I get in late—flight to Istanbul, to New York, then Pittsburgh, then a rental car pickup and a ninety-minute drive, pulling into Fourteen Burnham Street at 4:30 in the morning—but my mom is awake anyway, waiting in ambush.
“Mom,” I try to scold. “You don’t sleep enough as it is.”
“I’ll sleep when I die,” she says, and before I can tell her what I always do, that her death will come sooner if she doesn’t take care of herself, she wraps me in a hug. She insists on carrying my bags herself, she brings them to my old bedroom, and starts making me a cup of tea.
I’m too tired to handle it, to sit there across from her and watch her love me the way she does. Coming home late at night from Afghanistan, from a job I’m proud of, and there’s something about her that makes me feel like I’m seventeen and she caught me sneaking back into the house drunk. She doesn’t like that I do this job, and that hurts but I know she doesn’t like it because she worries about me, so I sit there and let her baby me. There’s a part of me that even enjoys it, even tired as I am, hearing how things are going, how Linda and the kids are doing, and oh just wait until you see little Timmy, he’s so much bigger, he’s walking now, and oh by the way your Uncle Carey is coming by tomorrow, or I guess today . . . it’s so late, he said he’ll stop by after the doctor’s.
But there’s another part of me that feels deeply uncomfortable, because I know why my mother makes such a fuss every time I return. And I think, I want to run. I need to run. The sun needs to rise, or at least start curving some light over the horizon, or bouncing rays off clouds and back to earth, to give me something to work with other than country darkness.
And then she brings up a local family whose son returned from Iraq a few years ago and had some issues, how they weren’t sure whether the issues were from Iraq or from him just always being a bit of a scoundrel, from a family that never was the most functional in the first place. I tell her I couldn’t answer for sure but I do know that stretch of time in Iraq wasn’t so bad and that things had been quiet before the rise of ISIS. My mother stares at me intently and I know what she really wants to know is if reporters get affected like soldiers do. I tell her he’s probably fine, that war isn’t so bad as people think, that most soldiers wouldn’t give up their time abroad and most think it makes them tougher, stronger, better able to deal with the hard breaks you find wherever you live.
“That’s true, that’s true,” she says, “but you know, your uncle, after the war . . .”
But Uncle Carey is the last person I want to hear more about so I shush her, tell her I’m tired, I’m not having more tea, and once I’ve hustled her to her room I head to mine. There I lay out my things, and sit collecting my thoughts and memories, and once I’m sure she’s asleep I change into running gear.
I start out right as the sun is rising, while the night air is departing and leaving bits of fog in the hollows of the unfolding hills. It’s in this first stage of the run, before I’ve really burned myself out, that the nostalgia tries to creep in. Western Pennsylvania is beautiful. Perhaps not as starkly grand as the Pacific Northwest, or as the crueler parts of Afghanistan, where steep cliffs and arid valleys suggest a land belonging more to God than humanity. This land isn’t so alien. It’s lived in—you pass barns and tilled fields and old homes set off from the road. It’s gentle—you head down rolling hills, past quietly meandering streams. Nothing dramatic. It’s a warm, simple beauty, one fitting the people I grew up with.
When I get to Old Scalp, though, I start noticing real changes from the last time I was here. A few new stores and restaurants. The local pharmacy has shuttered. Jake Siegel’s diner, the Wavetop, is now a Long John Silver’s. And as I get to the end of Old Scalp there’s the final blow—Hilda’s Furrier Fashions and Fur Salon, where I’d worked as a teenager. My second day there I’d gone to open the store only to find that out-of-towners had chucked a cinderblock through the glass and posted the statement: “Until all the cages are empty and all are free our struggle continues. This is not the last you’ll see of us Hilda.” An animal-rights group based in California had taken credit, confirming everything we ever could have thought about the Left Coast, and Hilda had been undaunted but unsure of how to show it. She was just a regular clothing store. Her furrier had gone out of business a decade earlier and she’d just never bothered to change the sign. So Hilda and I had driven to a shop outside of Pittsburgh to pick up fur underwear, of all things, to put on the shelves. “It was the cheapest fur they had,” Hilda had explained when we were stocking it. I’d always figured Hilda would die before
