Wayfinding

by Susheila Khera

Gnarly, slippery roots crisscross the trail. A scattering of spruce needles, cones, broken twigs, decaying birch leaves covers the soft ground. Sunlight filters between the trees and when the wind rushes through the crowns, it rattles branches and draws everything upwards. I’m thinking of what’s ahead. The bend around the big clump of trees, the small rise that will need extra energy, that welcome level area. I’ve done some of the hilly sections of this trail in interval trainings. Up and down, up and down the same hill, six to eight times, striving for consistent pace and time. Now, when I run these portions as part of a five or seven mile or longer workout, I can more readily adjust to a pace that I can sustain going up and maintain once I crest the hill. One two, one two, one two.

Although I’d always liked the sport, I didn’t take running seriously until relatively late in life. One May, a co-worker invited me to participate on a relay team in the Equinox Marathon, a race in Fairbanks that takes place annually around the fall equinox and that is run mostly on wooded trails. For a relay team, the 26.2 mile course is divided into three roughly nine mile segments. Apart from sprints down the soccer field when I was younger, some runs around the neighborhood, indoor laps at the gym, and arbitrary, spontaneous bursts during walks, I’d never run more than a mile at a stretch. Being part of a relay team presented the frightening prospect of having to run nine miles by the end of September, and not just for myself. There would be someone waiting for me, ready to run her leg. All of us middle-aged novices, we drew straws to see who would run which segment. I drew the first leg, probably the easiest of the three. And with my commitment, I suddenly saw time shrink and obligation grow.

I was completely intimidated, to the point of not seeking advice or even running on the actual race trail, although I did read about it online. It winds through a rural residential area fairly close to my house and was described as mostly rolling hills. I could see that, I drove by it every day on my way to work. I imagined that on the day of the race, I would simply follow the herd. After all, the important thing seemed to be that I could cover the distance in a respectable time without getting lost.

My training plan was to start with a mile and increase that distance by one mile every week until I reached nine miles, and then run that distance regularly. My intention was to avoid extra driving for workouts, so I started by running along the rural highway near our house, and I immediately loathed it. There was a good bit of fast and noisy traffic, often it was hot, and on a few occasions people yelled rude comments. I finally had it when a pick-up full of teenage boys pulled up alongside me and one of them yelled in my ear. I could have throttled him. That incident made me reconsider my commitment to driving less and conserving fossil fuels, and instead I began making the extra trips to run on the wooded ski trails around the university that I loved so much in winter.

From then on, everything changed. Running was relaxing, meditative, refreshing. Back then, I didn’t have a watch and my flip phone didn’t have GPS, so I don’t know how many miles I ultimately ran, probably around seven. After each exercise, I marveled at my endurance and pushed myself to go further and longer the next time. And then, still knowing very little about the sport and the course, I stood at the starting line on the big day and charged loose when the cannon boomed.

It was grueling, and it didn’t help that I’d eaten a slightly overripe banana right before the start and then sped up the steep hill that is the first tenth or so mile of the race. It took me at least two miles to catch my breath, and all the while I was combatting a terrible feeling of nausea. Further on, the rolling hills did not seem so rolling, but more like a brutal series of endless climbs. Everybody seemed to be passing me. Short stretches of the route, which are alongside the road I drive every day, and which I thought were flat, turned out to be subtle inclines. At one point, the only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that my teammate was waiting for me at the relay checkpoint.

When I came to Alaska more than half my life ago, it was for a six-month stay to help my mother as she went through chemo. It was mid-September, and as the plane flew into Fairbanks, I looked down at hills splendidly golden with fall foliage. Once outside, there was a familiar smoky, woodsy smell with an edge of winter that I remembered from childhood summers in Canada. For me, this is the smell of home. That weekend, it started to snow at the higher elevations, and I heard about the Equinox Marathon. The idea of people running 26 miles was so incomprehensible to me that I couldn’t even grasp it. For years after, that race was a daunting, surreal phenomenon. Who could touch it? And yet, I spoke with seemingly normal people who ran it, who said it was fun, who said I should try it. I could only shake my head.

Decades later, about halfway through my stretch of the relay, in a run rife with mistakes, I stopped at a water station and gratefully drank a cup of sugary cider. The view was of Ester Dome, the mountain at the center of the Equinox. It is visible from most points in town, rising as a dark green backdrop. From the base to its summit, runners climb about 1,500 vertical feet in 3.4 miles, partially on a dirt road, partially on a trail. As the cider calmed my roiling stomach and strength returned to my legs, I followed the mountain’s profile, gauged where the trail might be, wondered about those people who were doing all 26.2 miles. There’s a gash in the trees where the road is, and my eye followed it to the top, and suddenly I realized that I could do the entire marathon.

I thought about it all winter, and the next summer I started training. I ran on my own, and I was also finally brave enough to go to track intervals that the local running club offered.

Later in the season, I joined a group that trained specifically for the Equinox. Weekly sessions covered seven to nine miles, and we got to know every step of the course. I learned to anticipate each small hill, look out for large root clusters, use the downhills as a rest. At night while falling asleep, I would retrace my run, plan for the next one, analyze my mistakes and where I could have done better, commit the trail to memory. After we ran up and then down Ester Dome for the first time, I felt as though a great fear had been conquered. For the next week, every time I saw that mountain while driving or walking, I would marvel at having run up it. All that summer I felt a growing strength in me, and the training runs always energized me.

On the big day, jittery and my stomach in knots until the starting cannon sounded, I was wise enough to take that initial steep hill slowly. Once at the top, I focused on finding and maintaining a pace, regulating my breath, looking ahead to the next mile. It’s become a pattern now, and I can keep three little films going concurrently in my mind. The first one, the one that is most forward, is the next mile. The second one is of all the obstacles and difficult portions ahead for which energy must be saved. The last one is of the finish line and my goal time. As the miles get ticked off, the last film pops up ever more frequently. Running that morning, white clouds of breath in the chilly September air, a young woman, who’d also been in the training group, ran alongside me during part of the first mile. Her brown hair was pulled back into a pony tail and she was wearing a simple t-shirt and loose shorts. “I can’t believe I’m running a marathon this morning!” she said. We both laughed.

I ran consistently for seven summers. Each year, I looked forward to exploring new trails, competing in various races, meeting the challenge of weekly track intervals, and to being part of the loose camaraderie of running. After work, I’d take to the trails and unwind from the day, think about a difficult problem and how it might be solved. Other times, I’d repeat the lines of a poem I was writing, say them over and over until they sounded right. Or I’d think of a friend who needed help, and in my own way I’d pray for things to get better. And at some point, something always made me stop and look around, marvel at the trees, the sky, the smells of bark and dark soil. I’d wonder how I got to be so lucky, to live in this place at this time and be able to do what I was doing. I’d finish and come home after having run five, seven, or ten miles and feel great.

And then one summer, I felt drained. I was always tired, and running didn’t have the energizing effect it usually had. I often found myself walking, and then I started walking ever longer stretches more frequently. My times in 5k races, although never very fast, faltered. I seemed to be short of breath and I had a strange discharge. I wanted to attribute it all to menopause, or maybe a combination of menopause and some faulty running technique, or maybe some nutritional deficiency or excess, but something far deeper was nagging at me, making me anxious, prodding me. At least once a week, suddenly gripped by great worry, I would Google the symptoms of various cancers. But none seemed to fit. When I told a friend that I was always tired, he suggested that I might have anemia, and I eagerly glommed onto that idea, but the dread in me persisted.

In mid-summer, on a Wednesday, I finally surpassed the one year mark since my last check-up and went in to see the doctor. She listened, and on Friday I had an ultra-sound. On Monday, a CT scan. The following Wednesday I did 600 meter track intervals, all the while wondering when I would be able to do them next. That Friday morning, I was in surgery for stage 2 fallopian tube cancer. I was released on July 27. Thirty-one years earlier, on July 28, my mother died in the hospital of metastatic breast cancer.

I had a month to recover from the surgery, and in August I started five months of intense chemotherapy. In Fairbanks, Alaska, at this time of year, the evening sky starts to darken at around 10:30, taking on a dark greyish-bluish color as the season is nudged toward winter. After the first infusions, I spent many nights pacing the living room floor, my legs restless from an anti-nausea drug that was subsequently replaced. My mind was in turmoil from the chemo. I was agitated, depressed. One night I sat on the couch and cried, so sad that my mother had died before she was even fifty, so sad for all the other good people I knew who had been taken by this disease. I wished that I could have helped them live. Looking out the window, I saw the tall spruce that I’d watched grow up, saw the tops of the aspen silhouetted against the night sky, and I thought, what if I could only see these things for six more months? A chill ran through me, and I began to think of all the survivors I knew, and I believed that I would be one too.

By chance, I’ve learned a little bit about the Polynesian navigators—Wayfinders. Sailing across the wide and undulating Pacific, they observed the sun, the moon, ocean swells, birds, the wind. Guided by these elements, they covered thousands of nautical miles to get to a small dot of land in the endless and shifting waterscape of waves and tides. But above all, they always had a reference point, perhaps of where they had last been or where they had started originally, and this point was what they kept in mind, kept as a clear vision, to stay their course and find their way.

When I was going through chemo, I took a walk every day and ran short distances, but the intraperitoneal port attached to my ribs chafed uncomfortably. And with each chemo cycle, I became increasingly tired, until it was a chore for me to walk the 2/10 of a mile or so from our house to the end of the road. One morning in December, close to my last treatment, I left the house before anyone else was up, didn’t even take my cell phone, and walked to the end of the road. Turning to go back, a great fatigue swept over me. I could see the house, and yet I wondered if I could make it back. I thought of sitting down in the snowbank to rest, but I knew that would be the end. Mustering everything I had, I slowly worked my way home. As I turned in to the driveway I thought, one day I’ll walk up here, and I’ll feel normal and strong, like I used to, and the thought of drinking a cup of hot chocolate to warm up will seem delicious and not revolting.

One night I had a dream about running the Equinox. In this dream, it was a tradition for all runners to stop at a café-gift shop during the race and have breakfast. When I came in, the place was full of people, shopping or sitting and eating, engaged in animated conversations. A friend of ours, who had died of cancer a few years previously, was there, but he didn’t recognize me. I ordered breakfast and looked at a rack of greeting cards, and suddenly everyone was gone I remembered that I had to get back to the race. I wanted to pay for my food but couldn’t find the waitress. I ended up outside, but then I couldn’t find the trail. In another dream, I was on skis at the top of Denali. It was a European-type summit, with a lodge and cable car, and there was a dense forest of tall spruce all around the rocky, snowy peak. My husband was there, and so were friends of mine, and they were going to ski down. “I’ll catch up,” I said, because I had to adjust my boots. Suddenly they were gone and it was winter twilight. There were five trails from which to choose, but I didn’t know which one to take. I tried one, and it was a dead end. I worked my way back to the top and wished I could find my friends.

In the infusion center in Anchorage, the white ceiling tiles are embossed with a pattern that resembles sastrugi on the windswept surface of the small woodland lake where often I ski. During the hours-long chemo infusions, I’d occasionally look up, follow the ridges and grooves, and think of the clean sharp cold, the jagged line of dark spruce all around the shore, the deep pinks and golds from the setting sun. My last treatment was the week of winter solstice. On December 30, I waxed my cross-country skis. New Year’s Day weekend, I skied around the lake twice, about a mile. The next week, I started working out on the treadmill. I selected a moderate hilly course, and after a few minutes I found myself tired, out of breath, appalled by my performance. My husband told me to take it easy, I’d just been through five months of chemo.

That summer, I ran on the trails and slowly worked my way up to being able to run more than a mile or two without wheezing and having to rest and catch my breath. My goal was to run to the top of a nearby long and painful hill without stopping; I managed to do that twice. Throughout the following winter, I skied and did other workouts, and by the next summer I finally felt good enough to run five to seven miles at a stretch and also do weekly track intervals. I even participated in a few races. One day toward the end of summer, I was running on a flat and hard-packed trail, when a sense of being completely normal washed through me. It felt as though all the drugs were finally flushed out of my system and my body was rebuilt. I had reached a point where I was no longer standing outside, looking in at the world, but was once again fully a part of it. Not long after, however, I was diagnosed with a recurrence. It meant more surgery, more chemo. I’d staved off the disease longer than average, and the new growth was small and isolated, but it took me until this point to realize that I was dealing with something more than just a passing illness.

I’ll never be cancer free. My doctor, who is incredible and wonderful, likens this type of cancer to sand. “I can’t get it all,” she’s said. But with each treatment, be it surgery or drugs or something else, I hope to buy time, months and years of it. And I hope to be able to keep running and skiing and go on with my life. And always I will stop at some point, marvel at the world in which I get to live, at this time and in this place, and that I get to do what I do.

Spring time in interior Alaska is spare but short. The forest is brown, the new growth barely budding. Mushrooms that glowed red, orange, bright gold, velvety brown on the forest floor the previous fall are rimmed in black and curled into themselves. But in the soil, scattered around, the spores lie in wait to grow into firm, brightly-colored mushrooms. They might feed squirrels and other creatures, or they might just disintegrate back into the earth. And one morning, summer is suddenly everywhere and it seems as though everything is hurrying to grow, bloom, scatter its seeds. Wild roses, bluebells, fireweed, high bush cranberries flower—pink, blue, fuchsia, white. Cottonwood fluff is blown along, floats overhead, finally gathers in white bunches on the ground, against tree trunks and in roadside ditches. The salmon are running and the constant daylight brings energy to all.

After my recurrence and second surgery, I was supposed to have six chemo treatments but my doctor felt comfortable stopping after four and then switching me to a PARP inhibitor, a set of pills I take twice a day to keep the PARP enzyme from helping the cancer rebuild itself. I started taking the medicine and was cranky, tired, nauseous. My dosage was adjusted, and I started to feel better. After about a month, I even felt good enough to go running. I started with track intervals, and a few weeks later I happily did difficult hill intervals. I’d focus on my pace, on the next twenty feet, on reaching to top of the hill. And once there, out of breath, I’d think that this would be my last repeat. But then I’d jog down, and I’d realize that I could do at least one more, and so I’d start again and all the while wonder if I’d make it, if this would be my last one.

When I initially started chemo, one of the first feelings I had was of being trapped. It was as though I was entangled in a giant spider web, and no matter what I did, its dense and sticky silk threads ensnared me. Running through the woods cut those threads. I know the next recurrence is only a matter of time, but running makes me feel strong. It’s my reference point, and I push myself to reach the level of endurance I had in my life before cancer. It’s what helps keep me on course as I journey through these unknown waters, finding my way. And no matter how rough the waves or uncertain the winds, I can look to it for reassurance that I’m on course.

Susheila Khera lives and works in Fairbanks, Alaska. She has an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Her work has appeared in Catamaran-South Asian American Writing, IceFloe-International Poetry of the Far North, The Northern Review, Cirque-A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim and WoodenBoat Magazine. She also has a chapbook, Step by Careful Step, published by Finishing Line Press. She is a member of the Northwoods Book Arts Guild, a group dedicated to the arts of letterpress and bookbinding, and has participated in group exhibits of the Guild.