Evolutionarily Speaking

by Ana Maria Ventura

I run the hills of Huddart Park, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I like the occasional fallen branch that lies crossways on the path, another obstacle to climb over or duck under. I like the changing texture of earth under my soles—the points of rocks, stabbing, the crunch of twigs, snapping, the squelch of mud, collapsing. There is the darkness of the forest; even on the brightest day, the sun cannot overpower the shade of branches, leaf-coated, a thousand arms and ten thousand fingers crisscrossed over a lonely cavern. I like the rise in elevation: trails emerge gradually from beneath the trees into sunlight, and sky, until the peak of the trail finally overlooks the Pacific. I can run for hours without seeing another person; my steady breath is rarely interrupted by the courtesy, “Hi,” and my muscles pump until they reach that inevitable wobbly stage, as though there is gelatin inside my skin instead of my body’s complex system of woven fibers.

It interests me, the musculoskeletal system, so I would like to be a structural integrationist. “Of course you would,” my father said when I mentioned this in a meeting with my English teacher. “A structural integrationist. I don’t even know what that is.”

“But you don’t have to settle,” Ms. Handler said. “You could be anything. You could go to a good school.” Her fingers rubbed the thin edges of my transcript; dry skin, dry paper, an audible verification of my scholarly potential. “But not if you fail English. You can write the poem or take a zero.”

“I’m just not creative,” I said. I tried not to look at my dad’s face, the tired disappointment manifested in wrinkles around his eyes.

“You could write a villanelle. A haiku. Anything,” she bargained. “There are different kinds of poetry.”    

My own poetry is a run on a November morning and it begins like molasses. The cold in my bones makes everything stiff, but a half-mile in there is rhythm. Each pair of steps creates meter, each mile a stanza, and by the fourth, the cadence of my body rolls in iambs--da-DUM, da-DUM—and it feels like I’ve never done anything but run.

When I said this, Ms. Handler replied, “I get it, but, running doesn’t meet the parameters of the assignment.”

My father didn’t get it, doesn’t ever get me, so he just shook his head and explained, “This is because your mother was a hippie.”

But I don’t know anything about that. What I do know is that my father is an East Coast man—he’d like me to go to U Penn, because even though he’s not Ivy League educated, he’s not without dreams for his one progeny. 

Mr. Owens, who is Ivy League educated—Columbia—and only twenty-three, also told me I could go to a good school. He used to be my anatomy teacher, and somehow that made it mean more, because he knew—the beauty of our bones sheathed in muscles, in tendons, in ligaments beneath our skin. He is a runner.

He used to coach cross-country, and ran with the team every day. He said once, in class, that evolutionarily speaking, our bodies were made to run long distances. The bones in our toes, the spring of our ligaments, these things, “weren’t created,” he said, his pen tracing the soleus muscle on the overhead transparency, “by some mastermind with a plan. We evolved. We adapted.” After school, when everyone else had gone, he spun his pen between his fingers, under, over, under, over, the metacarpal bones rising and falling in waves. “I love anatomy, the way everything in our bodies works together. It’s a perfect machine.” He told me that he started running in college; he was worried about his final exams—so many bones—and running helped him remember all 206. When his girlfriend left him for another man, running helped him forget. When it was over, he just kept on running.

I don’t know where he runs now that he’s not out with the cross-country team, but sometimes I imagine he’s here, on a parallel trail or around the next corner. “Hey, you,” he might say, just like he used to on cold afternoons in the empty bio lab, one dimple punctuating his cheek. “Run with me,” he might say. But he doesn’t. Because there is nothing here but elevation, vegetation, isolation.

The trails today are dry, and cold. If I could, I would take my shoes off to feel pure dirt against my callused skin, even though I know how my dad would feel about that. But the smooth parts of the trail never stay that way. There are always rocks ahead, tree branches, or pebbled streams to slow me down. In the meantime, there are footprints, hundreds of them, to speed me up. Miles of ghost runners, sprinting before me, their proof carried away with each strike of my feet against the earth. They were here, then one step and poof—they’re gone. The footprints could belong to anyone: a dry cleaner, a cardiologist, Mr. Owens, my mother. 

So I chase the ghost runners. I push myself until I feel my breath burn in my throat, for my heart to pulse all way down to my fingertips. With every step, there is another tiny tear in my muscles, another sliver of welcome pain for my tomorrow-morning quadriceps. I could outrun gravity at this pace and still never find whatever—or whomever—it is I am looking for. This, I think, is poetry.

“Just like your mother,” my dad always tells me, “always running.”

I’d like to argue that we’re different, but I don’t really know. I rack my brain for details—the one brown patch in her blue-gray eyes, the lambskin coat she wore in winter—but all that surfaces are parts of pictures, fragments from the very few photographs I have of her. I chase memories that could be real or dreamed, memories I’m sure will solidify around the next corner, if only I run faster.

But then it’s over. The trail ends abruptly in the smooth, sane pavement of the parking lot. I can feel the crust of salt on my forehead, beads of sweat pooling at the base of my back. My lungs are raw, heaving, and my sated heart thumps, slowing and emptying, back to normalcy.