On Scraped Elbows

Last week I fell and scraped my elbow, running. I was on Fire Island with my pal who has had a house there the past six years and I’ve been out most of the years they’ve had the house. I have a favorite place I like to run that’s called The Sunken Forest. The name alone is worth the trip. And ocean, obviously, at least three times a day. Of course, also time with my sweet, wonderful friend.

Most of the place my friend stays, including The Sunken Forest, is wood slat boardwalk and the morning I went running there had been a (perfect, island and therefore Florida-like) torrential downpour from 5-6 AM. All the wood was soaking. It was close to 90 degrees by the time the rain stopped, I finished my coffee, the sun came out.

The wood was slippery, but I was fine the first two miles. My app had me doing two six-minute mile sprints followed by three half mile sprints followed by four quarter mile sprints and then another mile and a half cool down.

Because the heat, because so much of the boardwalk other people walk and I look creepy, running that hard, I thought I’d loop the sunken forest the whole time. Right after my warmup I took off then a sharp turn. The Sunken Forest is almost wholly twists and turns and both my feet slid out from underneath me and I went down hard. A burn on my elbow, a sharp pain. A blot of blood, a long wide scrape.

The morning before when my friend texted—we’d both just dropped our thirteen-year-olds at sleep away camp—did I think I could get away to the beach a couple days. I was in the city, meeting another friend, to see the Fairfield Porter show at the Arts Students’ League. Both the League and Fairfield Porter are in my new book. But also, I’ve loved Fairfield Porter a long time. A sort of not-quite realist, not-quite abstract expressionist, he had the rare and complicated courage (some might also call him stubborn) to continue doggedly to make exactly what he wanted his whole life.

He painted the same landscapes, over and over, at different times of day in different weather. He painted his wife and kids and the poet James Schuyler, who, as Porter’s wife said, came to stay the weekend but then stayed eleven years.

That show had me primed to think about repetition. How much I love it. How different weathers, times of day, can change the texture, rhythm, taste of everything. How going back and back to the same place, the same subject, the same form, but pressing on it from different angles, can often open something new up inside your work.

(And here, to say, I’ve been thinking about this also in terms of why and how Harry Styles is so obsessed with songs about fruit.)

I fall and scrape my elbow running at least once a year. Often more. This year, the day after my last day at my New Jersey job, I decided to ride my bike to meet my husband at his shop and fell a quarter mile from him. In this sort of slow motion horror show that always leaves me shaken up in ways that feel outsized for how little actually I was injured, it fucked me up. The shaking is mostly that sensation, that my body’s strong, I work hard to make and keep it strong and then all of a sudden, a big truck and the wobbliness of having not ridden my bike all year, wet wood and a sharp corner at a quick clip, and suddenly this thing over which I think I have power—my own body—I suddenly lose hold of it.

Last summer, staying with friends, I was listening to the book The Director while I did an easy loping run from their house on the North Fork. I love running in any place but particularly places where I have glimpses of water almost the whole time. It was hot then too and I had had to turn off the road that went along the water onto a larger highway out toward farmland and the concrete suddenly switched to asphalt that was cracked and my toe caught and I went flying and scraped not only both elbows but both knees and hands.

Once, leaping over a squatting tourist taking pictures on the Brooklyn Bridge, another time, downhill, a rural gravel road in Maine and pebbles stuck all through the scratches, cakey, bloodied dirt.

Three times in Prospect Park, on various wooded paths, and, once, going up to the big back hill and this man not understanding we were racing; me trying to get a little distance on him and getting off the asphalt path and onto the wooded one, looking behind me to see if I’d gotten far enough ahead, not seeing the root in front of me and going splat.

Another time, I’ve written about here before. We lived in Cold Spring. There are no lights in the early mornings outside of cities and I used to have to use my phone light to guide my feet as I ran. I was doing half mile sprints, and it was raining. My phone was in a plastic bag so the already not that great flashlight was blurry. I was sprinting down a hill, and it was wet and I went flying across the road and tore not only a large portion of my elbow-skin off, but skin flapped off the tips of both my thumbs, the surface of my left palm.

Generally, lately, this is how I have been feeling. I have been feeling the feeling that I get just after each of these falls. Like something I can’t quite name has caught me. The metaphor is too loud maybe, but I’m reaching here for something that feels true. I’ve been running. Actually, concretely, running. But also, you know, that rattling roiling in your brain that comes at 3 AM. The running can and does so often feel like power. The running often feels like just keeping going, good work and look at you, working so hard.

But then the root, cracked asphalt, wet wood and the sharp pain and then, what the fuck?

The running feels suddenly so silly. You understand, right, my friend said when I came back, that wet wood is slippery? You understand, right, that running at 430 in the pitch black pouring rain for stretches on highways is not a rational thing to do? You understand that spending your life trying both to make books that maybe no one wants to read while also trying to care for and support your family…you get the point.

My favorite painting at the Porter show was a small and simple landscape, almost all different greens. I looped the show then looped the show again and that was the one I couldn’t stop thinking about. I took a picture. I showed it to my friend and said, I love this. When I go to look at art it is the opposite of writing, the opposite of running. It’s more like swimming in the ocean. I don’t understand it. I can’t try to make sense or think about how I might make something better, but instead just sit with it. This feels like a feeling much more difficult to get in most of life than working, pushing. It’s quite wonderful.

I don’t want to land this thought so much as say my elbow’s slowly getting better. I feel afraid, insane, if I’m not both running and working all the time. But also, something I’ve been thinking a lot these past few weeks is what other register besides that might be essential in order that I not run straight to bloodied arms and knees and elbows so much of the time.