How about you - what was your last most beautiful moment?