Connor Southard

Running Into the Wind
You could call the wind malicious. It's hard to ascribe neutrality to something that claws, lashes and bites like this, finding some way to stab into every part of these daredevils who now stride wild in the pre-dawn dark. These fools are runners, and whether or not you give them credit for smarts, or call their harried stagger a run, you have to acknowledge their toughness. It's an unfriendly place to be: 7,220 feet at six a.m. on a January morning, running the sub-zero streets of a high-plains Wyoming town that lies unsheltered from the ferocious winter seething down from the Snowy Range. The smell is of the solitary steel of new ice. The chief sound is the jeering of that sadistic wind, though you can hear the desperate whine of your own breathing, and the velvety pounding of your shoes in fresh snow. What little beard you have is a lattice of ice crystals. Sight is a funny thing right now, your head whipping from side to side, snowflakes in your eyes, and so mostly you just seek out the next step, another small slice of lunacy. Alongside are your fellow lunatics: Ryan, the devout aspiring doctor who runs as though on crusade; Brian, the garish charmer who runs to filter his hidden rage; Kyle, running because it discourages anyone from forcing his shy, persecuted voice into conversation. Why do you run? Aside from the vaguely warming knowledge that you have company in this madness, the overwhelming feeling is a more individual one: you can feel yourself beginning to fall apart.

You revel in falling apart. Lanky, lemur-eyed and grimacing, wrapped in borrowed fleeces and holey long-johns, you look like someone who should be asleep right now, awaiting another empty, flighty day. But you are out here because, in all the fear and confusion and false bravura lugged around by boys of fifteen, you got mixed up about who you are, somehow lost yourself in the shuffling chaos of a high-school hallway. You volunteered to join these veterans, young men who endured long and hard and often, while you shied and hid and slacked. You are gaunt, that useless sort of skinny, and you had been last in many a P.E. mile. It terrified you, the thought of joining this mad march of brave souls, and it terrifies you still. But you're here to fight against that side of yourself, to lay every bit of strength on the table, see it gobbled up so you can scrap to find just one ounce more. You run with the oldest, the fastest, the defending state champions. You run with a coach who is himself a young man, and a former professional. They give you no quarter, and you are glad for that. In letting everything you are fall apart, you think you just might somehow find a way to build a self, to armor yourself in that passionate strength that all those you run with seem to share.

The vitality awakened in you inspires a love for all things unreasonable, ill-advised and filled with wildness; the sort of things that most people dismiss as absurdly masochistic or infected with foolish bravado. You spend hours in the mountains surrounding your town, honing the craft of adventure in the stony roughness of the Medicine Bows and the Laramie Range. Below the rimrocks of the Sunlight Basin, you race your black lab Jester up hills covered in sagebrush, greasewood, and the old bones of winter-killed elk. Among the monoliths of Vedauwoo, you claw like a drunken gecko up shear igneous boulders. Scrapping for the summit of a Beartooth peak with Montana within eyeshot, you flatten your body to a 75 percent grade ascent that winds between two spines of shiny shale, where a slip would bring you into the jagged embrace of a scree field. You stand on a recent cat-kill below the contorted volcanic crest of White Mountain in the Absarokas edging on Yellowstone, sniffing the harsh musk of a large cougar, the next few moments pregnant with feral possibility, pure happiness despite your dry mouth and aching legs. It's a definite joy, this unnecessary challenge and discomfort. You understand now the pleasure of searching for the wild things in wild places, those moments when the world snarls at you, and you, all visceral passion and dogged determination, snarl back. You have learned that you can charge straight at whatever it is that would cow you, mountain or wind or your own swirling fear, and break through it at a run, not worrying whether you might fall apart. You know now that falling apart is just the first part of the unification of a true self.

It's almost over now. The orange glow of the field-house bobs buoy-like through the haze of blowing snow, and these feeling trotting boys, all Shackleton and Amundsen in the blackness, quicken to a lope: barn-happy horses ready for the stall. The wind chases them, nipping vindictively, as far as it can, before they slam a heavy door in its face. Gasping for breath, they try to turn themselves back into average young men, so they can face the trials of a Tuesday in high school without alarming anyone with their intensity. First to rise is their jovial coach, a childish grin on his wind-burnt face. He walks over to the blonde one, whose pale cheeks glow a blood red, and chuckles: "Fun, isn't it, Connor?"