Running on The Mountain, #1

Mount Tamalpais in Marin County was my Sunday treat for more than 20 Years of Distance-Running. Below, my first run there, with fellow 1979 explorers.

You can read the piece with more photos alongside it and with sections quoting Lew Welch, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Eve Pell, and more over on the WeAreRevolutions website.

Here are three photos with poetic appreciations of the Mountain from over on WeAreRevolutions.

And now to the text about that first Sunday Morning run.

We'd finished my first run on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, across the Goldern Gate Bridge from San Francisco, a Sunday morning in January, 1979.

Our cheeks were chill. Our eyes were bright. We still wiped snot off our upper lips with cuffs of our sweatshirts. We arched our necks backward and  gathered more of our breath. We jogged and walked and stretched, round the two cars that had brought us to the slick and puddled College of Marin parking-lot this Sunday of January 1979. It was for me an exhilarating new world.

We were six--Bill Sevald, Daryl Zapata, Jeff Wall, Jim Nuccio and Mike Fanelli, and me--and we were runners and so we knew we'd been "out" exactly two hours and thirty-two minutes.

"Twenty-three miles," Daryl said, "with the add-on. A good tweenty-three, the way we were going down the Mountain and once we got on the flats."

We nodded. We were tired unto stuporous from the climb and the jolts and the miles, sweat growing less warm through our T-shirts, but above all else satisfaction and wonder radiated through us.

"Wow!", I'd said more than once that morning during our run up Trails and Grades and beside Lakes of Mount Tamalpais. It was another world. It was a Legend and God to Natives and a transformation for Beats. It accepted your passage into its multiples but its sights, smells and sounds were infinitely greater than you. Mist and low-lying clouds drifted over the Mountain's evergreen shoulders. It was Bear and other Totems I'd known in the Pacific Northwest and Southeast Alaska.

We'd come from the City--Bill, Daryl, Jeff, Mike and me. We lived in cramped spaces except house-owner Dr. Wall. Our radiators clanged and our neighbors watched --Mork & Mindy--. Our lips parted with anticipation as rode across the fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge toward the dark green promise of Mount Tamalpais.

We picked up Jim Nuccio at his house and his family's Nursery in Corte Madera. "Jim is the Mountain guy," Daryl said. "He's the guru."

Jim Nuccio was already a national champion and a runner fabled in the San Francisco Bay Area. He'd beaten 1976 U.S. Olympic Team 5000 Meters guys Duncan McDonald and Paul Geis over 25 Kilometers in Golden Gate Park, Fall of 1977, surging away on last loop.

'Aw, naw," Jim said. “I’m just so glad you guys are here.”

"Usually he just has me to beat up on," Daryl said.

Daryl Zapata was indigena and born in 1945. His profile was angled like a Plains Indian's. He was tallish and of course lean. He'd run five marathons in 1978 and already had a Personal Best (P.B.) of 2:24. His voice sounded authoritative and laconic.

"Naw," Jim smiled. "Yeah!" Daryl countered.

Jim drove some of us in a second car to the College of Marin lot. He and Daryl led our beginning trot past the Woodland Market and onto a bike-path. We came out on a residential street of Kentfield and climbed and descended gentle hills beside lingering Christmas ornaments and passed alongside Tennis Courts after about two miles. We entered real woods of shadowing conifers and campgrounds and picnic tables.

It was all new, welcome, and both remindful and tantalizing to me. It was beginning to feel like the Pacific Northwest--Whatcom County--Sehome Hill--Chuckanut Mountain--that had raised me.

We stepped single-file up a trail that wound above the campground. We hopped over and round roots and rocks. We were like goats in shorts--I rather more outfitted in sweatpants and sweatshirt. We kept eyes fixed on the runner and the ground ahead.

Bill Sevald and Jeff Wahl were teammates on the Excelsior Track Club. They sometimes ate lunch together in San Francisco’s Business District. After graduating from college in Michigan Bill had played linebacker for the Ottawa Roughriders. Jeff was a Toxologist in the Univeristy of California, San Francisco Medical Center on Parnassus. In 1982 Jeff would set a Masters World Best for running 50 kilometers, circling bicyclists' paved oval inside the Horse Track of Golden Gate Park. Bill would become one of my closest friends ever and the rigorous intellect who introduced me to Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power and Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers. He's now the author of two published novels.

Mike Fanelli was my teammate in the Pamakids club. He encouraged me steadfastly. 'You could do anything. A talent like yours, you culd set World Records." He was youngest among us and ardent in his love for running and racing and its lore and his voice could boom with commanding force. He' knew first-hand famous races involving Jim Ryun, Marty Liquori and Dave Wottle in the Franklin Field stadium of his native Philadephia. 25 years after this run, Mike, a well-known realtor, helped me to sell my flat in San Francisco's North Beach.

About the Pamakids, its' name was said by jokers to be that of a Native tribe in the Bay Area. The name was in fact a portmanteu condensing Pa, Ma, and the Kids and thus bespeaking its majority membership. It--we--Pamakids made up a scarcely noticeable aspirant among national-class teams such as West Valley (Jim, Daryl) and “the Aggies” of Davis and San Luis Obispo within our Athletics Congress (TAC) Region of Northern and Central California and Nevada. 

We came out from the trail and climb above campgrounds to a broad earthen road and view of a dark green, misting and overcast body of water.

“This is Phoenix,” Daryl said. "Phoenix Lake." The most low-lying and small of the Lakes that would be my company on Mount Tamalpais for nearly 25 years.

“Which way do you want to take up?” Jim Nuccio asked.

“You’re our leader. You’re the guru,” Daryl said.

“We could do Tucker.”

“Well, sure. We can get tough. Then go round the upper Lakes to the Dam,” Daryl said. He looked back at us four rookies. “Is that good with you?"

"We don't know nothin'. We're just follow you," Mike Fanelli said as if he was one of the Three Stooges.

"Along for this great ride!" I said.

“It’s Mars to me,” Jeff Wall said. “Or, I should say, Venus.”

"Tucker will be alright," Bill Sevald said.

"It's all so great," I said.

The trail known as “Tucker” was officially mapped as the ’Tucker Cutoff.’ It was multiplous in its climbs and dips and rocky, shadowed doglegs, lower on the Mountain. Higher, it was simply “a beast” in its straight-up angles between windfall logs and long-mossed boulders of frog-green and seaweed-brown.

Climbing “Tucker” was in fact like logging. It was as steep in stretches as sidehills during my first days with the Van de Grift Logging crew, eastern Skagit County, October 1973. It was a remove enveloping as the enormity of our scrabbling but phenomenally accomplishing Van de Grift gypo crew's slack-line show above Granite Falls, January 1974. Four thousand feet the inch-and-a-half-thick mainline stretched over a half-mile above us in this mists then, from yarder to cross-creek tail-hold. What a wonder was the ingenuity and acumen of hook-tender Jack Presley. What a smart and agile rigging-slinger was Norvel Rogers. How dogged and uncomplaing and get-it-done was my fellow choker-setter Jerry Umdall. Our rigging-crew's climb-out as dusk dropped on the snow, every day but Sunday that January before the log rolled on my leg, felt like the ascent of Tucker by the six of us this morning.

We were panting, a little "woobly", by the time we emerged onto the road for Fire or Water crews.“Eldridge"--Eldridge Grade--was of earth Winter-packed and rivulets-rutted. Its switchbacks took us up more--"This is as high as we'll go today, I think,_ Jim Nuccio said. We could then begin to regain our legs--to stride and even pelt with a whoop or two of gladness downhill. 

"So we'll do Lagunitsas and then Bon Tempe? We'll go the Dam?" Jim Nuccio said.

"To the Dam!" Daryl said. "These guys aren't quitting. They're not even getting tired!"

"I'm just thanking God," Jeff Wall said, "that I haven't fallen over yet."

Running round the Lakes—Lagunitas and big Bon Tempe—was then and forever my favorite part of running on the Mountain.

You could stretch out. You could run fast. You still had to watch out. Roots and rocks surprised many a toe to tripping unto sprawling falls.  The most unfortunate I saw Bill Donakowski's in 1987. Bill was then among the world's best marathoners. He'd won handily the New Jersey Marathon and the Twin Cities Marathon in 1986, the latter that year's U.S. National Championship. He was a tough engineer at the top of his game. Twice Bill tripped on the same rock-bump in the shady side of the trail round Bon Tempe. The second trip strained one Achilles tendon.

Our little risks added, however, to boys’ fun. Skip—skip—skip on stones across the culvert-like drop of a creek. Hop up the bank. Dash rightward. Dip and angle round the brush-obscured bends ahead. You had to--you got to--run like an Indian in some Great Lakes woods.
Vistas surprised your eyes too. The tunnel-like trail that required such focus suddenly opened into viewing the whole, western expanse of Bon Tempe. “Wow!”—a whisper or a louder or a silent, panting exclamation, depending on the breath I had available, this morning.
We jounced, zigging and zagging, down the trail to the road over Bon Tempe Dam. From here we looked westward on “Alpine”—Alpine Lake. "Alpine" extended long toward the Pacific Ocean that its ends could not be seen.

“You can call where we are now halfway,” Daryl Zapata said. “

“But’ the rest is downhill," Jim Nuccio said. “Flat or downhill."
We eschewed the "Shortcut" on the "Sunnyside" of grassy, rolling hills beside Bon Tempe. Drizzling rain started. It was not enough to wet us much and we licked droplets from our upper lips. Names for our routes continued to be plain-spoken yet magical. “Sky Oaks”, “Fish Grade”, even “Filter Plant Road”. Simple, concrete, yet suggestive of multiple realites.  Hadn't Beats such as Lew Welch, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, Phillip Whalen, felt this Mountain too? Hadn't they too wanted to be like Indians on it and in it.

We stretched our legs again, leaning forward, down the long descent of Eldridge Grade through forests of evergreens' shade. The blue-green key of another Lake appeared lower on our right. “That’s Phoenix," Jim said. "See? We're back to Phoenix."

We reached the road where we'd first viewed this Lake much over an hour earlier. We descended  between the campgrounds. We hit pavement next to the Tennis Courts. We agreed to add two miles--to take "our time out" up around two-and-a-half hours--by going around the Hospital and back to the College of Marin parking-lot.

Our pace picked up. We "smelled the barn." Competitive juices kicked in. More, though, was the flow of our whole, six runners' pack. The Mountain stayed with us. Energies we'd drawn from it beckoned us all along. I saw how Jim Nuccio got the name "the Italian Stallion." He wasn't tall, but his uptempo gait was that of light-footed charger.

How could it was to run free! How good to finish this first long run on the fabled Mountain. My mouth stayed agape even as snot's mix with drizzle threatened on its upper lip.

"Thank you! I can't thank you enough for taking us here! It was beyond even what I could imagine."

"You were amazing," Daryl said. "How could you run like that in sweats"?"

"It's just—well, logging, I used to run around all day in pants with suspenders.”

"Well, come back!" Jim said. "The Mountain is always here. I'm always finding something new up there."

"Oh yeah," said Jeff Wall. "Oh my god yes--our thanks,:

"Right," Bill Sevald said.

"It was great!" Mike Fanelli said. "Thank you," he said to Daryl and Jim.