Thoughts on the Run #3: Fountain Cave

On my long run the other day, I ran past a historical marker. You know, the ones that are heralded by green or brown signs across the small highways of the United States. The ones most people pass by without a second thought.

In fact, I have run by this plaque several times in the past without stopping. This time, though, I caught the title of the plaque out of the corner of my eye: "Fountain Cave." I find caves fascinating, so I turned off the bike path to give it a look.

Apparently, just downstream from the marker, there used to be a cave with a stream pouring out of it. In its time, it was one of the more famous landmarks along that stretch of the MIssissippi. Back in the early 1800s, it was popular with explorers, several of whom wrote about it in their journals. Travelers and tourists used to stop there on their travels up and down the River. The sculpted sandstone cliffs were said to be beautiful.

It was also the site of the first permanent (meaning, I assume, white, European) structure in St Paul. In the 1830s, a cast-off from Fort Snelling, just upriver, built -- what else -- a saloon there. Later on, there was even a small refugee settlement on site.

Why, then, I wondered, had I never seen or heard of Fountain Cave? I have explored most of the length of both banks of the Mississippi over the past 5 years, and this is just the sort of feature that I would find fascinating. My favorite spot along the river is actually just upriver from the marker: a small slot canyon carved into the sandstone bluffs.

The cave doesn't exist any more: they filled it in to build the highway.

Go figure.

And that made me wonder: what does it say about us as a species that we have historically been so willing to destroy natural wonders for the sake of our own projects? Why were we so willing to flood Glenwoond Canyon for the sake of a reservoir? Why, on a smaller scale, did we fill in a natural wonder of Minnesota for the sake of a highway?

Why do we so often, to quote the song, pave paradise to put up a parking lot?

Thoughts on the Run, Post 2: Noise

Noise

I live in a fairy middle-sized city —a quarter million people or so — in a reasonably-sized metro area — 3-4 million people. I enjoy many aspects of city life: concerts, museums, shopping, dining; all the advantages you get by simply having a large population of people in a small area. 

There are parts of city life I really dislike, of course: all the straight lines, the constant presence of people, traffic, the lack of natural areas (even though we are relatively blessed in the Twin Cities). Mostly, though I dislike the noise. 

Noise has been difficult for me my entire life. When I was a child, they extended the freeway in my hometown to the point where it ends now: four blocks from my house. Suddenly, I had to deal with something I’d never really thought about before: traffic noise. I remember lying in bed in the summer, the window open — nobody in Duluth had AC, because Lake Superior served us better than any AC unit ever could —unable to fall asleep because of what seemed to me excessive traffic noise.

I would later learn that “excessive noise” is a relative term. 

I live in a city now. Not a very noisy city, in the grand scheme of things, but a city nonetheless. St Paul mostly shuts down after around 9PM on the weekdays, and 11PM on the weekends. Even so, there is constant traffic on the street outside our apartment. We are on an emergency route, so we get the addition of sirens Dopplering by our windows at odd times of the night. People talk and yell, sober or otherwise, and I am a light sleeper: I wake up every peep. 

On the other end of the spectrum, I went to college with people from NYC who had the opposite problem: they had difficulty sleeping in the quiet of the middle of nowhere, Maine. Many of them could not sleep without a TV or a noise generator in the background, because they had grown up with the constant sound of the City that Never Sleeps. 

Strange . . .

The ubiquity of noise was driven home to me viscerally the other day. I went for my normal run on a day when I was particularly stressed. When I feel stressed, my run tends to take me down to the Mississippi. Growing up in Duluth as I did, the mere presence of water has always calmed me down. 

There is one particular spot on the river where I stop whenever I pass it on my run. It’s a spot where barges dock in the summer, just downstream from an old grain elevator. We had just gone through a cold snap, and the river was partially frozen, blocks of ice floating downstream and crunching into each other. 

I sat and listened to the ice crunch for a while, but the sounds of the city — the traffic on the road behind me, the constant “beep beep beep” of construction vehicles backing up, the sirens of the occasional ambulance — kept intruding, and I couldn’t help but think that all this noise cannot be good for us. The constant stimulation, the incessant background hum. 

Even the Boundary Waters, far from the sounds of any city, lie underneath an international flight path. 

I don’t know of a solution, but as I sat there on the bank of the river that day, I longed for a moment of quiet. 

Thoughts on the Run, Week 1

I have often said, to just about anyone who would listen, that “the best way to get to know a place is to run it.” 

I said this, believing it to be true. I espoused this. I tried to live this, and thought I was doing so. When I travel to a new city, I run it, sure in the knowledge that I will thereby be getting to know the place better than I would any other way. 

I have lived in my current neighborhood for more than four years, running locally the whole time. I felt confident saying that, based on my own maxim, I knew this neighborhood. 

But I have a confession to make: I was completely full of it. 

I know this now because I recently took up a challenge, posed by Rickey Gates, to run every single street in my neighborhood. 

After running more than 40 miles of streets and sidewalks, all within a mile and a half of my apartment, I can tell you that I did not know this neighborhood anywhere near as well as I had thought. Before this challenge, I had probably run less than 25% of these streets in four years. And these are the streets that, according to my own saying, I should know better than anybody. 

In the process of running every single street I found, among other things, a house that looks like it was transported straight from an English village, a row of mansions overlooking a homeless encampment, more Little Free Libraries than I could have imagined, and a Calvin and Hobbes mural painted on a garage door. I saw eagles, red-tailed hawks, and a fox. I found new allies, through, and dead-ends mere blocks from my front door. And I ran by more than a dozen churches.

So does my theory that the best way to get to know a place is to run it hold true? 

Maybe it does, but you have to run a place with intention. 

Thoughts on the Run

I am a runner. 

People who know me well at all tend to be aware of this. Casual acquaintances tend to be aware of this. The elderly gentleman I run past several times a week no doubt is aware of this. When first learning about my “runner-ness,” there are a few questions that  inevitably arise. One of the most common is “what do you think about when you’re running?” 

To quote Quenton Cassidy, protagonist of the novel novel “Once a Runner,” I often answer “quantum physics.” As he said, it’s as good an answer as any, and for me, it has occasionally been the literal truth. In college, whenever I was stuck banging my head against a particularly difficult physics problem set or take-home exam, I would actually go for a run. More often than not, I would come home to find the solution floating in my mind. 

The truth is, on my easy runs, I think about anything and everything. During harder runs, as well as races, I think about the run or the race. I simply don’t have the mental space to think about anything else. But more than two thirds of my runs are easy, and my mind is free to wander. 

I have often thought that most of my more interesting ideas seem to occur when I’m running. More often than not, I don’t fully recall these meandering thoughts when I get back and return to my daily, non-running life. 

Lately, however, I have worked hard to write more regularly, in a more focused way. I confess I have had this intention many times: I have started and made significant headway on several books, novels and nonfiction. 

Never having been able to finish one of these longer works, I decided this time through to try to write shorter, more focused pieces. This is my attempt to do so. 

Each day, I run. 

Each day, my mind runs. 

And now, each day, when I return from my run, I write down a brief phrase or two that represents some of the thoughts that passed through my head during the day’s run. Later on that day, I use these phrases as a cue to jog my memory (apologies for the horrific pun) and expand on it, writing out long hand. If I deem it worthy, I will later edit it, type it out on the computer, edit it again, and post it here. 

Welcome to Thoughts on the Run.