Running with Raven

by Laura Lee Huttenbach

  Raven shook his head and thought, Man, you are crazy.

  VI

  ACCOUNTABILITY

  If you tell Raven you’re going to be there, you better be there, because you know he’ll be there. When you’re feeling bad, you’re more likely to let yourself down than someone else. Even when I don’t feel like running eight miles, I come to the beach because I told Raven I would, and I always feel better.

  —Red Bandit, 35 years old, 178 runs

  When I moved to Miami Beach, I saw Raven showing up every day at the lifeguard stand in front of my apartment. I was drawn by the consistency, the structure that it added to my day as well. I could be absolutely sure of him showing up every day at the same time, ready to take whoever wanted to join him on a run or more like a running journey.

  —Jurisprudence, Belgian attorney, 120 runs

  I just want people to do what they say.

  —Raven

  TWELVE

  SPINAL STENOSIS

  Since the New Year’s resolution twenty years before, Raven hadn’t set a long-term goal. Every day, he resolved to run the next day. “I’m training to come back tomorrow,” he says often. But in 1995, his back made tomorrow look impossible.

  Trouble started when he helped Reverend, the fourteenth runner, move apartments. After carrying boxes up and down a narrow stairwell, Raven felt a dull pain settle in his lower back. A few weeks later it felt like someone was whacking him with a paddle. Each step sent shocks of pain from his glutes down his legs. Eight miles was two and a half hours of pure torture. He couldn’t find a comfortable position. He tried to remember his mother’s advice for when something bad happened—just don’t think about it—but hurt was pumping through his body. At age 44, Raven swallowed his first aspirin.

  By August, it felt like someone had grabbed hold of his spinal cord and was ringing it out like a dishrag. Teen Idol remembers seeing him. “He couldn’t walk,” Teen Idol told me. “I said, ‘You gotta quit, man.’ He’s like, ‘Nah, I gotta run.’ ”

  On one run, after enduring ninety minutes and 5.9 miles, Raven couldn’t take one more step and dropped in the sand.

  I had to make sure I’d heard him correctly. There were days when he hadn’t run eight miles?

  “For me to go under, it was really bad,” Raven told me, sitting in his living room in 2013. “I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t stand. I remember I was just shuffling. But I was out there.”

  He has never run fewer than ninety minutes or 5.5 miles, and he keeps track of his mileage on a calendar. When he goes even a tenth of a mile under or over eight, he marks it to keep an accurate record.

  I must’ve looked disappointed when I learned that he hadn’t in fact run eight miles every day for forty years, and Raven sensed it. “I tortured myself for more than an hour and a half,” he explained, hunched over on the couch. “I was getting close—six, seven miles—but for a few months in 1995 and again for an incident in 2005, I’m sorry to say, White Lightning, there were days I was going under eight.”

  He was so desperate for help he went to Coral Gables on the mainland to see a surgeon. An X-ray later, Raven was diagnosed with spinal stenosis, arthritis, sciatica, scoliosis, and degenerative discs. The doctor said he needed to stop running and get surgery. “But I can’t do that,” said Raven.

  She had nothing else to tell him. Raven got a second opinion at a doctor’s office in South Beach, then a third in North Miami Beach. Every doctor had the same order: Quit running. Get surgery. The streak was killing him. But Raven couldn’t survive without running.

  What does a person do when the thing he loves is both killing him and keeping him alive?

  Corvette Man took him to a natural healer who worked in Aventura. Once a week, Corvette Man drove Raven to get acupuncture and ultrasound. In between appointments, when he was moving and when he was still, everything hurt. He thought the streak was over.

  But one day he had an idea, and it came from a lifeguard named Eggplant Man. From his stand at 6th Street, Eggplant Man was holding a calculator and a notebook when he saw Raven running his way. “Hey, Raven,” shouted Eggplant Man, “You know you’ve run like seventy-four hundred days in a row?” Raven didn’t know that. “If you keep going,” continued Eggplant Man, “you might get to ten thousand.”

  That sounded pretty cool.

  After the run, Raven sat down with a pencil and paper. If he kept pace, he calculated that he’d hit 10,000 days—80,000 miles—in seven years, sometime in May 2002.

  Raven took stock of what he was creating. Sixty people had completed eight miles with him, but on most days, he still ran alone. He had run through Mariel, the Cocaine Cowboys, a blighted neighborhood, and beach dredging. In the tumult, Raven took solace in the consistency of his daily run. Anything was surmountable.

  He didn’t want to quit. In fact the streak was just getting good: Taxman wanted to organize the Awards dinner. Raven was even getting media coverage: Seven-Thirty, a local television program that became Deco Drive, did a short story. The show attracted more attention than the newspaper articles. For the first time in his life, Raven felt like he was contributing something to society. He had found his niche.

  On the last Monday in January 1996 at Puerto Sagua, a Cuban restaurant in South Beach, Raven hosted the inaugural Raven Run banquet. There were seven award categories: Top Runner (Sailor), Top Swimmer (Algae Man), Top Athlete (Vulcan Pilot), Rookie of the Year (Question Man), Most Improved (Taxman), Comeback of the Year (Budget Man), and Event of the Year (Copy Kid, for being the youngest Raven Runner at age ten).

  There were no time categories. “That’s when people push themselves and get hurt,” Raven told me. “The Raven Run is not a race. It’s about finishing.” The fast accomplish the same as the slow. “The only times I’m interested in are good times and fun times.”

  The most prestigious final honor was induction into the Hall of Fame. As a template, Raven used the BBWAA’s (Baseball Writers’ Association of America ) rules. To be eligible, a runner has to be on Raven’s official list for at least five years. The top five runners according to completed runs appear on a ballot. Election is through votes, though ballots are not secret. (Raven counts them and can recognize handwriting and tells nominees and other voters alike who is in the lead and why.) In 1996, Vulcan Pilot was the first inductee into the Raven Run Hall of Fame.

  With chronic pain, a person needs a long-term goal because, day-to-day, the tomorrows don’t seem worth it. At the banquet, he made his first long-term running goal since the original resolution of 1975: He would run 10,000 days in a row—about six more years—until May 18, 2002. “I may have held on to things a little too long in my life,” said Raven. “But I am not a quitter.”

  A few weeks after the first banquet, the acupuncture started working, and Raven’s back pain went away for a little while. But the taste of chronic pain made him sensitive to the fact that, sometimes, people just can’t run eight miles. “I said that if I couldn’t do eight, I can’t make everyone else do it,” said Raven.

  So began the tradition of a “partial.” To get on the list at first, runners must finish eight. After that, you’re allowed to do between three and five miles, which Raven will combine and tally up so that he still keeps track according to eight-mile segments. There is a stigma—encouraged by Raven—against those who run partials. When I hurt my back playing beach volleyball, I started doing partials and felt like I had to apologize. “Don’t worry, White Lightning,” Raven told me. “A partial is better than nothing.”

  * * *

  I ATTENDED MY FIRST RAVEN RUN BANQUET in January 2012 and sat across from the Giggler at Puerto Sagua Restaurant. The Giggler is someone that I’ve never consciously smiled around, but his positive aura just makes my lips curl upward. For dinner, he ordered a peach cobbler and a mango milkshake. “I have a sweet tooth, too,” I told him. “What’s your favorite dessert?”

  “I’d say Mrs. Motts’s German chocolate cake.”

  “Oh, I’v
e never heard of that,” I said.

  “Mrs. Motts was my next-door neighbor in Detroit.” The Giggler, who wore a plastic recorder around his neck like a necklace, had brought a portable sound machine and a microphone for Raven. We didn’t have a private room or a formal program. At some point Raven just stood up and started giving out awards while non-affiliated patrons tried to maintain dinner conversations and wondered what the heck was going on.

  The Giggler had started working on Beach Patrol in 1982 and described his introduction to Raven like this: “Another lifeguard told me, ‘You gotta meet Raven. He’s an incredible athlete and the nicest guy. You’ll see him. You can set your watch by the Raven.’ So my shift started at eight thirty, and I’m waiting, waiting—noon, one, two, three—no Raven. Then around four, he starts coming up, just like today, black shorts, glove, and nobody’s with him, just running in circles talking to me.” It took the Giggler a decade to attempt the eight miles, but he made the list in 1992—number 30—and now runs with Raven at least once a year and always swims.

  I have been to every banquet since 2012 and usually they are very nice events. In 2013, I received the Fitness award, and I invited my mother to come. She’d already met Raven and several other runners—whom she liked a lot—and kind of knew what to expect. Unfortunately, that was the year that Raven insisted on inducting Firecracker into the Hall of Shame.

  Firecracker has over a thousand runs with Raven and is in the Hall of Fame, but their relationship soured around the time when Firecracker went to prison. (Chapter 11 told me later that he’d actually given her a ride to jail.) In 2013, Firecracker had just gotten out before the banquet. Jail time seemed enough of a shame to most of us. But Raven said, “Well it’s by vote, and a few people voted for her.”

  When he presented Firecracker with the Hall of Shame certificate, she hooted and hollered, and my mother just looked at me like, What kind of running group is this?

  A lot of runners don’t like the Hall of Shame, but the Raven Run is no democracy. On the write-in ballot for Hall of Shame, I always scribble it out with a note to Raven that I don’t support this practice.

  It started in the late nineties as a joke with a flaky runner called Colonel. Raven believes that the Hall of Shame should encourage people to become more trustworthy and reliable. “Oh, White Lightning, it’s easy to get out of the Hall of Shame,” he says. “You just have to do what you say.”

  THIRTEEN

  YOU’RE THE MIRACLE

  Priscilla Ferguson, Raven’s girlfriend for the last twenty years, can talk for hours about fishing and hunting. Once, when we were running together, I asked about her first date with Raven. “My only strategy was to set the hook deep,” she said.

  “From a fisherman, that means something,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, I’m the type of person who will spend all night sharpening every hook in the tackle box before going fishing.” She went on to describe, in detail, how to sharpen fishhooks, emphasizing it’s not the tip of the hook that matters but the side. Equally important was tying a good knot. “That’s why I stopped smoking pot,” she said. “When I was high, I couldn’t remember how to tie the knots, and my line kept breaking.” Now marijuana is no part of her life, and she can tie a Bimini Twist with her eyes closed. “It’s beautiful to tie a Bimini Twist,” she said. “It’s like a dance.”

  She riffed for thirty minutes, and I listened closely; I’d thought it was a metaphor for their relationship, but when she warned me that decaying fish skeletons excrete an alkaline component that dissolves boat propellers, I realized that she was just talking about fishing. “From five years old, I could easily tell the difference between the wake of a stingray, a bone fish, or a blue fish,” she told me. “My father taught me to pay attention to details. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have become a photographer without that, but from him I learned how to see things.”

  On her childhood, she says her parents reigned with a “cascading tirade of logic.” To illustrate, she gave this example: One time, she took a cookie from the cookie jar. “Did you take the cookie from the cookie jar?” her mother asked. Priscilla answered, “I was hungry.” Her mother said, “That’s not the question I asked. Answer the question I asked. It’s a yes or no answer, Pris. Did you or did you not take the cookie from the cookie jar?”

  “There was absolutely no wiggle room,” recalled Miracle. “That was from the age of eighteen months. It’s part of the reason I’m so damaged.”

  Another relationship that did damage was her first marriage. She and her husband lived in a small house on a five-acre farm surrounded by eighteen uninhabited acres. Sometimes, when her husband drank too much, he would lock Priscilla in the bathroom. Once, after a day of captivity, she ran the hot water and steamed the bathroom like a sauna. After shedding a couple pounds of water weight, she greased herself up with soap and slid her way out the tiny window above the shower.

  Another time, she and her husband had just come back from a sailing trip to the Bahamas. While she was making a dinner of stuffed pork chops and collard greens, her husband was drinking bourbon. As soon as the food hit the table, he shoveled in a fork of steaming greens, which burned his tongue and mouth. Furious, he grabbed her ponytail and dangled her face in front of him, then threw a glass of bourbon into her open eyes. She could only hear the clicking of his lighter. Once, twice, three times—when he realized the lighter was out of fluid, and he couldn’t set his wife on fire.

  The next day she got a fax machine and a lawyer and six weeks later, she was divorced. Shortly after, while hunting, her ex-husband fired his shotgun from a blind in a tree. The kickback sent him tumbling eighteen feet to the ground, from which he was picked up a quadriplegic.

  Now Miracle carries a baseball bat in her car. But she cannot shake a fear of entrapment. Her nightmare is a cramped, dark space that reminds her of that bathroom.

  Raven lives in a ground-floor apartment and keeps his blinds drawn. Objects of his hoarding spill out of every corner and pile up on the ground and under tables, like we’re one sneeze away from an avalanche. When Miracle feels trapped, her instinct is to flee. Raven’s greatest fear is of abandonment. When Miracle flees, Raven is in his most vulnerable, terrified state that he will forever be alone. “We have these two terrible conflicts of entrapment and abandonment,” Raven says. “It takes a lot of trust.”

  It has also taken counseling. Miracle says her reaction is nothing personal. “It’s just after thirty hours with Raven and his—uh—rigid schedule, I start thinking, It would be nice to be at my house now, with my dogs. So I leave.” She returns to her home, an hour away in Palmetto Bay, where Raven has never spent the night.

  * * *

  THEIR RELATIONSHIP BEGAN in snapshots. In 1994, Miracle, who is seven years younger than Raven, was spending a lot of time on the beach documenting characters and nature with her camera. She saw Raven running all the time, but knew him “as nothing more than an annoying silhouette” in the background of her pictures. His presence “commanded so much attention” and would throw off the weight of her photo. One day, late in the afternoon, Miracle was standing by the rocks at the jetty, camera loaded with black-and-white film around her neck, admiring a rainbow that stretched across the purple sky. Raven walked up—he had a massive crush on this new blond surfer-girl—and said, “There’s a nice rainbow, you should get a picture of that.”

  His comment upset Miracle. “It’s what any normal person would say,” she admits. “But I really chewed him out. I told him, ‘How can I improve on something like that?’ ” Scared of her temper, Raven backed away and admired from a distance.

  Around Christmas, Raven was at a neighbor’s party with Donna when Miracle showed up with her boyfriend Charles, a pale, bald intellectual artist. “Miracle’s holding court, talking about fishing, using bad words—you know how she talks,” says Raven. “I thought, That’s a cool chick.” At the party, Miracle was attracted to Raven, particularly his strong upper body, but she didn’t talk to
him. “I’m not the cheating kind,” she says. She liked that Raven was dating an older woman because “I knew he wasn’t a phony. He was with Donna for who she was, not how she looked.”

  The next year, after breaking up with Donna, Raven saw Miracle on the beach. “Hey, are you still seeing that guy Charles?” he asked. “He’s a little strange.”

  “Oh, he’s an artist,” she said. “They’re like that. But no, we’re not seeing each other anymore.” Raven handed her his business card, which listed his profession—songwriter—and his number—531-RAVE. He asked her out, and she said maybe, tucking his business card in her shoe.

  The next run-in, she was sitting at 3rd Street on a picnic blanket. He sat down next to her. “I can’t remember exactly what he said or if he tried to kiss me, but I told him, ‘Why don’t you try flirting?’ I specifically remembered using that word, flirt. I wanted to be teased a bit.” Before she dismissed him, he handed her a copy of the official running list. Then he got up and started running. A few seconds later, when he was only about thirty yards away, she realized she had forgotten to tell him something, so she got up and started chasing him. “You think it’s only thirty yards, it should be easy to catch someone,” she says. “But no, in the soft sand, it was impossible. I couldn’t do it. That’s when I first came to understand how difficult the run was.”

  For months after that encounter, unbeknownst to Raven, she studied the list. She found the culture fascinating. She decided, “I will have that man.” On what initially drew her to Raven, she said, “It was a carnal thing.” She hadn’t run a step in twenty-three years since snapping her back in a waterskiing accident, but toward the end of 1996, she started training.

  On November 23, Raven was running with Corvette Man when Miracle appeared. “Come on, run with us,” said Raven. So she did. “Of course they tricked me into doing the whole eight miles,” she says. But at the end, she threw her hands up in the air and proclaimed, “It’s a miracle.”