Somewhere over the next few miles, things started getting tough.
I know I’ve made it sound like things were tough already. But things were about to get ultra tough.
For instance, at Mile 85, I ran headfirst into a tree. I crumpled to the ground, my forehead gushing blood, and for a few minutes I just lay there, giggling in the dirt.
Then, at Mile 86, my headlamp started flickering.
Great, I thought. Just what I need! If my batteries died, I’d be stuck on the trail all night long.
I slapped my headlamp, and the light stopped flickering and grew brighter. Awesome! I thought. But how long would it last?
At Mile 88 I reached the toughest stretch of all. It began with the train tracks and then it got worse.
The train tracks ran along a high, narrow ridge, and it was instantly obvious that they weren’t used by trains anymore. Shrubs and sawgrass grew between the rails and some small trees were growing between the cross ties.
The trail markers ran along the edge of the tracks, so I walked between the rails for a while. The cross ties were a foot apart — too close together to run comfortably on — so I hopped up on the rail and tightroped along that. It was tricky, and I kept falling off, so after a while I gave up and went back to jogging along the edge of the tracks. The rail bed curved south, glowing blue in the light of the moon. The trees on both sides of me waggled in the breeze.
Another beep from my watch. It was now 3 a.m. I began switching back and forth between running and walking. I’d walk until I got cold and then I’d run to warm up, and when my legs couldn’t run anymore, I’d go back to walking again. My headlamp was still shining brightly, thank God. Why hadn’t I been smart enough to bring extra batteries?
Suddenly I noticed that the trees on either side of me were gone. The bushes and sawgrass had disappeared too. I flashed my headlamp all around. What happened to all the trees? I wondered.
I figured it out eventually. At some point, without noticing, I’d started walking across a bridge. Now I was standing on a span above a pitch-black valley. I looked down at my feet. Thick, tarry-smelling beams ran crosswise beneath the tracks. There were gaps between the beams, and nothing underneath.
I dropped to my knees and crawled to the edge of the track. There was no railing there, just a sudden drop. I reached down and picked up a pebble from one of the cross ties, dropped it over the edge and watched it disappear into the void. I didn’t hear it hit anything down below.
What the heck was Bruce thinking? I wondered. A runner could easily trip and die out here!
I crawled back to the middle of the tracks and stood up. I flashed my headlamp forward and backward. I couldn’t see any trail markers.
That’s when it hit me. Crap, I thought. I’d gone off the trail! I wasn’t supposed to be on this bridge at all!
A spear of ice shot through my heart. I was all alone. In a forest. In the middle of the night. And I was lost.
Relax, I told myself. Stop freaking out and THINK. When was the last time you saw a pink flag?
I couldn’t remember. Was it before I reached the tracks, or after? I was starting to hyperventilate. I couldn’t remember anything. Calm down, I told myself. Breathe deeply. You’ll find your way back to the trail.
But would I? I was lost and scared and bleeding and hungry. All I could think of was how much I wanted some of those toast soldiers that Dad used to make every Sunday.
Dammit, I thought. Why hadn’t I eaten some of Kaylin’s lasagna at the last rest stop? I’d have given anything for a mouthful of that now.
Chill out, I told myself. Breathe deep.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Sounds like you could’ve used your pacer just then.
QUINN: For sure. I kept telling myself to chill out, breathe deep. It didn’t do a lot of good, though.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Why didn’t you just turn around and walk back along the bridge to solid ground?
QUINN: Because that would have been the smart thing to do, and as you already know, I’m not very smart. If I’d retraced my steps I would’ve eventually found the pink flags. But for some reason, that thought didn’t occur to me.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: You’d been running for 21 hours, so I think we can cut you some slack. But what did you do to get out of that mess?
I walked farther out onto the trestle. I was curious to see what was on the other side of the gorge, so I walked for 20 metres and then suddenly I stopped.
My foot was sticking out over nothing. The iron tracks were shorn off and the bridge simply ended. Broken timbers stuck out in all directions. There was nothing in front of me but a 200-metre drop.
Whoa! I thought. Ever heard of a guardrail?
I sat down and swung my legs over the edge and stared down at the canyon that had nearly become my grave. I took out my bag of yogurt-covered cranberries and tossed them, one by one, into the abyss. What had happened to the bridge? I wondered. Had it collapsed while a train was passing over? If so, what had happened to the people on the train? Was I looking down at their bones right now?
Weird, I thought. One moment you could be riding on a train, looking out the window at the passing trees and lakes, and the next moment, for no other reason than really crappy luck, you could be plunging into a gorge, living out your last moment on earth.
I promised myself I’d never get on another train. And certainly not a plane. Or a boat. Or a car. Or a bike.
From now on, I’d run wherever I needed to go. Running was the safest mode of transportation ever.
But then I thought: That is SO not true. Just look at how many times I’d nearly died today!
My watch beeped, signalling the time. It was 3:30. I swung my legs back and forth. The wind blew cold air down my back, and for a moment I considered letting myself slip off the edge of the bridge. That’s how miserable I felt — like a nickel that’s been placed on the tracks and flattened into a smear of tinfoil by a passing freight.
I felt dead. Ultra dead.
I squinted at the far side of the gorge. I thought I could see a grey blanket of trees. They seemed to be whispering in the breeze. And then, far away, I heard the train.
“Mwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
It was hard to hear over the sound of the wind. At first I thought it was my imagination.
“Mwaaaa-Mwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
No doubt about it — it wasn’t my imagination. It was coming closer. But it can’t be, I thought. The bridge is out.
“Mwaaaa-Mwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
Still closer, I thought. But something wasn’t right. It didn’t sound quite like a train.
“Mwaaaaa-Mwaaaaa-Mwaaaaaaaaa!”
The noise echoed off the canyon walls. It sounded more animal than machine. And it was coming from below.
“Mwaaaa-Mweeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
I crawled back from the edge of the bridge and poked my headlamp between the cross ties. A black shadow drifted beneath the trestle. It was massive, the size of a submarine.
“What the heck is that?” I whispered.
“MWAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOO–AAAAAAAA– IIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEE!”
It was bigger than twenty school buses caught in a net. It was a blue whale, swimming up from the bottom of the gorge.
This is so not happening, I thought.
But it was.
The bulk of its body rose up above the bridge, and a huge watery eye blinked down at me. The whale slapped its flipper against the tracks and rubbed its barnacle-encrusted head on the sharp end of the trestle. Eventually, it floated in beside the bridge, lowering its back down to my level.
“Nice parking job,” I said.
The whale waggled its tail fluke, and the whole bridge shook. It would have been so easy for me to climb onto its back.
Just then, the moon stepped out from behind a cloud and sprayed a rainbow of silver rays over the clearing.
“The moon can make rainbows?” I asked.
The whale didn’t answer.
It was a rainbow without colour. A moon-bow. A ghost-bow. It was the strangest, most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
The whale twitched its flipper again. Then it started singing.
Saaaaaaay helllloooooooooooooooo!
Waaaaaave gooooodbyyyyyyyyyyyye!
Yes. The whale was singing in English. Which made it official: My mind was falling apart.
“Please don’t,” I said, putting my hands over my ears. Of course the whale ignored me and carried on.
Swiiiiiiiiiiiimmmm tooooodaaaaayyyy!
Toooomoooorroooow weee flyyyyyyy!
My headlamp flickered. My breath felt ragged. The leaves of the poplar trees hissed in the breeze.
Wait a second — the leaves of the poplar trees hissed in the breeze!
For the first time in hours, I remembered the promise I’d made to Wind.
“I need to ask you a question,” I told the whale.
The whale stared at me with its huge watery eye.
“Wind’s shadow,” I said. “Do you know where it is?”
Lightning flashed in the distance. Cold air stabbed my neck.
The whale drifted up and down beside the trestle.
“I know it doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I mean, I know Wind is invisible. So she can’t even block the light.”
A flash of orange lit up the edges of the sky. Thunder sounded far away.
The whale rolled sideways and sank down a couple of metres. Its tail remained perfectly level with the bridge.
“You want me to climb on to your back, don’t you?”
The whale’s huge tail moved slowly up and down. Just one step — that was all it would take.
“It’s tempting,” I said. “But you’re just a hallucination. It’s a long way down if you’re not real.”
The whale didn’t speak, but I read the meaning in its eye. Sometimes you have to trust, it said.
Lightning flashed in a corner of the sky. It was only a matter of time until Wind came back.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Please tell me you didn’t step off that train bridge …
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: You did? But the whale was just a figment of your imagination.
QUINN: Oh, I know that now. But it sure felt solid enough at the time.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Great. You climbed on to the back of an imaginary whale. And what does a whale’s back feel like?
QUINN: Like the skin of a mango that isn’t quite ripe. I could feel its beating heart through the duct tape on my feet.
I sat down with my legs folded and my chin pressed against my knees. My heart was beating faster than a baby squirrel’s.
That lightning again. It was coming closer. The night sky was milky; the colour of a blind dog’s eye. And then I felt the thrashing of the tail.
The whale and I rose into the air and angled away from the bridge. Everything got blurry as tears streamed from my eyes. Below us, the world was racing with shadows.
The whale went into a dive and we plunged toward the trees. And then, for what seemed like hours, we swam through the forest. I clung to a mound of barnacles on the whale’s head to keep from sliding off, flashing my headlamp from side to side.
But as hard as we searched, we didn’t find Wind’s shadow. I was beginning to suspect that Wind never had one in the first place. Why did it matter so much anyway? I wondered. Looking down, it was clear the whale didn’t have one either.
* * *
When I woke up, I was back on solid ground, lying beside the train tracks and a line of pink flags. I looked at my watch. It was 3:33. Three minutes had passed.
I suppose you could say that the thing with the whale was just a dream. But it would be wrong to think that it didn’t happen. Something happened to me in those 3 missing minutes. I learned that there’s more than one type of shadow.
I stood up and started running. I felt completely recharged! I hadn’t felt this good in hours.
I ran and ran, glancing up at the moon-bow as I went. It looked like a frozen river in the sky. The beam from my headlamp was stronger than ever. My mind felt clear. My superpowers were back!
Wind is invisible, I told myself. That’s why it doesn’t have a shadow.
But invisible things have different kinds of shadows. That’s what I realized on the back of the whale. Nightmares, for instance. They cast shadows inside your brain.
And stories, also invisible, throw shadows on your heart.
The trail dropped into a ravine and followed a creek. The glow of my headlamp lit up the rocks in the water.
And what about love? I asked myself. It’s invisible too, but it casts a very long shadow. It can make you feel safe when you’re lying in bed, but when it leaves, it hurts worse than a tooth that’s been pulled.
I shone my headlamp down at the rushing water. The rocks beneath the surface looked like grinning skulls.
The ravine broadened out at Hither Lake, and I saw huge waves heaving themselves against the shore. The silver moon melted and turned sickly green. The moon-bow darkened and disappeared.
No doubt about it, I thought, love has a shadow. The bleakest and angriest shadow of them all.
The moon swam through sooty clouds. Another wave crashed against the rocks.
In the tattered spray, I saw the face.
“There you are!” Wind hissed.