This land was your land, this land is my land
Doesn't every runner wonder what their routes looked like to the first humans who ever left footprints there?
This post is partly a summary of the loosely matched set of podcasts I recently listened to—Dinée Dorame being interviewed on the Morning Shakeout by Mario Fraioli and Fraioli undergoing the same treatment months later on Grounded, Dorame’s recently launched show—but mostly a string of thoughts on what those podcasts provoked me to do, which was dive into as comprehensive a history of my hometown in New Hampshire as I could find, one going back to the 1600s and published in 1903.
Given my tendencies, it was almost inevitable that I would perform this dive, with a strong focus on geography and whatever the name for urban planning was in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. But the greater point is that I listened to a podcast that inspired me to consider in depth some of the interrelated concepts that podcast presented. Usually, I’m happy to use podcasts to simply pass an hour or two without me being the sole apparent originator of my own yippy thoughts.
In the first of these podcasts, Dorame, a member of Navajo Nation and native and current resident of Albuquerque, New Mexico, describes having spent time working in the admissions department at Yale before returning home three years ago to serve as the associate director of College Horizons, a non-profit providing college and graduate admission workshops to Native American students. She and Fraioli also explain that her podcast Grounded, brand-new at the time of this interview, was founded largely with the help of Tracksmith. I didn’t know that Tracksmith, in addition to supporting established newsletter and content creators, had dedicated a fellowship to backing one or more nascent podcasts, like an angel investor. (While it is to Tracksmith’s credit that it supports creators with a range of viewpoints, I balk at the idea of ay business entity supporting a newsletter like the one Fast Women churns out, the only aim of which is to sow discord within the running community under the guise of an especially demented and dishonest form of pseudo-progressivism. But I suppose we all have our preferences and peccadilloes.)
The portions I found most interesting concerned the importance of being aware of the land we* run on and who the real stewards of that land are, regardless of who owns it now. Property ownership itself is a topic that easily allows me to climb myself up a rhetorical tree and remain stuck there, and I usually wind up taking a number of arguably incoherent stances about it. But whenever the general notion of running and living in the same spaces arises, I invariably start thinking of the many thousands of kids who literally don’t have safe places in which to move around outside, let alone run for exercise or sport. When I watched The Wire, probably the most captivating crime drama ever produced and interchangeable in many ways with a documentary series, one of my overriding thoughts—bizarre for a randomly chosen viewer, I’m sure, but probably typical for one with a jogging jones—was that countless kids in West Baltimore would never be able to simply leave their homes and go running without a strong likelihood of being attacked. And obviously, Baltimore is just one of a number of American cities with cores that were never built or developed with the idea of running there in mind and, even when relatively free of criminal activity, are not environments in which a competitive runner could flourish.
At one point, Dorame emphasizes the tendency of most Americans to unconsciously but habitually regard indigenous tribes as anthropological relics, even as they live and run and work among people belonging to those same still-extant tribes and nations. I admit I’m among the many non-indigenous Americans who have unconsciously created a distinction between “Native people we have seen” and “Native people the United States Government fucked over and are now gone.” I can blame the evolution of this petting-zoo mentality on learning about “Indian reservations” as a child, and on basically being told that these were pitted parts of this vast country housing people who are sort of adjacent to the rest of us but sleep in tepees and are not quite up to social par, but it’s still an uncomfortable realization.
This semi-oblivious stumbling is surely what the writers if Seinfeld were highlighting in “The Cigar Store Indian,” an episode in the fifth season in which members of the main cast repeatedly embarrass themselves by instinctively resorting to racialist tropes. While on the surface this string of clips seems most unkind to Native Americans, it’s plain that the intent here was to expose Jerry and his friends as the jubilantly hapless borderline sociopaths they proved themselves to be in every brilliant episode.
Dorame’s father ran for the University of Colorado, but Dorame is not of the varsity college runner mold, throwing in jokes about her flat feet and being a heavy overpronator and having an honest chuckle over the shuffling of the genetic deck not resulting in a lot of her dad’s athletic cards showing up in prominent places. But she is a natural at sports talk, which is probably among the reasons Fraioli has mentored her in the development of her podcast. She has clearly found a satisfying place as a runner, and I expect her podcast to succeed quite apart from occupying a formerly lonely niche.
Dorame’s interview of Fraioli was illuminating as well, albeit in a different way because I went into it familiar with most of Fraioli’s running and media background. What I paid most attention to, as I always do when sampling a new podcast, was this: Did the host and participant(s) sound like people sitting in the same room having a natural conversation, or did they sound like strangers trying to quickly get acquainted over the phone so they could run through some questions? As with the Morning Shakeout podcast with the roles reversed, this emanated every element of the former type of presentation. Most of the running podcasts I’ve tried out involve either nondescript joggers alternating between interviewing each other to keep the content-train rolling or starstruck recent college grads amazed to have landed a Big Name Runner on their program. This doesn’t always turn out badly, but it’s simply rare for people with little background in the sport—which can’t be faked or accelerated beyond its natural time course—to be able to ask sensible questions of professional runners.
(A point of commonality with both Fraioli and Dorame here: I used to keep score at my sister’s softball games for fun, and also used a basketball scorebook to see if I could reach the same stat totals from watching Celtics games on television as would appear the next day in the newspaper.)
I feel like pointing out that all of this was conducted as if the greater running world is not presently subsumed in at least nineteen distinct contrived gender, ethnic, and other identify-driven culture wars; as if, in fact, that people can discuss issues pertinent to these topics with sense, humility and humor as well as a sober acknowledgement that a lot of people are not seeing other people as they are, but in terms of any number of ham-handed and persistent stereotypes. But that would seem like an effort to make everyone else appear bad, when in fact I just want to emphasize that this stuff is really good—the Wokish do an unimpeachable job of looking foolish and destructive on their own, even if they can’t see this.
Getting back to the substance of the first of these podcasts, to me, the idea of humans connecting to the land they wander and inhabit is instinctive or at last pan-cultural, like religious belief. While the nexus of this for me is geographical data, ranging from early-twentieth-century U.S. Geological Survey topographical maps to satellite photos from last week, I suspect everyone who would rather be outdoors than indoors has created their own version of a reverence-based human-Earth interface.
When I last traveled to my hometown, almost two years ago, I wrote about wandering the eastern bank of the Merrimack about a mile from the house I moved into when I was eight and that my family sold 26 years later, in 2004. I was roaming the far reaches of Concord on foot and by bicycle long before I became a runner, and the land along this section of river, from about a mile north of the Route 4 bridge to about a half-mile south of it, holds for me a lot of those special kinds of memories that sound boring when articulated out loud, even in the shower.
Sometimes, a piece of the land just gets you, and you get it right back, no matter whose it is or how you found it. This part of three municipalities (Concord, Canterbury and Boscawen) has just been one of those places for me since I can remember being there, and it’s why I wrote a 40-page “short” story about a gigantic rope swing hanging from a nonexistent oak tree on the Muchyedo Banks, back when I used to dabble in such things. The short stories, I mean—I’d still use a rope swing all day long if one were handy.
The land east of the river on south side of Route 4 rapidly became fucked up for public-use purposes in the 1990s, when a small industrial park boasting a big-ass smokestack—the most prominent feature of a trash-to-energy incinerator—was erected. This smattering of inevitable, and inevitably ugly, buildings largely obliterated a stretch of road-remnant I used to run along, from Sewalls Falls Road north to the now-disappearing dead-end Hannah Dustin Road. Six or seven years ago, a Mobil station including a Dunkin’ Donuts went up there, too, and as I type. a supermarket and liquor store are being added to the complex.
I am not dumbfounded by any of these changes—I graduated from high school in 1988, since which time Concord has increased its population by maybe 40 percent, and in most places, formerly undisturbed land has been developed far more avidly—but I used to ride my bike with my friends three miles into Penacook, a village in northernmost Concord, to get to Mr. Grocer’s, the nearest place of business of any kind. Alongside Route 4 was nothing but farmland; all you smelled on that bike ride between I-93 and the bridge over the river was cow shit, and all you smelled after that was the stench of Allied Leather, the pride of Penacook. If you’ve never smelled a tannery, well, at least it’s not a paper mill or a meat-packing plant.
In that post about my wandering along the ever-shifting Muchyedo Banks, I linked to a page about Hannah Dustin (often spelled “Duston,” but I’m going with what’s always been on the statue and road signs). I didn’t say why, as the whole story is gruesome. When making those c. 1979 bike trips from my neighborhood to Penacook for Bubble Yum and Yoohoo, I and my friends would sometimes stop at the site before continuing along Commercial Street, joking that we needed to brace ourselves for the stink of endless piles of leatherlike matter from the tannery we were about to endure. When I first read what apparently happened on that spot in 1697, like most wise elementary-school kids, I ignored the details as best as I could. I still do. And, not helpfully, Wokish people have recently tried to rewrite the already nasty history of this event by speculating that it was something other than what it has long been understood to be. I mean, I get it, either way that statue honors a mass murderer. What bothers is that people like the author of that piece have only lately decided to relabel all of this “heroism” as mercenary savagery.
The larger issue is what white settlers were doing, in a more general sense, in this area over three hundred years ago. Why was anyone? The gruesome flavor of the statue notwithstanding, I admit to being fascinated even at ten by the spot itself—a small island where the Contoocook River meets the Merrimack. This is exactly the kind of sandbar-and-water-set one looks at from a state highway bridge, offering a mile’s worth of riverbank view in both directions, and then thinks: “Imagine all of this with no steel, no pavement, no us. No cows, even. Just the flow and the breeze and the green.” Some environments prompt this exercise more than others do.
Finally, I learned something about what became of the Penacook people, the inspiration for the name of the village of 1,273 people formerly boasting a Mr. Grocer. I already knew the word itself means “bend in the river,” and the Merrimack used to have more of them as it ran through Concord, which has a horseshoe-shaped standing-water river-remnant called Horseshoe Pond. (People naming things in Concord back in the day were always tired and cold, so they didn’t think hard about them.)
Penacook is a bastardization of Pennacook. In short, there are no more Pennacook people. When Europeans first arrived in the 1620s, they brought with them an impressive variety of heretofore unseen communicable diseases, three hundred years before penicillin. This probably killed about three-quarters of the Pennacooks, but even before white people arrived, the Pennacooks were under constant threat of attack, or actual attack, by the Mohawk people of the Iroquois Confederacy, who vastly outnumbered them and pretty much everyone else. As it happens, humans have been plundering land from each other by force since the time the first asshole picked up a stick, drew a rectangular shape in the dirt around him, and declared “This is mine, go find your own.”
The Pennacook people were part of the Algonquins, about whom I wrote a report in eighth grade for anthropology class. I remember asking my teacher where they had all gone, since New Hampshire didn’t have any reservations. (This was the extent of my thinking on how certain people moved about, I guess.) Mr. Ryerson gave a sad smile in response, pointed at the course textbook (which included nothing about the Pennacooks) and said something like, “We only get to read about them now.”
Even at 14, I didn’t really get what he meant. Maybe I still don’t.
Anyway, I enjoyed this little diversion more than my words here perhaps reflect. Also, it led me to listen to another podcast—that’s three in two weeks!
Most of you, I hope, have heard of Jon Krakauer, who has lived in Boulder since the early 1980s and has therefore enjoyed both its “inherent endurance mecca” and “tractor-beam for trust-funders who exercise and embrace pseudoscience” phases. In this episode of The Press Box from January, Krakauer lets a few things fly: He rewrote every sentence you see in every one of his books at least a hundred times (he’s discussed making editorial hay of his own OCD before); that he sincerely wishes he had never gone on the 1997 Mount Everest trip that landed the book he admits made him rich, so gnarly and contentious were his dealings with the climbing community; that people in Alaska are strangely hateful toward Christopher McCandless; that he is a native Masshole; and that he is through writing books. I really respect the guy’s work and perseverance—he paid his dues before landing anything remotely big, and he worked and thought creatively to get there.