Random find onthe run today

A Journey of Discovery - Literally

by Kevin Beck

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Running is a rather simple affair, a game of locomotion with few frills. Yet there are definite types of runners: competitive runners whose primary motivation is the races, islands of reward in the stream of obligatory training; runners fearful of encroaching bellies and burgeoning cabooses, ushered out the door by vanity and little else; health-conscious runners, faithfully logging early-morning miles owing to the dour cardiovascular histories of self and family; and a group Once A Runner author John L. Parker Jr. describes as "Zen runners" - people who are convinced running is a pipeline to a new spiritual plane, a legal indulgence in narcotic drugs, or a metaphor for a ragtag variety of matters that scarcely seem related to the act of putting one foot in front of the other repeatedly until good and tired. I am not a Zen runner and neither are most of my friends. However, running is indeed a journey of discovery at some point or another for all that partake. And I mean this in the simplest terms: The foregoing is a long-winded way of saying that all of us have found things on the roads, paths and trails that our sedentary fellows, happily confined to their couches and cars, will never stumble across.

Few longtime runners have failed to happen upon items in one or more of three leading categories: money (about the only truly good thing we find, it seems); animals, living or (usually) dead; and couples, secure and misguided in what they consider isolation, engaged in the sort of stuff not featured on, for example, Sesame Street.

For example, a New England runner named Theodore Glockenspiel reports finding $700 in a crushed eyeglass case. After a token attempt to locate its owner, he used the money to purchase a two-mammal kayak for himself and his dog. On another occasion, he spotted his own bicycle, which had been stolen earlier in the year. Interestingly, it was in a local preacher's yard. "I said a few Hail Marys," says Glockenspiel, "and then 'stole' it back."

More common than such tales of "personal enrichment" are sightings of various animals, typically discovered in equally various states of decay. A Massachusetts runner recounts finding a dead cow "so bloated it appeared ready to explode at any second." His retrospective impression is almost poetic: "It was as though one of the balloons had escaped from the Macy's parade and, after drifting for months, had fallen from the sky."

Other accounts highlight what a miserable species we often are. Beth, a Rhode Island runner, recalls seeing a deer head mounted on a post, a green bow tied around its neck ("It was the holiday season, after all"), and, on different occasions, a dismembered dog and a smattering of cooked lobster shells. Along more zoologically exotic lines, Brian Erb of Louisville, Ky. has found a dead barn owl and a dead boar, while a fellow called Highball discovered two Canada Lynx in garbage bags, dumped by poachers. Probably the most absurd fallen-animal tale comes from a runner named Youngster: "In high school there was a dead cat in the road on one of our regular routes. A guy on our team was a big Devo fan and went out and painted it pink." The lavender carcass was still there the next day.

Not every creature is encountered postmortem. A high-school coach in Ohio was shaken by the sight of a rather large feline that had no business patrolling the Midwest and hightailed it in the other direction posthaste. Understandably so. It seems a local taxidermist had "misplaced" a lion, which was captured several days later. And Highball was chased by a mountain lion, which he was forced to confront in a stare-down. "I got on NPR with that one," he says. Finally, James Osborn, a D.C. college student, tells of finding two identical cats that had been abandoned. He adopted them, but this heartwarming tale took a morbid turn a few months later, when the cats chewed through the electrical wiring in Osborn's apartment. The building burned to the ground.

Osborn offers a botanical angle as well. A friend took a wrong turn in the woods and stumbled upon a good-sized crop of marijuana. When he told the police of his find they appeared apathetic. A few days later the plants were gone.

Then, of course, are the inevitable findings of human remains. (The newspapers invariably report the discoveries of "joggers" in such cases.) Snalls, a California athlete, recently discovered a corpse in a field near the Fresno Airport. He says that his three-hour period of questioning by the police ruined his run and also says: "They ruled it a suicide, but it didn't look that way to me. I think this is one for Columbo!" And an airline pilot running in Birmingham, Alabama happened upon an individual stretched out at the edge of a sidewalk. Thinking the person might be injured or ill, he stopped, only to find himself gazing at a dead body. He looked around, saw no one else - living or dead - and panicked. "All I could think about was that it was probably a murder and I might be a suspect, so I took off as fast as I could," he said (which was pretty fast; he had once run a sub-4:01 mile.) After this experience, he adopted a "stop-for-nothing" policy. And Beth tells of a "jogger" in town on business who disappeared one hot summer day and was later found lying naked on a sand dune, dead, clothes folded neatly beside him. The dune was often used by Beth's training group for hill work. "The ruling was no foul play," she says. "Must have done one repeat too many. We usually stopped after twenty minutes."

Another somber tale - but one with a better outcome - comes from Mike Hillyard. On a night when the temperature was well below freezing, Hillyard was running along a path near an Indiana stadium when he came across a woman who had been raped. She was hypothermic and barely conscious. Hillyard ran to the stadium, where a monster truck rally was in progress, and summoned help. "I came very close to not running at all that night," he says, reporting that he has also found a CD wallet containing twenty discs as well as some snorkeling gear.

But it is a runner dubbed Strat who gets my vote for the most bizarrely grotesque discoveries. "(One day) I happened to notice flies buzzing around something in a ditch which had some pretty tall weeds," he remembers. "I walked over there and found a rather decomposed human arm." After contacting the local sheriff, Strat learned that the authorities had been unable to find the arm of an unfortunate woman who had been flagging some cars that were racing; in a drunken stupor, the woman wandered too close to the action and the limb was clipped off by one of the passing vehicles.

Strat has more, but the squeamish might be well advised to skip this paragraph. "Several more years on the same road there was a plastic bag (off to the side)," he says. Strat ignored it, but several days later, on a sweltering summer afternoon, the wind brought a foul odor wafting his way. "Dead meat," he says. "I opened it up. Inside was a badly decomposed human fetus."

All of which is almost enough to convince any runner to opt for the sanctity of the treadmill. But there are unconditionally amusing sightings, too, and almost every runner has one. These are exemplified by this account from Kennedy, another Massachusetts rambler: "Years ago, while doing a trail run through the back woods of Wachusett Mountain, I came across a man and woman - both in their fifties - engaged in an intimate act." And Kennedy's story has a cherry on top: "What made it particularly interesting is that I knew both of them. They were married, but not to one another."

I have my own story like this one, and it unfolded almost fifteen years ago several hundred yards from a rural New Hampshire lane. I was running along a trail that was only passable by car for about a quarter mile before narrowing into a four-foot wide track. Just prior to this bottleneck there was a rusted-out heap of junk that I instantly judged abandoned and undriveable. Now, for whatever reason, over the years I had developed an unconscious habit of perfunctorily checking the interior of these heaps (as if I fancied finding the Hope diamond in the trunk of a 1924 El Camino with moss growing on the rims). This time, when I peered through one of the car's dusty windows, I was shocked to see the bare and pimply back of a long-haired fellow. The back was moving, and the man wasn't alone: The girl beneath him noticed me right away. Her eyes grew to the size of saucers and through the glass I heard her yelp. The guy turned his head, and his expression also served notice that he had not expected any visitors to this little party. It was a toss-up as to which of us was the most startled, but I bolted down the trail, laughing like a crazy man, practically doubled over and narrowly avoiding several trees as a result. My instinctive thought at the time was that of any sixteen-year-old: Whom can I tell first?

Along similar but inanimate lines, a great many runners I surveyed have found Polaroid photographs and videotapes you would never show your grandmother. The photos to me are a curiosity: One would think that such slices of life would be the least likely Kodak moments to be let fly where a stranger - or worse, a non-stranger - to find them. But such is not the case. Any runner with a lot of miles to his credit will tell you that the roads of America are virtually paved with pornography. Doug McDougal, a one-time 14:40 5K runner from Texas, recalls finding an interesting videotape while training with a friend. Jokingly, McDougal gave it to his companion. "He went home and gave it to his wife for their anniversary," McDougal says. "It did not have the intended affect. I could have slapped him for being so stupid."

Finally we have the catchall division - runners who, by the sheer happenstance of their passage, become the possessors of objects that might actually serve a purpose. My only significant brush with this was finding an almost-complete set of Ping golf clubs inexplicably resting against a tree on a remote bluff overlooking the Merrimack River. I shanked the three or four balls in the bag into the river, then threw the clubs over my shoulder, intending to run the four miles home with them. The novelty wore off when I reached civilization and remembered that I do not golf. I lay the bag in the weeds. When I returned to this spot a week later someone had liberated it.

Mike Platt of New York tells a much better story. "I once found a sledgehammer," he says. "My stepfather had just told me he needed one, so in an attempt to actually do something nice for someone I really never got along with, I carried a ten-pound sledgehammer three miles in my left hand - I couldn't periodically switch hands because of a torn rotator cuff in my right arm. I walked in circles for the next three days."

Indeed, the diversity of items found by runners essentially matches that of anything manufactured, bought, or sold - legally or otherwise. A Marylander named Jim recalls his most unusual find: "A kilo of cocaine. Right along the shoulder of Ritchie Highway." On the same road, he's found more mundane but still interesting collectibles - a combination wrench, a cell phone, and a pair of panties (presumably not in combination; that possibility summons images I can do without). Beth has found a diet book half-buried in the sand and some poker chips. A longtime runner named TeddyO, who has trod the soil of thirty-seven states, has observed countless cops cooping in groups of three or four, and has stashed away odds and ends for later collection including a doll cradle, some hockey sticks, a baseball bat, and some rickety bikes. The list expands quickly to the point of monotony.

But sometimes, what we really find is the simple absurdity of the human condition. A Californian named Gordon tells this story: "I was running on a straight, flat, two-lane road in the middle of a bean field in Santa Ana, California. Somehow, two drunks had flipped their car right in the middle of the road one night. One was still strapped in the passenger seat, hanging upside down. The driver was walking around, dazed and drunk but otherwise okay. His door was open and a mechanical voice kept chanting: "The door is ajar. The door is ajar." To which the drunk driver kept responding: 'It's not a jar - it's a door!'"

In truth, though our findings may startle us, they really should not surprise us. An alert runner is nothing more than a one-man search party covering more ground in more places for more years than any search and rescue worker. It is, of course, not why we do what we do; it is merely a by-product. It is part of what connects us with the world at large even as we blissfully escape its petty reach for a while.

Still, on days when my motivation is lacking, looking at the dearth of tools in my personal kit might be a useful trick to get me outside. Because as a runner, for better or for worse, you just never know what might be around the next turn or over that next hill.

- March 2000

(Author's note: Obviously, many of the names in this article were not those assigned by the parents of the individuals in question. The reasons for this are varied, but do trust that all persons named do in fact exist and that as far as the author knows, their stories are all true.

The author also wishes to thank the visitors to the Track and Field Media message board and the Cool Running forums for unwittingly contributing to this piece.)

Oh man I forgot about all the lacrossea balls I find on my runs. I find a lot of lacrosse balls because of all the lacrosse being played. They play a lot of lacrosse down my way.

Oh you know why.

What The Fluck? wrote:

lucky perv wrote:

little ways down the road from a stripjoint...several worn panties and thongs. some stripper must have left her bag on top her car and drove off. luckily the weather was cooler and i had long sleeves to stuff them up so nobody could see what a perv i am.

What? You picked up someone's used panties? Why would you want them? Honestly, I am curious?