The Hour the Alarm Goes Off
The alarm goes off at 4:20 a.m., and at 4:20 a.m. on the flatlands there is no name for what is happening outside. Morning is still far away. Night has already finished its shift, and night at least has density, a right to be in the world, while this is scrap dark, the kind that piles up when nobody is using it. The phone screen lights the ceiling for two seconds. Then everything goes black again.
I sit on the edge of the bed with my socks in my hand.
The house is asleep and the moka pot muttering on the stove sounds out of proportion. I drink the coffee standing up, leaning against the counter, watching my face reflected in the window that looks onto the yard. Beyond the glass there is nothing but the streetlamps and the yellow halo the humidity gives them. In September, out here, humidity doesn’t fall. It sits still, resting on things like a second skin nobody asked for. The bag is already by the door. I put it there the night before, before dinner, while there was still light and the decision could still be undone without anyone noticing.
At 4:20 I’m not deciding anything anymore. I execute.
This is the part nobody tells you about, and it already contains half of everything. People who live at the mouth of a valley open the door and the mountain is right there, available, almost domestic, something you do when the time for it happens to come up. I have to decide the mountain. I have to choose it on a Friday night in front of a calendar, defend it against a dinner invitation, pack it into a bag while there is still daylight and normal life is still switched on around me. Distance forces an act of will on me that people lucky enough to live close never have to perform. And that act, which looks like nothing more than a cost, ends up being what gives weight to everything else.
I close the door turning the key by hand, so the latch doesn’t snap.
The Highway, the Fog, the Window Coming Down
The windshield is opaque with condensation. I drag the back of my hand across it and get a crooked half-moon, enough to pull out of the yard without clipping the low wall. The traffic circles are empty in a way that would be news in daylight. A signal blinks yellow for nobody. Then the tollbooth, the gate lifting with nobody looking at me, and the highway.
Driving the flatlands before dawn has a quality that daylight erases. The fog comes in banks: for a few minutes I can see the white line and the reflectors lighting up one after another, then it opens, then it closes again. Warehouse lights slide past on either side like buoys. I don’t turn on the radio. I tried it the first few times and every voice sounded out of place, a guest talking too loud in a room where everyone else is still asleep. I drive and think about nothing in particular, and this may be the last hour of the week when nothing is being asked of me.
Then the road starts to climb and I notice it with my ears before my eyes. The engine changes pitch. The curves tighten and lift. At some point, with no clean border, the fog thins: it becomes a veil, becomes haze, then stays below, a still white lake covering exactly the place I left.
I roll the window down.
The air that comes in is almost twenty degrees colder than the air I left at home, and it carries a smell the flatlands don’t have: resin, wet earth, a cold that tastes like stone. It gets down the collar of my shirt and wakes me more than the coffee did. I keep my arm out until it hurts.
The lot is gravel and the car door closing makes an enormous noise. By 7:30 my feet are on a trail I can’t see from my own window even on those January days when the wind scours the plain clean and a blue line of mountains shows up on the horizon.
The First Steps on Ground That Isn’t Yours
The first few hundred steps are bad, and they always are. The body has just gotten up from two hours in a car seat, the hips are locked, my breathing is running harder than what I’m doing deserves. There’s a moment right after the start when I ask myself, coldly, what the point was of getting up in the dark to feel like this.
Then there’s the ground, which is the real reason I drove all this way.
At home I run on surfaces that always answer the same way: asphalt, concrete, the packed gravel of the levee paths. The foot knows in advance what it will find and the head can go elsewhere, do its own arithmetic. Here the foot knows nothing. A root slick with damp, a stone that shifts under weight, a stretch of mud that holds less than expected, leaves hiding whatever is underneath. Every footfall is a question I answer in a tenth of a second, hundreds of times in a row, and the head empties out of necessity more than virtue. It’s the move from road to trail compressed into a single morning, like a foreign language you have to start speaking right away.
After a while the body stops protesting and starts cooperating. The cold air stops burning. My hands warm up. The sound I make on the leaves is the only sound there is.
People with the mountain at their door inhabit it. I have to cross it, and to cross it I first have to have wanted it.
For years I thought living on the flatlands was a lack, a kind of handicap you’re born with, to be paid off in miles behind the wheel. Now I see that the distance isn’t an obstacle between me and the mountain; it’s the thing that makes me choose it. Desire needs an interval in order to exist: if the trail starts behind your house, it also starts to resemble your hallway. The two hours of driving are where the Sunday gets charged.
What’s Left on Monday
The drive home is the part nobody ever mentions, and it’s the part that convinced me to keep doing this.
By five in the afternoon I’m home. The bag waiting to be emptied is on the entryway floor, the shoes packed with dried dirt are out on the balcony, shedding pieces of trail onto the concrete. And there’s still part of the afternoon ahead, intact, with the low September light coming through the kitchen window.
This is what throws me every time. A Sunday that has already been full by five, with a piece of it still left over.
Ordinary Sundays, the ones where I decide nothing, come at me and spend themselves. You get up late, you do something because it’s time to do something, and by seven in the evening there’s an emptiness that’s hard to name. This one I built myself, piece by piece, starting from a bag set down by the door on Saturday night. What changes between the two Sundays is who did the deciding.
Monday morning the flatlands are identical to how they were on Friday. My legs aren’t. There’s a particular soreness in the quads, different from what asphalt produces, more diffuse and slower to leave, and for two or three days every perfectly flat sidewalk feels like a simplification.
From September on, I don’t pick the hour I train: it gets picked by the light going earlier and by the things other people put on my calendar for me. The Sunday built on purpose is the last thing I can still decide from end to end, from the alarm to the window coming down.
The soreness passes in three or four days. Then I open the calendar again and look for the next free Sunday.