Stranger Things and Pizza Pockets

Hail the size of cantaloupes dropped like ordinance from the sky in Vivian, South Dakota smashing roofs and windshields. Old men in Cat hats ordered another cup of coffee in the Sunflower Diner when they saw the storm coming knowing that, for this one, they'd better stay put. It came across RR 17 from the north west, set the traffic lights swinging and blotted out the lights in the Wal Mart parking lot. The sky was "taller than I'd ever seen it," said Ernst Hamman, 78, and "kind of sparkling" added Gunter Sibley, 70,"course, that might a been the silos". "We could see the green in it, so we knew that was hail." And hail it was. Hail stones dropped out of the sky "like it was raining rocks," said Bonnie Gardner, 83, owner of the Sunflower Diner, "so I put another pot on".

The biggest stone measured in at 8" in diameter and 18" around. It had been bigger, more like 11'' across, they said. The young man whose mailbox it wrecked, yelled for his wife and she came out of the house wrapped in his Carhartt and flip-flops, and they stood with a thoughtful hand on the exploded mailbox and looked at it like a spiky rugby ball. "That'd kill you if it hit you," she said, and they looked out over the empty land where the storm was moving south out to the Southern States silo in blinding light just before it disappeared and they could hear the clatter on the grain dryers. They looked at it flashing out there, and then at the fields full of torn-up corn across the road shiny and creaking. And they rolled the stone with their feet toward the house, clacking through all the other hail stones like a crowd, and put it in the freezer, and they called her mother. The neighbors started coming over around 2 to take a look at it in there with the blue plastic ice trays and the Pizza Pockets, and opening the door, and the power went out around 4 - transformer blew in Pierre - so little by little a record of the strange things of heaven and earth sublimed.

There is a Danger of Being Uncomfortable

With my nose: running in Great Fall, Virginia
I'm going to run 10 miles now. It's 7 am and 82 degrees and the cicadas are already buzzing like electric castanets filling the tree-tops all along Virginia's W & OD Trail.

With a fistful of half-frozen cherry Powerade, SPF'd to the bone, and absolutely no plan, I set off from the last scrap of pretty Dun Loring, Virginia - a cluster of rose-gobbed, stained glass, picket-fenced Virginia surrounding a oak lined common green that had held the Dun Loring train station until as late as the 70s with its deep eaves and a big leaky wooden water tank pleasant to stand under.

The W & OD, which runs from Washington, DC, 45 miles west through Virginia suburb and gradually into countryside. Even at 7 am it's filling up with bikers - wasp-waisted and surly, runners, herds of walkers.

Setting off, it's always the same. The first step - there's always a first step - and it always seems like you're kidding. There is a second step. Ridiculous. You listen to your steps: crunch crunch crunch on the cinders: what are you thinking? You are choppy, too fast, you take little old lady steps, chop-chop-chop. A glossy beauty lopes by: gleaming brown as wood, cruel sunglasses; tidy shoes; legs all one color. What must you look like? You realize you've forgotten to inhale. That, or you are being water-boarded. You breath in - breathing all the way up into your clavicles, you think about how your lungs fill up your torso. It's good to breathe, you think, and wander away and think about how there really is no good place to get shot, even in the shoulder, because your lungs go all the way up there and....then whoosh you breathe out like a horse, and in again, and all the while crunch crunch crunch.

And your old body, having been under the impression you were merely going for a drive and possibly a stroll, is surprised and not a little indignant at being so misled, having done nothing to you all these years but work and toil and put up with abuse, and now this? - when there is a clear possibility - a danger, in fact, of becoming uncomfortable at some point.

She refuses to believe your story that you and she are a person who runs. Ten miles. Your shoulders are climbing up to your ears - your body trying to get a hold of yourself. You keep up the story. We'll just run out to five and come back. Don't think about 5 miles. Think about your left foot. That's all. And she thinks about your left foot. How perfectly serviceable it is. Even better for being, you know, so really huge. In fact, it's possible there may be some benefit in a surf-board-sized springing off ...and she begins to believe you and the story isn't a lie, it's happening, and you and she are running along crunch crunch crunch, and you've become somebody else.

Getting to Morogoro

Your Vacation Summary
---------------------
To Foxes Safari's Web site:
Please contact us. We are horribly late.
CONTACT DETAILS
Name: Liz Kirchner


YOUR MESSAGE
I want to visit: Mafia, Mikumi, Udzungwa

I want to experience: We'd like to see fruit bats, wild dogs, edible orchids, and Tanzanian agriculture.

No one is ever prepared for edible orchids.


(Running shoes, DEET, sunscreen, and cameras)

Be Bio-Logical

Barefoot, bespattered, and fuming at the door - dead bees in her hair, a bloody lip, and a fistful of black coral - I think it's for you. Earth Day is here and wow, is she mad. Appease her by mulling birds, bees, air-miles, and fish-smothering phthalates -
then, be bio-logical.

Here are some ways to Eat, Drink, Think, and Love deeply this weekend that will make her happy.

Think:
At the Phillips tonight, my friend, Ann Yonkers, moderates the discussion: "Earth Day, Landscape and Local Food"
Maryland winemaker Robert Lyons, chef Nora Pouillon of Restaurant Nora, and Pennsylvania farmer Mark Toigo of Toigo Orchards talk about art, food, and the Terroir that makes it good. The brochures says " a light tasting follows," which means something wild like: Crispy nettles and Chili Roasted Asparagus, Fiddleheads, and Ramps.

Drink: Deep six sensibly disaster-plastic bottles, and don't buy any more. What are you thinking?

Love:
Memorials by Moonlight with DCTours: Moonlight, marble, a general glowing
"How the Sinking of the Titanic Changed Washington" Bike Tour: He would go down with the ship for you in that helmet.
MOCA DC Art and Film Space at M and 31: Wander, ponder, brush fingertips

Bee-keeping classes are everywhere

Slow Food is Good Food and the Snail is Metaphorical

Slow Food USA's logo is a snail. Good in a garlicky butter-and-parsley sizzle of course, good too as metaphor for us, of course - plump and happy, clambering through arugula and heirloom tomatoes of an evening. "Soil, water, air, and light. Simplicity," the garden says to us, "Now, That's Delicious."

Slow Food USA (www.slowfoodusa.org)is a movement, a grassroots groundswell, and, as missions go, "the revival of the kitchen and the table as centers of pleasure, culture, and community" is a mission as profound, pleasing, and optimistic as soup.

Slow Food USA and all its state affiliates (SlowFoodDC is the closest/biggest to Annandale) is an educational organization dedicated to land stewardship and ecologically sound food production. They work to establish sound food policy, healthy, affordable school lunches, encourage people to plant victory gardens, save heirloom fruit, veggies, and animals (see Orange Oxheart Tomatoes and You).

These are hardly smug and indulgent goals. The group works to feed kids and families. Slow Food USA is one of the reasons why your town has a farmers' market. It's why you know the words "sustainable" and "organic" and "community-supported agriculture."

Then, like all People-Plant-Earth revelries, there are poetic connections. The message is that Slow is Good. Slow is a crusty loaf and dewy glass, snowy cloth and chiclet-toothed friends. Under an arbor. It's history human and animal in that Norton grape, in that Amish Pie Squash. Thoughtful Food. Eat slowly, it says, talk, nod, mop that thick plate with a chewy slice.

Smell.

Slow Food says that eating is another opportunity to exercise calm in our worlds - to exercise ease, naturalness, frankness, maybe even, what's this?, Love.

Well.

Tatoo'd Ladies

There are worlds within worlds, we all know it, and we've always suspected that some of those worlds would astound us if we caught a glimpse of them down an alley one night, or surprised one in a sunny field, or, in Amanda and Liz's case, came upon one in full swing in the bus lot at 9th and H. The Trapeze School of New York, now in Washington, DC, is just such a world teeming with squads of clear-eyed, timber-thighed folk - lean as brisket, beaming from swings, beckoning like sirens.

Where do all they come from for god's sake? It seems there are worlds within worlds within worlds. Liz's teacher, Everett (which made her chuckle), was wearing nothing but Ray Bans, piratical hair, and, orange camo tights when he swung into view beneath her, storm clouds and sun boiling up 12th Street, and Chinatown wheeling over his oak-leafed bottom making her think of Death and pumpkins as he grabbed her well-chalked forearms, quietly said, "straighten your legs," and took her with him off the bar. At 24, he had spent six years in Israel training tigers.

The woman who signed us in, whose eyes were the color of Windex, had until recently trained dolphins in Baltimore. The girl with watermelon-pink hair and cannonball delts who winched us like freight hauling on pulleys yelling "Let the back-flip do YOU!" and "...Knees UP!....Release your HANDS...Arch BACK...STRONG hands...GOOOOOD!" was fresh (if you can call it that) from riding horses upside-down and bare-back in tiny circuses in Northern England. A woman at the gate sped along on a powder-pink Elite bike stand squirting Orange Vanilla Goo in her mouth with one hand and taking our waivers (it's nobody's fault but our own) with the other.

They're still calling the Metro stop "Gallery Place" for now, but A and L are feeling like Persephones just back from the Underworld. For P, one pomegranate seed, and you're never the same. For us, maybe it was the Goo.

Car-Free is Care Free on an Autumnal W & OD

It's the Autumnal Equinox and Car-Free Day. This morning, I ran to work along W & OD Trail (http://www.wodfriends.org/), cool and damp both me and it. The picture above is not me very much at all, but Abiyot Abebe, who, not touching the ground, won the 2009 W&OD 10K in August 2009.

Steamy as it was then, it was chill this morning, and a canyon like running down a gully sluiced with a big autumn buffet full of wines and cheddars and mustards. In the stream valley below the path, white tail deer were out in the flood plain, lifting their pretty knees and plunging them down again into the mounds of fescue and sedge tussocks, and vetch, like they were spearing fish from a canoe. They stomped delicately through ripe poke and barged through wingstem tall as they were like breasting waves. They're taupe now, autumn deer are.

The W & OD is an old railroad bed, the steep banks are tumbling over with dogwood and fern and blooming golden rod dusty as bees, and dunes of smashed bracken, the color of deer, and fern in lime greens and chocolate, and sumac the color of bruised cardinals. I found a tiny, wild persimmon in the gravel the size of a thumb nail and perfectly formed with its four leaves unfurled like the crest of ancient family line.

The Crystal City Runs From Grim to Glossy

Did I tell you this? In late July, I ran in the Crystal City Twi-Lighter 5 K.
In a shuffling mob and a summer downpour, we set off, all 2078 of us loping along the wet city streets, past the newly bustling Crystal City Centre.

Full of restaurants and cafes overflowing with family and friends waving Buffalo wings and mugs of hand-crafted Pilsner, cheering us on through smeary puddles full of green and red traffic light reflections, and whistle-tooting cops looking like gleaming yellow mushrooms in their sou'westers and slickers, out to that boggy, forgotten end of Crystal City, where you dump the bodies and the oozing petrochemical drums - the last scrap of what the whole place used to be.

Five years ago, Crystal City was empty canyons of office buildings filled to the ledges with consulting, accounting, and logistics firms: the togglers and tenders of the fly-wheels and bezels that run the government machine across the river. Those buildings cast the empty streets, a disturbing Holiday Inn, and drippy, long-in-the-tooth bachelor pad apartment buildings in a perpetual, salt-mine gloom. The Crystal City Underground, a subterranean Mall-cum-Disco, built in that Golden Age of Design that brought us brown glass, donut-shaped transistor radios, and pebble-dash pre-cast by people wearing Bryl Cream and plank-wide ties made of sofa upholstery. Take all this glamour and rain down upon it the a heavy metal particulate emissions of Reagan National's northbound air traffic. Even on the cheeriest summer afternoons, if you glimpsed anybody at all, they were rumpled clots of Government Consultants with mustard on their Sears ties smoking, clawing at the sunlight, or scuttling like crabs around a distant corner toward the Olley's Trolley for a chili dog and a 9 am beer. Like one big office itself, Crystal City slammed shut with the last car door every afternoon at 5.

Now, what's old is new again! We love donut-shaped transistor radios and Crystal City is more polish than spit. Crystal City gleams! It's all light and life and air lined as it is with chic restaurants like butterfly-themed Oyamel for cultured tapas, or playful King Street Blues, and the horrible, drippy bachelor pads are now swank and retro, and the bachelors themselves have aged to a patina that flossing and good real estate investment will get you.

The Pacer's-sponsored run completed the street party feel they were playing Boston for some reason, Barry White's "My Everything" and Earth Wind and Fire's "Let's Groove" and Chaka Khan. People were safety pinning on each other's bib numbers, and lacing up their shoes, waving and meeting each other under the pretty trees, and everything was swathed in redolent gouts of barbecue char from the swaggering Ted's (as in Turner's) Montana Grill across the street. The idiotically beautiful Saucony Running Shoe models, one, clambering nimbly in nylon shorts onto the roof of the Saucony-Mobile to do something sexy and capable like link up the aerial feed, and it must be said, moving the way creamy coffee pours, caused a pile-up in the practice lane, and it was a lively happy Twilight vibe.

So, we ran out of the rain and into malarial steam somewhere around Mile 2 with the fastest runners coming back, passing the bolus I was in, fast and beautiful, and as if they had run right out of their clothes, all wet ribs and bony shoulders. They were like hounds, really leaping along through the puddles at truly stunning paces. We cheered them on with hardly a bitter thought.

Of the field of 2000-ish, 52% were women, whose average age was 32.7, and whose average time was 31:11 at a 10:02 minutes/mile pace. This was me:
# Bib First Last Age 1M 2M 3M Time ChipTime ChipPace
1204 2041 Liz Kirchner 46 09:37 19:03 28:46 31:14.2 29:41.0 9:33

Here are the data for everybody and The Best:
People Years Old AverageTime Minutes/Mile
33.5 years old 28:52 9:17
Male 34.4 26:20 8:29
Female 32.7 31:11 10:02

First Male 27 14:34! 4:41 AHaha!Yikes
First Female 23 16:20 5:15

Staunton, Virginia: Hand-knotted by the Criminally Insane

The throw rug in front of my back door, is made of heavy cotton loops in blues and yellows and reds. As happy and festive as it seems, it's as thick as a saddle and sturdy as a mud-flap, and was hand-knotted by the criminally insane in the 1980s at the insane asylum in Stanton, Virginia.

The Western Lunatic Asylum was built in 1828. As eastern as it is, everything's relative, and the only other "Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds" was the "Eastern Lunatic Asylum." That's in Williamsburg - the first in the nation, and crammed to the gills with "a poor unhappy set of People who are deprived of their Senses, and wander about the Country, terrifying the Rest of their Fellow Creatures," described an 18th century report.

In Staunton, where the Blue Ridge rises up like a tidal surge, the Western Asylum was built, and, when its last brick was laid and its handsome doors thrown open, it was swamped and "immediately filled to capacity." The deluge of hopeful and ideal patients washing out of the Blue Ridge and up from the muddy coast forced the founders to restrict admission to "the dangerous, the immoral, and those who looked like having a reasonable shot at recovery."

The garden spot of Staunton, the hospital stood on willowed grounds where swans glided in ponds and buttercups starred (as they say) the long grassy slopes. It's the first thing you see as you come into town. Words like "gracious" and "fine" and "big" would describe pretty well the brick buildings and white columns.

The first time I saw it, it was so graceful and ante bellum that I thought it was a Girls' School, full of "Fine Women of the New South" being finished off with pearl-buttoned gloves and dimpled knees under their thick, plaid skirts, wielding field hockey sticks capably, and spending semesters establishing women-owned composting toilet and sustainably grown hemp co-ops in Guatemala. I considered the school quite liberal and Zelda-y as I drove past gazing at the shadowy figures silhouetted in tall windows or outside in the willow shaded verands hunched against the concrete Cupids, cupping their Marlboros, in undershirts damp with, what turned out to be, desperation, and not Estee Lauder at all. It really is crazy how we don't change our stories even when we see the bars on the windows, if you know what I mean.

Coming whipping off the exit ramp onto the main drag of Stanton, Virginia, despite the pythons of razor wire topping the chain link with its top two feet canted inward, those buildings and grounds were The Beautiful South in architectural form: windows as tall and slim as women, chimneys marching across the roof like infantry, the whole thing solid as a Colonel's bristly eyebrows. Rather. But what was the great thing about Staunton, was that, best of all, its Lunatic Asylum was overlooked from a grassy hillside by Wright's Dairy Rite Drive-in Dairy Rite Drive-in) its patrons gazing east over swans and willows.

Up on that hill, all the cars in the drive-in lined-up under the jaunty yellow and white striped drive-in canopy like De Soto over the Mississippi in the sun. Glinting metal trays are clamped to the car window by the sheer weights of their loads: red-checked paper french fry boats, towers of pickle-y burgers wrapped in paper emblazoned with a freckle-faced, plaid-panted dapper kid holding a burger out in his now-giant hand to you There were ketchup squirters and ribs gory with sauce and char like a sacrifice revealed by pulling open hot Reynold's Wrap.

And we'd sit in the sky above Staunton, Virginia chewing and gazing down upon the gracious grounds and bouncing willow tops and gabled roofs that went on and on like the Blue Ridge at our backs.

From that hillside, cheese burger clutched in the right hand, left hand coming too soon gouging you with your own Dr. Pepper straw, you are mesmerized while you chew you - overwhelmed by the immense statement that is Staunton. In one sweeping, charcoal-broiled vista, you've got The Myth of the Antebellum South. You've got Swans, you've got Madness and you've got Barbecue.

Summing Up: Women My Age

"Women my age are not as young as I am."

This morning it's autumn and drizzling. Chill as a crisper drawer. I can hear a field cricket stuck under the throw rug (hand-knotted by the criminally insane in Stanton, Virginia)calling. Thighs gleaming and clicking glossy as black eyes - all dressed up and trapped in my family room.

He sounds like ghostly Morse code from lost explorers, or the buzzer for summoning the nurse. But the connection's loose and she won't come. Buzz...zzz...god where's the nurse?...buzzz...

Good god. It just makes you want to fish him out from under there and tell him "Oh give over, mate." and fling him in a gentle arc out into wet poke, the smashed fescue, and the last of the clammy and slug-bitten tomatoes calling, "Cheer up! Go find a girl." Which brings me full circle, I guess. Go for a run. Have an apple. Don't panic. It's autumn.