Letitia L. Moffitt - Bird People: A Memoir

Copyright 2019 by Letitia L. Moffitt.

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Cantraip Press

2317 Saratoga Place

Charleston, IL 61920

www.cantraip.com

Cover Image by Laura Anne Welle

Cover Design by Damonza

Bird People/ Letitia L. Moffitt. -- 1st ed.

Kindle ISBN 978-1-9427372-0-9

Epub ISBN 978-1-9427371-9-3

Paperpack ISBN 978-1-9427371-8-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934170

Thank you, Mary Maddox, for being my publisher, a great friend, and one of my all-time favorite writers. I cant believe how lucky I am to know you.

Thanks to Melissa Ames, Megan Holt, Jennifer Hrejsa-Hudson, Anna-Elise Price, and Cynthia Boatright Raleigh for providing helpful comments on drafts of this book.

Thank you, Laura Anne Welle, for the beautiful cover image as well as many of the great photos within the book. And thanks to Laura, Theresa, and Julia Welle for letting me be part of your family and giving me hope for the future (no small feat given how pessimistic I can be).

Nothing I achieve would be possible without three people who have been there for me my entire life: Leonard, Shan-Ying, and Laura Moffitt.

Ken Welle, my life is so much better with you in it. Lets run together forever, OK? (Well bring snacks.)

And finally, to Boston, Phoenix, and Fred: Love? Love.

Chapter 1

Imet his dog before I met him.

Theres a five-mile trail about ten minutes from town where my trail-running group, The Buffalo, meets each Thursday evening. It isnt the most interesting or challenging trail in the world, but this is east-central Illinois, where varied topography is hard to come by, and for runners who prefer dirt to pavement, were lucky to get even this. That particular day I was running with a friend, Kathy, and at some point in the early miles I became aware that a friendly, mid-size dog was bounding alongside us.

Body language can reveal all sorts of things, even when the body is four-legged and furry, and I figured out pretty quickly that the dog was not Kathys. Something about the mutts movements suggested more you seem like good people, so I will run with youisnt this fun? than Kathy Kathy Kathy, run with Kathy, chase down rabbit to bring to Kathy, whats Kathy doing? Oh, shes running! Run with Kathy! She was clearly someones dog, though, with a well-groomed, frosty red coat and a tame demeanor, so I asked.

Kathy glanced down. Oh, thats Cayenne. Almost as an afterthought, she added, Shes with Ken.

That seemed to be all the explanation required, so I guessed Cayenne did this regularly, went happily gamboling off with strangers. I dont know who this Ken person is, I remember thinking, faintly disapproving, but he has a nice dog.

When we finished our run, Ken-person was not there. He went back out to look for Cayenne, one of The Buffalo told us.

Well for goodness sake. I looked down at the happy red mutt. Now what were we supposed to do? Go looking for him and keep chasing each other in circles until one of us collapsed? Despite the fact that everyone knew Cayenne, nobody had Kens phone number, so we couldnt call him to come back to the parking lot. It was getting late and we couldnt very well leave until they were reunited, but nobody else seemed terribly concerned.

Ken-person finally returned. There you are, you knucklehead, he said affectionately, and Cayenne, overjoyed, looked up with shining eyes. Why yes, I am a knucklehead! Thank you for saying so!

He was tall, with the build of someone who looked more like hed been a football player and not a runner in his youth, he had a nice smile, and he looked vaguely familiar. Only later, driving home, I realized he must have been a long-standing member of The Buffalo given how everyone seemed to know him, or at least his dog. Yet he had made very little impression on me until then. He was quiet, he was a fast runner (hed probably finished the five-mile course a good ten minutes ahead of Kathy and me), and he liked to let his dog run free. Beyond that I knew nothing.

Thats not unusual with the trail runners Ive met. One of the things I liked about this group was that we rarely talked about our personal lives. You could run with someone for months and have no clue what they did for a livingand not feel any particular need to know. So much of the time, we present ourselves to others through how we look and what we say. On the trail, theres none of that; theres just what we do, what all of us are doing at that moment together. Even though I doubt there are many other species that run around in circles for the hell of it, I like to think were more like our animal selves when we run in the woods, living solely in the here and now.

The funny thing is I used to hate trail running, wasnt a runner at all, in fact, for most of my life. I started when I was 37 years old, having just moved from New York City to a small college town in rural Illinois. It was not the first time I had radically redefined myselfI was born and raised in semi-rural Hawaii, far removed from either the East Village of Manhattan or the cornfields of the Heartlandand it would not be the last. Barely a month into my new life, a friend at work told me about a 5K that benefited the local public library. Rural Illinois was flat, I reasoned. How hard could running be? Very, as it turned out, yet something happened to me after that first painfully slow ordeal besides gorging on the pancake breakfast provided for the runners, thus ensuring I consumed far more calories than I had burned: I vowed that I would get fit. As God was my witness, I would earn those pancakes. And then I would have seconds.

From there, somehow I went from barely making it around the block without collapsing to regularly taking on marathons and even ultramarathonsthat is, distances beyond 26.2 miles, which I had not even known existed in my previous life except by car. Its not unusual to hear stories of people discovering running later in life; its exercise a person can do on their own, after all, with relatively little expense or preparationand, most of all, no humiliating sessions with baffling equipment, surrounded by the young and the chiseled, in a mirrored room where you cant delude yourself about your lack of strength, coordination, and flexibility.

But after a while I wasnt doing it to be healthy. After a while it wasnt all that healthy. Im not an MD but I still know that black toenails probably arent a good thing. I kept doing it because I loved it. There is solitude and peace. There is rigorous challenge and then rapturous reward for getting through the rigorous challenge. Theres a highfor me, a slow, steady one, not a crazy crash-and-burn adrenaline rush but something that feels deeper and more enduring. And yes, theres pain. Lots of it. After long runs I hurt in ways I never thought possible. I once chipped a tooth during a run. I strained muscles I couldnt pronounce. The thing about that, though: the suffering you take on voluntarily is very different from the one you are helpless to prevent. In truth, nothing too terrible has happened to me running, nothing I couldnt chuckle about later, and many good things have happened. I got reasonably fit for the first time in my life. I made friends with a lot of like-minded lunatics who run crazy distances for fun. And as I said, I met a certain dog and her person.