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Thu, 02 Sep 2010 06:02:42 -0400
Reruns 60: The Retreat
RUNNING COMMENTARY 848[From my memoir, titled Reruns, which ends with this chapter. Photo: John Steinbeck led me to his native area. He lived in this Salinas house in his youth, and I ate lunch here on my best and worst day as a writer.]
PEBBLE BEACH, CALIFORNIA, April 1981. Retreat isn't necessarily defeat. Instead of surrender, it can be a pullback to revise strategy. My plan for life as a writer was failing, and to revive it I had to retreat from this bucolic beachhead on the California coast.
Once the book royalties dried up, we couldn't live in dreamland anymore. We didn't want to leave but couldn't afford to stay. We'd outgrown our house, where Sarah and Eric couldn't share a bedroom much longer. We couldn't add on here and couldn't buy up in the bullish local real-estate market.
Paul Perry offered a solution. The editor of Running magazine called to say, "Our managing editor is leaving, going back to New York City. Would you like to move north and take her place? Nike can raise your pay and cover your moving costs. Plus you'll find bargains on houses here."
The benefits would be professional and financial, even educational. As a gatekeeper on content for the magazine I could assign and edit my own articles, reclaiming a voice in the running world. Moving to Eugene, where half the money bought twice the home, would solve the housing squeeze.
Sarah was now in second grade at a school that wasn't great. The older population of this area balked at spending tax money on schools. Eric, at three, had started to school himself. Our boy was slow to start talking. A pediatrician had tried to ease our concerns by saying, "Don't worry. He's a boy and a second child. That combination often leads to delayed speech."
Finally we visited a specialist at Stanford University Hospital. He told us, "Your boy has been severely hearing impaired since birth. Without hearing aids, he's essentially deaf." The doctor outlined a remedial program: hearing aids and an early start at a special pre-school. At age three he took an hour-long bus ride to Salinas and back each day.
The kids deserved better schools, or at least closer ones, than we could find on the Monterey Peninsula. So we headed north to Eugene, where a job awaited, where better housing was affordable, where the schools were first-rate in this college town. Relocating here was a needed move out of the dream and back to reality, out of a theme park that guests paid to see and into a real town. We would remain in Eugene long after Running magazine's short life ended, after I resumed writing for Runner's World, after the marriage broke down and both of us remarried. Eugene, where I came in retreat, would become my longest-time home.
UPDATE: WRITING ON
The highest and lowest points of my writing life both came the same week in December 2003. They would have fallen on the same day if I had picked up phone messages while traveling. The thrill of the high helped ease the pain of the low.
I had picked the right writing hero and visited him at exactly the right time. This is John Steinbeck from Monterey County. I never saw him in life (he died in 1968), but a writer's good words can reach beyond the grave. Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath was the first book I ever read without it being a class assignment or having sports as its subject.
It wasn't his fiction that moved me the most, but his collection of letters and the journals that he kept while writing the novels. From his informal lines I learned what writing can mean to the writer. With Steinbeck it wasn't a job or ever a career. It was a calling, a passion, even an obsession. He didn't write because he could but because he must. For every public word he wrote, there were hundreds or thousands that no one ever saw. He felt about writing as I did about running, and would come to feel about running writing.
Steinbeck was born and grew up in Salinas, California. The hometown that once vilified him for writing unflatteringly about it now promotes him as its top tourist attraction. There's the Steinbeck House, the Steinbeck Library, the Steinbeck gravesite and now the National Steinbeck Center. My 600th race (and one of the last true races) was the Steinbeck Country 10K, in 1980.
My wife Barbara and I toured Salinas in late 2003, walking where Steinbeck had walked and sitting where he'd sat. We ate lunch in his old dining room, where volunteers now serve meals as a fundraiser to preserve this Victorian house. The narrow, steep stairwell to his room upstairs is closed to the public. But we could see where he'd climbed hundreds of times to the room where he wrote his first sentences.
The nearby Steinbeck Center now stands as a memorial to his life's work. My big thrill there was seeing pages he had handwritten. Most of these were photocopies, all encased in plastic. But the words looked to me exactly as they had to him while going down, and I came as close as possible to touching them -- and by extension, him.
I came home from the highest point in my writing life and plunged to the lowest. This dive began with a phone message from the new boss at Runner's World, a young man I'd never met or even heard from before. When I called him back, he said that my column, which had appeared for 250 months in a row, had "run its course." It didn't fit into his plans for the "new" RW, so he was dropping it.
I might have listened to his offer to keep writing for his magazine "occasionally." But then he added an unnecessary (even if true) jab that abruptly ended this conversation and my connection with the magazine: "You've been scraping the bottom of the barrel with your column subjects for a while now." My best answer to him -- longest, anyway -- is this three-book memoir series, all written after this retirement from RW.
John Steinbeck continues to teach and inspire me. The final National Steinbeck Center exhibit, posted on the wall at the exit, reads, "I nearly always write, just as I nearly always breathe." I can say with some certainty that as long as I'm consciously breathing I'll be writing, somewhere.
[This concludes the book. It appears in full in the "New Books" section of this website, http://joehenderson.com/reruns. The final book in this series, titled Running Home, begins here next week.]