Grief’s a loop and so is a good run. Cormac’s been missing four nights and we’re not ready to accept it. I have such a bad cold I’m barely walking anywhere yet I somehow managed to rake the whole front yard, move the wood pile, cut the firewood, submit two applications, drop off my taxes. I was inspired by Tristan’s hard work refinishing the floors. We’re all working hard, hoping it brings the cat back.
Techno Grind, the way I run it, is an uphill march from the back alley up Spokane, past the turn where the bobsleds usually crash and the house where Cormac begs for food in the summer, past the entrance to the Gulch Trail and on to Centennial where I take a sharp right up the start of the steep hill called Monte Christo, a little mountain that overlooks the big mountain, Red, our ski hill. It’s fifteen or twenty minutes straight up until you hit Techno Grind, and you’ll think you’ve reached the trailhead several times before you do, or at least I always think that, each turn a little like the next and the hill unnervingly continuous. This part’s a road, really, like the wagon roads or rail trails down in the valley or even in Lower Rossland to Warfield, routes carts and horses and trains used to get somewhere, unlike us who loop them to do a workout.
When we moved to the Kootenays ten years ago, I thought I’d be a trail runner. I was a runner in Vancouver, where there was a seawall, and so here, where there was a mountain, I’d run that wall. I bought my first pair of trail running shoes last summer. It’s not that I haven’t been running—I have, actually—but not in the winter, and not in a group, and not in the right kind of shoes. I once lost a ten kilometre race: I was the very last one. Without a group, and afraid of bears and cougars, it’s hard to convince myself to go out, but when I do, of course, I love it. I hate it too, but I love it, too.
The trail itself is single track. It’s rocks downhill, then a wetland area and what feels like deep forest, and you wrap along a nice ridge area that spits out on to the intersection with poetry where I turn right and boot home along the familiar KC path. It’s mostly downhill, the way I run it, and so you can go fast, and listen to techno, I guess, and grind it out. I suggest listening to this story, or the first ten or so minutes I recorded. Three sisters decide to ride the Gulf Islands as a fundraiser for their recently-passed father’s rare brain disease; the protagonist is only pretending she’s got things under control. There’s no money coming in and that’s because she can’t say the right things: dad, dead, grief.
Cormac loved hunting and so he was hunted. Is that a reasonable loop? We extracted him from the food chain, offering him store bought and often even vet-recommended food, and he wanted bird. He wanted mouse. He even, with the help of the dog, killed squirrels. I saw a raven ripping up a bird the other day and looked Cormac in the eye and told him hawks were after him and to be careful. He was careful, but maybe he was eating too. Maybe he was chasing or tired or whatever else you get on a run and he forgot to be. He forgot he was predator and prey. He’s gone, I think, but I’m not yet, so the door’s open.
