D-Day + 32: Dancing with Disaster

Ed and I both like to read “This Day in History” in our local paper.  Yesterday’s entry, for April 15, 2013, caught my attention.  “Two bombs made from pressure cookers exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line….”

It took me back to that day in April 2013.  It was the first time in twelve years that I had not been part of that race.  Boston meant the world to me.  Boston was legendary even when I was a fledgling jogger, back in the mid 1970s.  It was an ideal.  I held no delusions that I would ever be able to run in that august event; I was never going to be that fast.  I was happy just to admire those who were that fast, and who completed that very difficult course on the third Monday of every April.  But then, after I had run my first three marathons, amazingly, I hit a day when I was that fast.  On a chilly day in early October 2001, in those scary days just a month after 9/11, I ran a qualifying time in the Chicago Marathon.  I was set for my once-and-done trip to Boston in April 2002.

Then something magical happened.  I ran my first Boston, and then I kept re-qualifying for the race.  Year after year.  It became a huge part of my life.  My friends and family all knew, too, how important it was to me.  Year after year; more people than I ever could have hoped for watched my progress through the on-line athlete’s tracker.  They knew that every April, on Patriot’s Day in Boston, I would be there for the race.

But time and life happened.  I ran Boston ten times, and ten times I finished.  Then I finished my goal of running a marathon in every state, in October 2011.  I was getting weary of all the training and all the racing.  My knee was hurting.  My mom died in early 2012, and that just killed my spirit, too.  I was single.  And lonely.  I went to Boston in April 2012, and, for want of a driving mission (and a bit of heat exhaustion), I dropped out of the race in the Newton hills.  It was my only DNF (did not finish) ever.

And it was my last marathon – Boston or otherwise – ever.

But my friends and family didn’t know all those details.  When the news of the 2013 bombing hit the airwaves, I started getting phone calls.  Texts.  Emails.  “Are you okay?”  “Were you there?”  It was heart-warming to know so many people cared.  It was also heartening to hear that my friends who were part of the race that day were all okay (albeit a tad rattled – or annoyed and angry – by the outcome).  And, while it was a huge relief to not have been one of the people injured or killed by the bombs, I was completely ambivalent.  Shouldn't I have been there?

This wasn’t my first experience courting disaster, and it wouldn’t be my last.  Over the course of my life, I’ve been racking up more than my fair share of near-misses, sometimes way too close for comfort.

There was the San Francisco earthquake of 1989.  I was there, in the heart of San Francisco, when the earth started shaking.  I was in the city for a doctor’s appointment, and the doc had just come into the exam room when the quake started.  While I tried to pull my feet out of the stirrups, he said, “we’ll just have to ride this out”, and that shaking seemed to go on forever.  The medical office was running late that afternoon, by a good thirty or more minutes, which, as it turns out, was my good fortune that day.  If they had been on time, I would have very likely been on the Bay Bridge, on my way back out of the city, when it collapsed.  As it was, it took me ten hours to get back home to Grass Valley, where Rome was waiting.  At 3 a.m., we walked across the parking lot to a grocery store (we had just returned back from a time living in the UK, and were staying in a motel), bought a bottle of brandy, and planned to get the heck out of California for good.

Then there was the emergency landing on a flight home from Dallas in 1999.  I was on a project there, traveling back and forth on a weekly basis.  One Thursday night, I caught a flight with a couple of my colleagues.  At about the time we were supposed to be approaching Denver, the captain told us we were making an emergency landing in Oklahoma City.  Huh?  It turned out that one of the engines had a leak, and we could see jet fuel spewing out behind the wing of the plane.  I didn’t realize how serious the situation was until, once we were on the ground, the captain parked the plane at the far end of the runway – as far away from the terminal as possible – and had us go down the slides.  Fire trucks came screaming up and started spraying fire-retarding foam.  Emergency crews yelled at us as we emerged from the slide, shouting at us to move as far away from the plane as we could.  It’s amazing to figure out, only later, how much danger you were in.

That wasn't my only scary flight experience.  There was the time, back in the early 1990s, when I was on an aborted takeoff;  nothing wakes you up from a pre-flight nap like having the plane come to a screeching halt just at the time it should be airborne.  It turned out that the flight control panel went completely dark, and the captain (and all of us on the flight) would have been in deep trouble had we been in the air.

And there was the time, just last December, when we were in New Zealand, and the White Island volcano erupted.  Ed and I, along with our Kiwi host Delwyn, had plans to be on the tour of White Island just a few days later.  What if?  We had just arrived in NZ the morning that the volcano blew;  Delwyn texted us to tell us the news.  She was shaking, she told us, as she looked at the brochure for the tour that she had on her countertop.  

Also in December, we heard news of a helicopter crash on Kauai, on a tour of the Na Pali coast.  Ed and I had just visited Kauai in early November, and had taken that helicopter tour.  We had not flown with the same company, but does it really matter?  All the choppers line up at the same spot at the airport, and they all cover the same flight pattern.  Again, what if?

There are times, it seems, that I have been dancing with disaster for much of my life.  Perhaps it all goes back to the fact that I might not even be here today if it weren’t for disaster – disaster in the form of the last pandemic to hit the world, the Spanish flu of 1918.  You see, my maternal grandmother was married at the time, and was a young mother, in southwestern Iowa.  In the early fall of 1918, her husband took a train journey across Nebraska to look at homesteading opportunities in northern Colorado.  He contracted the Spanish flu and died.  Grandma later remarried and had a new family with my grandfather.  The collection of molecules that is me would not be here if not for the Spanish flu and that fateful trip for her first husband.

But here I am in April 2020, watching it snow outside, and fairly content to be sheltering-in-place.  The Boston Marathon for 2020 was originally scheduled, as usual, on Patriot’s Day:  April 20^th.  The coronavirus has changed all that.  It’s now set to occur on September 14^th instead, and I’ll be praying that things have improved enough by then for it to come off.  Somehow, this whole pandemic is giving me renewed inspiration.  I had a dream last night that I ran a marathon. I didn’t qualify for Boston, but who knows?  I’ve been known to have some pretty darn good luck in the past.