Tucson COVID Tales No. 3: Wild at Dawn, by Lydia Millet
What’s mostly kept me going is my writing. But even a sedentary person needs fresh air and a bit of natural light. So in the spring of the pandemic, before it got hot, I’d go running in the morning along a trail near my house, in the western part of the national park. When I use the term run, in this context, it’s mostly because it’s quicker to say than “slowly, awkwardly jog.” Have no fear: you don’t need to picture a sleek, self-righteously fit athlete and feel irritated/envious. I’m typically outfitted in compression tights for a creaky knee and hip, plus weird, armored-looking ankle-and-calf gaiters I wear as a rattlesnake defense—I’ve leapt over several in my time, but someday, I figure, one of those sleepy jokers will wake up suddenly and surprise me. I also wear an elaborate hat, sunglasses, and earbud setup, since I can’t run without music, and a geeky water-vest apparatus with ugly-looking, intermittently slimy feeding tubes that flops as I go. I love the desert, true, but I also value the trail for its solitude. Even when no plague has descended over the land, I don’t care to risk encountering my fellow humans. As a jogger I demand nearly complete invisibility. Though I do like to see other animals, jackrabbits and mule deer mostly. I tell myself they’re not inclined to judge.
When it got hotter, I couldn’t get up early enough. I’m not intrepid and I can’t stand to exert myself outside once the temperature at 7 a.m. hits the 80s. I lapsed into inertia and focused more on drinking mail-order wine at the cocktail hour. It was biodynamic, though, so 100-percent healthy. But I did make a couple of excursions into the White Mountains, where my children spent a week in a so-called pod with their friends’ family for a break in the quarantine monotony. Up there I decided not to run, not wishing to subject my hosts to the spectacle of me in my compression tights and water vest. There’s a psychological limit to hospitality, and I try to respect it. Instead I went for quiet early-morning walks in the forest. There I saw lupines blooming, a small herd of feral horses, and an Abert’s squirrel that maybe had a nest nearby and got angry at me, chuffing and slapping a tree trunk until I retreated. My favorite part was the sound of the wind moving the ponderosa pines.
Lydia Millet is a Tucson-based writer. Her latest novel is A Children’s Bible (see here for an excerpt). Visit her at www.lydiamillet.net.
Category: TUCSON COVID TALES
