In the Long Run

Shira Springer

 

IT WAS FOOLISH and foolhardy; every downed tree, every icy stretch of pavement, every ten-foot-tall snowbank said so. But I didn’t listen. Less than twenty-four hours removed from a February blizzard, a travel-banning, two-foot snow dump, I ran toward the Charles River. Slip-sliding, slush-puddle-jumping along. I didn’t care about news anchors urging extreme caution if venturing onto local roads. Runners do foolish and foolhardy quite well, maybe better in Boston, where winter weather provides ample opportunity. New England stoicism helps, too. On blustery, cold days when the mostly flat topography around the Charles turns both banks into wind tunnels, some runners wear T-shirts and shorts. (Not me. I don’t have some frostbite fantasy.)

Mercifully, this was not one of those days. The strongest winds came and went with the storm, leaving behind occasional gusts that barely stirred the powdery top layer of snow piles. I worked my way up and down the piles, ducked beneath bent branches. Sinking ankle-, knee-, sometimes waist-deep into the snow. Trudging more than running. I wanted an escape from the indoors, from endless updates about snow totals and power outages, from the banality that took away the postblizzard beauty.

Several strides past the Boston University boathouse, I tried to trace the path that dips down to the water’s edge. Spotting cross-country-ski tracks and snowshoe prints, I used them as guides. On my right, the Charles appeared in perfect panorama beneath the Boston skyline. In warmer seasons, wedding parties and tourists pose on the path for photographs, capturing the river, the golden-domed statehouse on Beacon Hill, the famed Citgo sign by Fenway Park, the Prudential Building and John Hancock Tower in one frame. Now, surveying the storm-altered scene, I saw an aesthetic more abstract than postcard. Nearest the shore, the Charles had been transformed into a swirl of snow-dusted, yellow-gray ice. A ribbon of dark blue water peeked through and flowed in the middle, creating a natural Rothko. The blanketed landscape looked familiar and foreign all at once, the way old furniture does in a new home. I recognized landmarks, shapes, outlines, but not the geometry. The snow, the fuzzy white-gray all around, blurred where the riverbank ended and the river began. And everything seemed separated by more distance than I remembered.

For twenty years, I’ve run along the banks of the Charles and across its bridges. I’ve cycled down its bike path and kayaked against its gentle current. I’ve driven around the sharp Storrow Drive curves that follow the river’s whims. But mostly I’ve run, logging somewhere close to forty thousand miles. The Charles is a reassuring constant, a relatively uncomplicated stretch of land and water amid a confused and confusing cityscape famous for one-way streets and rotaries. On the Charles, I’m always seeing the city anew, a participant-observer in the front row for free. (Full disclosure: sometimes I’m a distracted runner, tripping and falling and getting a closer view of the river and riverbank than I want. I’ve done every embarrassing tumble possible—the full-out face-plant, the slow-motion topple, the skidding stop on my stomach. I’m always skinning knees and elbows.)

I know what the Charles looks like at sunrise when college rowers crowd the water; and under a full moon when tango dancers fill the Weeks Footbridge for monthly, summertime milongas, where pot smokers frequent and homeless men stash belongings; and when sea breezes spread salty air upriver and Red Line trains create deafening echoes beneath the Longfellow Bridge. The Charles reflects the city. Its tallest buildings mirrored in the water on all but the cloudiest and coldest days. Its passions visible in the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins logos on the hats, jerseys, and jackets of people I pass; at Hatch Memorial Shell concerts and charity walks; in volunteer cleanup crews and on docked boats, sizable pleasure craft with names like Summer Affair and Viva la Vida and Priority Too and No Rush III.

Some of those same boats are cocooned in white, weatherproof covers during the winter, hibernating along the Cambridge side of the river in the shadow of the Museum of Science. After the blizzard, they appear neatly tucked in, teasing almost unimaginable changes in the seasons and scenery. And maybe this is what I like best about the Charles: the way it changes, sometimes reinvents itself, season by season, year by year, decade by decade. It has been made different by all the activity it hosts, the constant comings and goings. In a city saturated with history and historic institutions, it is the rare landmark without any pretensions, always welcoming.

 

My parents told me it wasn’t a tough call, not even debatable. I found that hard to believe. Who lets a newly licensed teenager drive a carpool forty minutes to school? Who lets her battle morning rush-hour traffic on backed-up bridges over the Connecticut River? The answer, as it turned out, was the burdensome commute over the river.

Growing up outside Hartford, Connecticut, the waterway divided east from west, blue-collar suburbs from wealthier towns. My family lived “east of the river,” a designation that spoke as much to geography as it did to psychology. To be east of the river meant to be disconnected, disadvantaged by location, separated from the cool kids and the tonier neighborhoods, relegated to urban-planning afterthought. Proof: until the mid-1980s, no direct highway connection existed between my hometown and the three bridges into Hartford. The capital stood ten miles away, but always felt ten times more distant. And not just because childhood exaggerates the scale of everything. It was the river as barrier, as broad-shouldered bully. The Connecticut wore down my parents and the parents of my classmates, at least enough that a sixteen-year-old commuting with three teenage passengers seemed sensible.

Six days a week (there were Saturday classes), I drove my mother’s old, Smurf-blue Volvo station wagon over the Bulkeley Bridge, across the Connecticut, to high school. Every day brought a different chaos, narrow highway ramps always squeezing vehicles to and from the bridges. Every lane-switch on the Bulkeley turned into a near miss. And not a miss at all when headed home one night, but an absurd hit-and-run accident in bumper-to-bumper traffic. When I pulled over, full of bravado and naïveté, and got out of my car, the guilty party made for the last exit before the bridge. I ran after the large sedan, futilely chasing the car for a hundred yards down the highway shoulder. I came to despise the river, the river crossing, the constant combative nature of the Connecticut. And I couldn’t escape it. I attended a private school nicknamed “the Island,” a proud nod to a sprawling campus situated at the confluence of the Connecticut and Farmington Rivers. More river-built boundaries and barriers.

But there was one redeeming quality of growing up east of the Connecticut. In a state with sports loyalties and cultural leanings split between Boston and New York City, my hometown fell well inside the gravitational pull of Boston.

There were summer day trips to Fenway Park and the Freedom Trail and winter day trips to the Museum of Science. And the Charles River was the hub of the Hub. Turning onto Storrow Drive and glimpsing the water, I knew my family’s final destination waited around the next bend or two or three. I spent enough time in Boston to make childhood memories, but not enough to know much beyond its surface, Revolutionary history and Red Sox curse. I didn’t know back then that the Charles was dangerously polluted, that its banks attracted muggers and rapists, that its bridges drew people determined to commit suicide.

Visiting Boston as a kid, I mythologized the city and the Charles, filling in factual gaps with youthful fantasy. The Museum of Science floated on the Charles and the longest home-run balls left Fenway Park and landed in the water. I half-observed, half-imagined a city beside a river that was completely opposite of what I knew. Where the Connecticut was wide and formidable and endlessly frustrating, the Charles was intimate, accessible, easily crossed, and, in a revelation, at ease with its urban surroundings. Bridges conveniently spread over the water like broad stripes. Some were spaced no more than one-quarter mile apart. Some eminently practical, like the steel-girdered Harvard Bridge. Some architecturally elaborate, like the arched Longfellow Bridge, also affectionately called the Salt-and-Pepper Bridge because its four central ornamental towers look like giant salt and pepper shakers. The whimsical nickname and imagery stuck with me, as did the shock of subway trains moving across the Longfellow with car traffic. In my young mind, I saw the river I wanted, and it was the Charles.

 

More than a century ago, influential Boston leaders and landscape architects saw the river they wanted, too, and made it reality. They started with construction of the Charles River Dam, from 1903 to 1910, then created and enhanced the Esplanade. The ambitious projects turned a vast tidal expanse of salt marshes and mudflats, an area strewn with sewage at low tide, from an industrial and commercial corridor into a public attraction. The new, manmade topography tamed the waterway and brought the Cambridge and Boston riverbanks closer. It showed imagination and foresight about the river and its environment; it framed the Charles as an extension of the city. In the decades that followed, the riverscape expanded along with its role in Boston’s life. The Hatch Shell brought classical music and a Fourth of July extravaganza complete with the “1812 Overture” and cannon fire; Community Boating brought sailing to the masses; Storrow Drive brought cars; the Dr. Paul Dudley White Bike Path brought outdoor enthusiasts of all kinds in bigger and bigger numbers.

Running along the Esplanade, not far from the TD Garden and Fenway Park, I sometimes see the Charles as a public stadium unlike any other. It is a grand, historic staging area for spectacles big and small. It is where the city gamely puts itself on display, reveals itself in the routine and the rare, sometimes in the most literal sense, with nearly naked sunbathers populating docks and grassier riverbanks. Outside Harvard Square a monastery overlooks the water, and I suspect nowhere else would monks and sunbathers awkwardly meet but on the Charles. Spring, summer, and fall days, I watch the water traffic as I run, the college sailors steering precariously close to each other during team drills, the coxswains shouting commands at rowers, the novice kayakers paddling in circles, the fishermen in Bass Tracker boats hoping for a big catch, the tall vessels passing through the Craigie Drawbridge while I wait for it to close and reset the roadway.

The biggest annual boat crowd comes every October for the Head of the Charles Regatta, a weekend filled with crew races by day and bacchanalian exploits at night. (In high school, stories of the event, day and night, only added to my Boston mythmaking.) The regatta is the Charles at its most preppy, spectators either channeling, reimagining, or appropriating some perceived Boston Brahmin ideal. I go for the vendors selling kettle corn and sweet potato fries and for the chance to see Olympians compete. Not far upriver, beside the Community Rowing boathouse, on a half-dirt soccer field, players take weekend games seriously. I see it in slide tackles and hear it in how loudly they shout in Spanish or Portuguese as I pass by. Old Boston and new Boston almost meeting.

Most memorably, the Charles is where the city celebrates. Reveling in the Red Sox curse-breaking 2004 World Series win, fans overflowed the banks, climbed on bridge supports, and cannonballed into the river as the team paraded by in tour Duck Boats. Dirty water be damned.

 

The last of my college all-nighters ended on the Weeks Footbridge at dawn. Hours before graduation, I gathered there with around thirty classmates, most of us coming from various parties on campus. Fortified by a potent mix of alcohol and caffeine, energized and terrified by what awaited in the real world, the Charles was a friendly, familiar place. We came to watch the sunrise over the river, to take one final, glorious snapshot of college life. Then we stood around, lingering in some strange, overtired limbo. We leaned over the water, sticking heads, torsos, and arms through the footbridge’s slotted sidewall and peering into the murky depths below. It wasn’t long before mischievous minds went to work. A small group stripped down and launched off the bridge. Most of us watched as one, then another, then another dropped into the river, falling maybe twenty feet. We cheered as they resurfaced and swam ashore.

Stepping off the footbridge, someone wondered whether our soaking-wet classmates should get tetanus shots. We’d heard about how industrial waste and untreated sewage once polluted the Charles and how the effects remained. It pierced the river mythology I’d created when younger, as did cross-country and track teammates who cautioned not to run along the river alone at night. Living on the Charles in college, I started to view it differently, with less innocence and more nuance. The river marked the passage of time, and the passage of time marked the river. The waterway evolved and adapted, settling into new rhythms each season. I ran along its banks almost daily, searching for its quirks and hidden charms. The Charles remained the river I wanted. But making real memories on the river, I learned nostalgia can be a more powerful draw than mythology.

The nostalgia comes on fall afternoons when local college cross-country teams take over the river. In a blur of school colors and ponytails, a dozen runners speed past at an impressive clip, staying close together and chatting about classes and popular culture and guys. At intersections, they briefly consider where they will turn around, the best bridge back to campus for mileage goals. On the move again, there is a subtle competition within the group, someone always, ever so slightly pushing the pace. I know, because I was one of those runners twenty years ago. Now, it’s strange crossing paths with college cross-country teams, running into my past. It’s even stranger returning to the Charles with former teammates. We cover familiar routes, still sporting ponytails and striving for an impressive clip. But pace is dictated by how fast a Baby Jogger can be pushed over curbs and down uneven parts of the bike path. Inside the stroller, one former teammate’s fourth child, an eight-month-old girl, sleeps. We take turns steering the stroller and talk about parenthood, politics, and travel. The conversation flows easily, despite a slight breathlessness as the pace quickens. The harder we push forward, the more the Charles takes us back.

I remember pushing forward after the blizzard, talking myself through the deepest snowdrifts. I crossed the Harvard Bridge and scanned the riverbanks for other runners as foolish and foolhardy as I was. I didn’t see anyone, though by now the white-gray all around played tricks with my mind and my eyes. Sifting through river memories, I tried to recall a moment that would transport me, take me to a warmer, more hospitable day. Then I spotted movement coming from under the bridge. As I got closer, I recognized the herky-jerky motions of runners struggling for balance in the snow. Three runners followed each other, one after another after another, in a postblizzard version of a conga line. Soon I joined in the awkward run-dance. We didn’t speak, focusing instead on each slippery step. I was in my own world, but felt the presence of the other runners keeping me upright and pulling me along. I sensed us connected by the Charles.