The intermittent rains of the last few days have left a richness in the air that makes running an intoxicating pleasure. Mary Mcleod Rd. is a steep grade that starts near the back of the residency house and works its way up the side of Dome Mountain cresting at the rambling cemetery grounds. Those first 5 minutes are a grind but suffering up the rutted road trumps any happy hour G&T binge down in the town. A coyote does its own run along the treeline north of the newest burial plots as the grade slackens and Mary McLeod Meets Dome rd. signaling the start of the downhill reward that will eventually loop back along the riverbank and into town.
As I write this I feel a slight giddiness about these runs. Running on and off for 20 years now, those at the age of nineteen were far and away the toughest of my life. In that liminal year between civilian and soldier, teen and juvenile-adulthood almost all the running was hard, fast and without respite. Just completing a run was often challenge enough. Battle School was no place for the faint of will and the ability to disconnect body from mind was a crucial survival skill.
Like all infantry schools, the physical space of CFB Wainwright has a hard anchoring locus, often built around the imposing indifference of a parade square. From this block of flat blackness platoons head out into the training area, paved roads giving way to oiled hardpack and then dirt roads rippling across the broken grasslands – puffs of dust circling low on the ground as they pass by. The occasional truck or APC passes the platoons and the candidates do their best to not mentally project themselves into the easy living of the passenger seat or crew compartment.
Spittle gather on the edges of their gaping mouths as they suck in as much dust-filled air as possible, focusing their blurring vision on the feet in front of them.
But these long ago sufferfests are just a context. It is the unknown periphery of CFB Wainwright that I am thinking about as I turn past the jutting cliff face to my right and onto the hardpack of Dawson. The small, functional homes I’m passing have qualities kindred to the PMQs of bases across Canada. Those post-war family dwelling are clustered dots on the base’s edge and feel like a mirage when your days are spent humping gear and weapons, living in a crucible of adrenaline and ache.
On our rare day off we might venture a run through these unknown zones feeling like the outsiders we surely were. Children run around in the small fenced yards while lines of laundry are dried by winds heading east across Central Alberta’s expansive grasslands, the nearby Saskatchewan border their next marker. Like most prairie living, domestic life perseveres and almost flourishes in spite of and because of the harshness all around.
Again an outsider, I run along Dawson’s 5th Ave. wondering, where is the parade square, where are the chin-up bars and the quartermaster stores, where is the hard, defining heart of Dawson? This far north there must be a hardness and the characters wandering the streets affirm my belief. Hardness here is in the hills and rivers around town, in the camps and mines that I’ll likely never see but it is also held in the knuckles and fingertips of the guys downing draft at 10am or happy hour (5-7pm) on their day off, perhaps their last day off for some time to come.
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One foot in front of the other. Each running step gives the briefest moment where the body floats above the ground. One shoe hits the ground, both shoe and ground compress and the tiniest portion of heel tread is left behind, embedded in the oiled dirt of this town that continues to offer small and suspect glimpses into the past.
