Light at the Friend of the tunnel
- Jun 15
- 9 min read
“It looks like the trail keeps going over there.” Her eyes pointed through the mist to a gate among the bushes. “Wanna see where it goes?”
Mom listened both ways and we rushed across the highway. After only a few steps, the bushes hugged closer and blocked out the towers, roads, and other traces of civilization. Only the smoke remained as the earth carried us upward into the orange air.
The trail was so narrow in places that lonely vines reached across it to reconnect with their leafy friends. Perhaps it hadn’t seen enough runners to finish becoming a trail yet. Or maybe it was going the other way, forgetting the paws that carved it and fading back into wilder-ness. When the hill weighed down Mom’s steps so much that running turned to walking, the brush parted and I recognized the curious triple phone tree that marks the one-mile mark on the Haunted Highway. We stepped onto the familiar balcony where ghosts look back at My Hometown one last time before the sun sucks them back to heaven.
I peered through the orange, trying to make out the places where I usually run patrol. Now that the sun was higher, I could make out the shadows of hills and the lacey whiteness where the ocean met the land. From up here, My Hometown looked more wild than not. The houses and streets that made up my life were slotted into the spaces left over between hills and ocean. I knew the Stuck House was down there somewhere, but the smoke and distance made it as invisible as a tiny, unimportant detail in all that wilder-ness.
Mom looked up the Haunted Highway with the hungry eyes of someone seeing it for the first time. “I had no idea that the trail system south of the tunnel connected back to the other trails in town,” she said. “I wonder if we could connect them all into one big run that starts and ends at our front door.”
“That would mean running a very long way to go nowhere special,” I said. “The nice thing about being from somewhere is that you don’t have to enjoy it all at once.”
“I suppose you’re right. At least not today. We’ve got to hurry or I’ll be late to work.”
Every trail changes when you run it in the opposite direction, especially when it’s on a hill. In some places, the earth was so crumbly that it lost hold of Mom’s shoes. She growled deep in her throat and punched the air wildly to catch her balance.
Scrit, Mom’s shoes said.
“Duck!” Mom shouted.
Tisk, tisk, tisk the gravel warned as Mom fell from one leg to the other trying to catch herself after tripping.
“Damned goat trail,” she growled. One of these days, Mom wouldn’t catch herself, and she’d tumble into the ocean growling last words about ducks and dog doo dragging me by the leash behind her.
“Did all of California look like this once?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Mom’s paw slipped toward another cliff. She waved her arms until her wayward paw stomped into a bush that caught its escape. “I don’t know how they got covered wagons over this terrain.”
“The wagon trains didn’t travel in lines like roads, right? They followed the earth like trails do.”
“Sure. But eventually we got better at making straight lines to get places faster. That’s called progress.”
“I bet that’s why everyone is so peevish lately,” I decided. “Because the road they usually take is blocked, and now it’s an emergency because they’re gonna be late. What does progress do when there’s a mountain in the way?”
“They use machines to cut through it. Like the tunnel they built to avoid landslides.”
“So when your path keeps getting blocked, the answer is to hide underground where nothing dangerous can reach you?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Mom corrected. “Progress is solving a problem that keeps happening rather than just living with it. I would think that a life coach like you would know that already.”
“I thought that maybe the lesson was that sometimes it’s best to stay safe underground until the danger has passed. That’s why they told everyone to hide at home.”
“Tunnels aren’t meant to be shelter,” Mom corrected again, forgetting that something can be two things at once depending on the problem. “You’ve got to come out on the other side eventually.”
“Exactly,” I said, so that we were both right. “The answer isn’t always to get over it. Sometimes you just have to get through it. Maybe the reason everything has been so hard lately is because we’re not getting over it, we’re tunneling to the other side. When we do break through, perhaps we’ll look back to the old way from a different direction and find beautiful things we couldn’t appreciate before. Don’tcha think?”
“I guess. But today it’s hard to see anything nice. This whole year has felt like a knee on our necks and I’m out of breath from all the running away.” Mom let her eyes drift up the caged mountain toward the orange sky. “We can’t dig that tunnel by ourselves. It’s one of those things that can only be finished when everyone’s tunneling in the same direction. And I’m losing patience with all this division.”
“Don’t worry, Mom. I’m sure the tunnel-building people always finish their projects quickly and without drama, since everyone is depending on them.”
“I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the concept of government.”
There are two hard parts of a marathong: the part that’s hard for Moms and the part that’s hard for dogs. A Mom-athong starts with a checklist of all the hard things she’ll have to endure, like pacing, and chafing, and grape Gatorade, and the neck cramp at the end from shivering while they look for the bag with her sweatshirt and keys in it. Mom-athongs get easier as you go, because each trial is like a river—once it soaks into you, you have one less burden to worry about. Mom went through her runs doggedly checking off one misery after another until finally the river washed her clean of worries and she got her sweatshirt back.
Marathongs are a different kind of difficult for dogs. We can’t read checklists, so for us, a marathong means following Mom until your legs get crabby and it dawns on you that this run might take longer than you thought. The burdens and discomfort pile up until it occurs to you to try something different, like sitting in a shady spot, or drinking from the river rather than crossing it, or sitting on a rock for a little longer than usual after a picture. But no matter what you try, Mom always tells you to keep going. So you trudge behind her, wasting no movement until the end finally comes, long after you stopped looking for it. And yet, the extra snack at the end will be the most delicious you’ve ever tasted, which makes the whole thing worth it.
The boogeyvirus marathong had us running both ways at once. There were trials, but no checklist to tell how much was left before the finish. We passed each challenge with a dog’s strategy of trial and error, stepping boldly into rivers and resting in the shade of the Stuck House. But with no signs to point which way to turn and no one telling us where the finish was, the wet socks, sunburn, and grape Gatorade only added to our burdens. No matter how long we endured, the boogeyvirus just teased, Keep it up, you’re almost there.
One night, weeks after the first rain storms had put out the fires, when the smoke and summer fog had cleared from the air, Mom was all tucked into bed. I was helping her get a good night’s rest by pinning her under the blankets, when suddenly the door to the Stuck House burst open.
I jumped up, but was too startled to bark. “What the goose?” my head tilt said.
“Grumblegrumblegrumble,” grumbled Mom.
Without me to keep Mom’s straightjacket fastened, she escaped the blankets and closed the door.
“Who was it?” I pinned her back where she belonged, but kept my head up and my ears cocked for signs of ghosts.
“It was the wind,” she mumbled. “Can’t you hear it? I must not have closed the door tightly. Come on, lay down.”
But what dog could lay down when he might need to wake his Mom at any moment to protect him? Mom pretended to sleep, but I sensed her mind sitting at attention, too. Her arm escaped the blankie and pulled me into little-spoon position. She rested her chin between my ears and her thought bubble leaked numbers into my head.
“Let’s play a game,” I thought to her. “Let’s think about all the things we’ve learned this year. Round 1: Oregon. What did you learn in the dooms?”
“I learned that people lie and get away with it every day.”
“Wrong. The correct answer was that you’ve got to keep going if you ever want something unpleasant to end. Let’s try another one: What did you learn in Utah?”
“That dry socks are just a state of mind.”
“I’m sorry, the correct answer was that you shouldn’t let your fears stop you from chasing what you want. Okay, I’ll give you an easy question: What did you learn when we got back home?”
Mom tightened her arms around my chest to squeeze more love in. “I learned that you can be unwelcome in a place where you thought you belonged.”
“And the mountains, what did you learn there?”
“That rednecks don’t appreciate how the Great Remote-work Migration can breathe new economic life into their communities?”
“Wrong again! The correct answer is that we’re all heading for the same finish line, but we might take different paths to get there. Okay, here’s an easy one.” I yawned to let the suspense build. “What did you learn from that time we almost fell off the mountain?”
“That danger isn’t just something abstract that happens on TV and we need to be more careful.”
“More careful? What makes you say a silly thing like that?”
“I’ve always thought of danger as something I could leave out there and visit it on my own terms. But now that the air is clear, there’s still no end in sight. It feels like it’s only a matter of time until it gets us, too.”
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew, her thoughts were back to chasing their tails in the same rut they’d been running through for weeks. God, I’m gonna be so tired tomorrow. I don’t want to run in this wind. I hate wind. I hate running. I hate feeling tired. I wonder how many votes they’ve counted in Pennsylvania. Why is it so close? How could anyone vote for him? I’m so tired of this. I’m so tired. God, I’m gonna be so tired tomorrow…
Mom had gotten sucked into a very suspenseful show called The Election. She’d been watching it before bed all week, and after lights-out she lay awake wondering how it would end. I hadn’t seen the world so wrapped up in a show since Game of Thrones spoilers used to chase Mom from the lunch table at work every Monday. Unlike Game of Thrones, Mom was too impatient to wait for the season finale to binge the whole Election. She tuned in to each episode as soon as it dropped, as if something terrible would happen in real life if her favorite character didn’t win. The suspense was taking over our lives.
Part of the problem was that Election didn’t follow a schedule like an old-fashioned TV show. A new episode could drop at any moment, so Mom checked with the Witch a million times a day to make sure she didn’t miss a thing. She couldn’t look away, even when there were no new episodes to watch, because there was always someone spinning numbers into fan fiction or blah-blah-blahing a theory about what something in the most recent episode could foreshadow in the next.
When her thoughts went into reruns and still no one burst through the door to gobble us up, I finally put my head on my paws and went back to sleep.
After running through “a very close race” all night, the next morning Mom’s thought bubble was empty. She dug through drawers like a zombie, pulling out the right number of clothes but in the wrong combinations. She laid out two pairs of shorts and no shirt. Then, a shirt and a hat that didn’t match either pair of shorts.
“What about the threeteen Jillian reasons you listed overnight for not running?” I asked. “Why don’t we stay home and eat brunch in bed?”
“I do laundry on Sundays. You can’t do laundry when your sock drawer is still too full to close all the way,” Mom explained, like it was obvious. “What’s the flattest trail around here? I don’t have the energy to run uphill.”
“Have you ever looked out the window?” I asked. “There’s nothing flat around here. Not even the beach is flat.”
Mom thought about that and it did something to her face like she’d swallowed throw-up. Her face let go. “I know! Let’s go to the dog beach!”
At the Dog Beach, a dog and his life partner could run for miles using only the leash in their imagination. Mom would take off her shoes so she didn’t have to worry about sand or water getting in her socks and we would run fearlessly, letting land and ocean take turns between our toes.
“But you don’t wear socks on the dog beach,” I pointed out.
“After all the dangers we’ve faced this year, maybe I can handle an overfull sock drawer after all. At least the beach is wide enough that I can keep 6 feet away and won’t have to pull up my mask all the time. I’m so sick of having to worry about that damned mask. I’m sick of it all!”
“No! But we’ve been working so hard to make sure you don’t get sick!”
She looked very sad all of a sudden. “There are other ways a person can be sick besides a virus.”
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
