In “Tortilla Flats,” John Steinbeck’s first novel of critical acclaim, the great author wrote: “Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.”
As are my thoughts while running any time of the day.
Late afternoon is my preferred time to be fast afoot, after finishing my writing day at the keyboard, and therefore my slow and deep and golden thoughts often stretch into the golden hour of sunset. It is difficult to imagine a day, even one that has already been a masterpiece—but especially a salt-in-the-coffee kind of day—not being made sweeter while savoring a sunset during a run when the sky becomes a child’s finger painting in progress, a kaleidoscope of grape and strawberry colors swirling and flowing Van Gogh-like.
My favorite sunsets are seascapes. Of these, the most magical—and which I have seen only twice, both times while pausing during beach runs—feature a “green flash” when, at the exact instant the sun fully melts into the water’s horizon, there truly is a rare bright-green pinpoint flash of sunlight.
On each occasion—the first running barefoot on the bronze-hued sand in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; next in training shoes along a two-lane beachside road in Kona, Hawaii—I resumed my run feeling like I had a rising trade wind at my back and Hermes-like wings on my ankles.
On the same run that I saw the green flash in Kona, I momentarily watched two fishermen—one was a fisherboy, actually; grandfather and grandson, I surmised, the latter maybe ten years old. Though they were surfcasting, my thoughts turned to fly-fishing because it is the angling art my grandfather favored and gave me instruction in when I was a fisherboy.
The lessons were less than fully successful as I never mastered the rhythmic ten-to-two-o’clock ideal casting motion of the rod tip. Or, perhaps, what I learned simply took a good long while for me to appreciate because I now think running is my version of fly-fishing, affording respite from life’s busyness; a slice of quietude in a loud world; a brief escape from what needs escaping; time to myself for thoughts that are slow and deep and golden.
When I am out running on a beach or bike path, road or grass field, I am my father’s father patiently casting a hand-tied fly into a brook or stream or pond or lake. “The gods do not deduct from man’s allotted span the hours spent fishing,” Grandpa Ansel liked to say, quoting an old proverb, and this is my adopted rationale as well for my hours spent running—for which I celebrated my 23rd “Streakiversary” earlier this week of having run a minimum of three miles every single day since July 7, 2003.
Playful epigram aside, from time to time I ask myself: Is time spent running time well spent? After all, as Ernest Hemingway poignantly added in a postscript to a letter to a friend: “Time is the least thing we have of.”
My daily hour or two dedicated to running is not precious time misspent, the gods would agree with me I have come to believe, because it leaves me, as Walt Whitman wrote of walking, “enriched of soul.”
More angler wisdom, this time from Henry David Thoreau: “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”
My own flash—green flash!—of insight from my Streak: it is not entirely the run I am after.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.
