|
The rain, the dark and the Boston bombings
9 p.m., the night before.
I’m laying awake in bed listening to the ferocious drumming of heavy rain. It set in a few hours ago and is threatening to seriously dampen my pre-dawn run tomorrow morning. Tomorrow’s run is important, but I’m not thinking about that just now. Instead I’m transported in my mind well over four decades back to my youth in Tasmania; of laying in bed on cold winter nights with my pastel-blue AWA two-transistor pocket radio surreptitiously tucked under my pillow and tuned to stations hundreds of miles away, mainly rock and top-40 stations like 2SM in Sydney or 3AW in Melbourne, although often I’d listen to a weird eclecticism of whatever was available: greyhound racing from Ballarat, Garner Ted Armstrong’s oddly fascinating bible-bashing programmes from any of a number of church-owned stations, or country stations with terrible fake American accents playing Hank Williams tunes. I'd listen to anything that was a bit different and was from somewhere else. As long as it was a long way from the isolated, trapped-in-time island on which I lived I’d happily listen to it, and I flattened many Eveready 9-volt batteries by falling asleep with my trusty radio still chirruping under my pillow.
The Australia of those days was a product of the resources boom of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Wool, wheat, copper and iron-ore had made Australia “The Lucky Country” with an affluence that had enticed hundreds of thousands of migrants from all parts of Europe, including my parents who arrived in the antipodes aboard the S.S. Fairsky from England three years before I was born.
One of the icons of the resources boom was cheap, plentiful iron and steel; the most visible example of this being the ubiquitous corrugated-iron roof which adorned vast swathes of Australian housing. It was extremely popular, being cheap, lightweight and simple to work with, and it could be painted almost any colour you liked. As common as it was, the iron roof was singularly ill-suited to the Australian climate – exceedingly hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter. It did have one benefit over tiled rooves which had nothing to do with structural values, and that was the sound it made in a rain storm. The heavy drumming of rain on a tin roof lulled many an Aussie kid to sleep, and still does today. As a youth I enhanced the effect by deliberately placing my bed next to the window so I could have the double benefit of listening to the rain hit both the roof and the glass of my window. It also allowed me to feel the chill of cold air from the window on my face while the rest of me was toasty warm in my bed. On such nights I would turn off the transistor radio and instead of “Back to the Bible”, the Rolling Stones or the trots from Albion Park, I would happily nod off to the sounds of nature reclaiming its sovereignty over mankind on my roof and window pane.
Now that I live in a house with a tiled roof, I miss it so much that on rainy nights, no matter how cold it is, I will sleep with the window open to better hear the rain, and always struggle with that bitter-sweet irony of wanting to listen to the rain but finding it sends me off to sleep in an instant.
Tonight though something is keeping me awake and I listen to the rain for ages wondering why I can’t sleep. Eventually I do drift off, only for some reason to dream strange, restless dreams about unsuccessfully attempting to grow giant pumpkins in my backyard. It’s all a little weird.
3:50 a.m., the next morning.
The alarm sounds and I’m out of bed and into my running gear before it even registers that the rain has stopped. I’m still wondering about the pumpkins as I step outside, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and fussing with my Garmin. The ground is sodden and I see the sky is overcast so I don a water-proof layer and with a sense of reluctance over-written only by a dimly-sensed yet somehow keenly-felt obligation, I head off into the night.
It has to be said that it’s a special morning to be running, but for the moment that’s far from my mind as I head up the first hill, lungs barely coping with the sudden transition from their relaxed, comatose role in the arms of Morpheus to now frantically sucking in air as legs and mind struggle to understand the rude and inhuman rush from bed to hillside.
Slowly however I start to remember why this is such a significant morning. In less than an hour – at 4:49 a.m. to be precise – it will be exactly one year since the catastrophic Boston marathon bombings occurred, and I had wanted in some small way this morning to remember the occasion and register my own small act of defiance against those that wish to kill and maim innocent people.
A year ago I had arrived at work at 6 a.m. to find the news services all crossing live to the Boston marathon, but of course for all the wrong reasons. For me the impact was not unlike watching the 9/11 World Trade Centre attack. If Boston was on a smaller scale in terms of devastation and loss of life, its impact on me was magnified due to the attack being against a running race – a marathon at that, and only a day after I too had run a marathon, albeit in Canberra on the other side of the world. And I knew as I watched the TV coverage that running – no matter where it was - would never be quite the same again.
In the aftermath of Boston, my desire and plan to do something about the tragedy had actually been to travel to Boston and run the race the following (i.e. this) year. Being hopelessly unable to run a qualifying time however I was going to have to rely on a charity entry and this didn’t eventuate. Plan B was to run the Canberra marathon again, which is held within a few days of the Boston event, but work pressures in any case intervened and my training plan fell apart. I was left therefore with only this small token gesture of an early morning run at about the time the bombs went off. As small as this gesture may be in the bigger picture, for me at least it was not an insignificant one.
There is something almost dichotomous about the nature of my defiant run through the darkened streets of Sydney this morning. It’s an almost perfect solitude at this time of day – there’s absolutely no-one about at all other than myself, and anyone who knew me who happened to think of me at that moment could have no real clue as to where I was or what I was even doing. And so as a gesture of defiance it seems a little ridiculous, but I believe that somewhere there is a running God, and that She will somehow honour my small tribute.
Of course it is very hard when you’re running up and down hills in the dark to remain fully focussed on the terrible events of a year ago, but as the appointed moment came and went and the universe went on regardless, I at least felt pleased to have made this small effort. Terrorists – even if somehow they might have noticed my token effort - will hardly be concerned by it, but despite that I believe it is doubly important in the wake of Boston that we keep running. The mindset that even these solo efforts bring about will meld with the minds of others at countless races around the planet with a heightened sense of the importance of standing up to terrorism everywhere.
And so we run on. Doubtless the victims of Boston wouldn’t want it any other way.
Two days later.
I’ve been puzzling over why I felt this strong connection between the dark rainy nights of long ago and the Boston bombing. There’s an inherent loneliness I think in both my listening to distant radio stations in my youth – longing to be somewhere else – and also in the act of long distance running. And like the Boston bombing, there’s always a sense that dramatic events only happen to other people, a very long way away.
But if the shrinking of the modern world says anything, it’s that dramatic events don’t only happen to other people and no-one is ever really that far away. We’re all inextricably connected and bad things happen much closer to home, even if they are on the other side of the world.
All I really know is that while the Boston bombers planted their bombs some 16,000 kilometres from where I live, I felt the impact at an oddly personal level.
Such is the bond among distance runners. May it always be so.
|
April Fuel 2014
