Hope Runs

by Claire Diaz-Ortiz

Within an hour, it is done, we have emailed the photos to everyone we know, and we are one step closer to leaving.

  We begin the trip with a two-week cruise from Miami to Spain, where I’ll run my first marathon. I finish my training on the cruise ship, pounding out miles on the tiny track on the upper deck—fourteen laps equals a mile—and filling my body with richer food than we will see for months. After Madrid, we head south to Granada and then to Morocco, where we spend a night in the desert, nearly tripping over tiny kittens drinking milk from teacups on the sand dunes.

  Although we spend some days on the road truly traveling—rising early for a bus or plane—the majority of our days start late, in a cheap hotel or hostel somewhere with a long breakfast and lots of tea. We spend a good chunk of every day working at our freelance jobs, earning enough to offset the expenses of the trip, and then typically take a long walk around where we are that day or week, in search of a cute place for lunch or dinner. Tourist attractions are not our goal—to preserve your sanity you can’t spend a year in museums, we decide—and we instead focus on attempting to live our strange lives in a new place from week to week.

  A few months into our year on the road, we stay for a month on the beach in southern India, where the daily monsoons mirror my mood. I stay up nights, making lists of all that I love about my life and wondering why I still feel so blue about lost love. Shouldn’t travel be curing me?

  One day while in Goa, India, I have the best day.

  It doesn’t start that way, but rather it starts as one of those hard days, something we all have, when things are going on in life and we feel sad about them. But on the trip, when we have them, Lara and I like to use a phrase of our friend Mari, and we look at each other and say, “But you can’t have a bad day—because you’re living the dream!”

  So on the best day—perhaps calling a bad day the best day helps to make it so—I go out for a run on the beach, because running has been one thing that I have learned in the last year is making me a better me. I used to hate running something fierce, but now it is changing me. And it is on the run that something happens that makes that best day actually, truly, one of the best days I’ve had in a long, long time.

  I am running, and I come across all these ferocious-looking, probably rabid dogs. And I get kind of scared but then tell myself that there are really only three, that they even look mildly playful, and that I can run into the ocean and outswim them with my paltry arm muscles if they try to viciously attack me. So I keep running. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is, because I used to be terrified of dogs, and only in the past couple years, with the help of a tiny dog in Mexico, have I been able to slowly start to like them a bit.

  So after I safely pass the dogs, I realize all of a sudden that there is a little one running behind me. I get scared because it looks like he’s trying to bite my calf, but I breathe deeply and keep running. And he just hangs in there. The dog and I run up and down the beach together for a long, long time, and it is weirdly wonderful.

  A few times I start to worry that the dog is getting worn out because he is so far behind, so I clap my hands and say encouraging things like, “Come on now, buddy!” And he comes running like a crazy man really fast, and I realize that he wasn’t tired at all, he just thought I was slow and was giving me a head start so it didn’t get boring for him. (Kind of like skiing with parents or a boyfriend, I think.)

  At some point, I start to feel really, really warm feelings for the dog I can’t control, and I remember that on 1950s television shows and Disney family movies, sometimes people throw sticks and dogs catch them. So I go out and find a dead tree near the beach and get a stick that I think looks about right. We start playing this game, fetch, which is perhaps the most out-of-body experience I’ve ever had, given what I feel for dogs.

  He’s not that good at it and never manages to actually bring the stick back, but instead he just sits there with it in his mouth, waiting for me to come get it. And so we move down the beach like that, and I keep thinking about what compelled me to go find the stick in the first place, because playing with dogs (especially with sticks) is not the kind of thing I do.

  And then, because it is southern India in summertime, the monsoon starts. The rain gets really, really, really hard and hurts my eyelids, and I can’t see more than fifteen feet around me. But I don’t want to go in, because it feels like a cleansing that I need badly, so I stand there on the beach just feeling the rain.

  I look down and realize that the dog is huddled up against me to protect himself from the rain, and it feels like I am helping the dog by just being there and that he needs me, and in that moment I feel more lucky than I’ve been in a long while.

  After about fifteen minutes of me just standing there, looking at the dog hiding behind my legs and being in the rain, it starts to let up and the sky fills with insane white light. It feels like the apocalypse in a really good way and is pretty amazing. I keep looking for a rainbow but there isn’t one, though I think maybe if you think there is a rainbow, even if you can’t see it, it’s the same thing. Then the rain stops and the sand is completely clean and our footprints are all gone, and it’s like the beach is being born.

  Even though my run is over, the dog and I do this really weird thing and start running some just for fun. And it makes me remember why I have decided that, in a small way, I may actually like dogs. And here is why: they are happy little guys, they make you exercise and go outside, and they just radiate love.

  When I come back from the run, I say to Lara, “I ran with a dog!”

  “But you hate dogs!” she says. “And you hate running! Or you used to, at least.”

  “I know!” I say triumphantly.

  And then I tell her the whole story of what happened, with the fetch and the dog and the warm feelings and all, and I even say that Jesus might have been coming down when the light got all weird.

  To which she says, without looking up from her work, “I’m sure it was him, Claire,” which is kind of a sarcastic comment because it’s unclear what Lara thinks about Jesus.

  Another month we visit our college friend Sue, who is on vacation with her family in a villa in Tuscany and has generously invited us to come stay for a week. The villa is filled with a handful of New England families, and for some of the adults it is the longest vacation they have had in thirty years. One couple is celebrating having their children’s college educations finally mostly paid for.

  “This is really our reward,” the environmental lawyer says as he jumps into the pool.

  One night there is a potluck dinner on the veranda overlooking the countryside—there is no veranda at the villa that does not overlook such a view—and we drink wine and eat fresh pasta for hours.

  At one point in the night, the discussion heatedly turns toward doing good and international goodwill. No one knows that the study of this fine art is what fuels me, and I listen silently as the discussion unfolds. One of the men, who thinks I have not understood, turns to me and says simply, “They’re talking about charity.”

  One of the couples with two children already grown will be leaving the villa at the end of the week to travel to Africa to adopt two children. But how can they get more L.L. Bean gear for the kids at the orphanage onto the plane? the husband wonders. The taxes can be so high when you go in those kinds of countries, another woman says. There is a whole industry built around trying to get this kind of stuff figured out, she adds.

  Another woman explains her plan to spend seventy dollars a year to send an African child to make bread in Italy. The best part, she says, is that they can one day go visit the bread-making child, on the very same trip where she’ll also visit a place she volunteered at thirty years ago.

  “Why does he have to go to Italy to learn to make bread?” her twenty-something son asks from the other end of the table.

  The conversation soon derails into the merits of sending a check overseas versus going there in person to volunteer, and I am amazed that the same
conversation can happen everywhere.

  We spend several weeks hiking to Everest Base Camp, and our guide, Lal, is the smelliest man I have ever met. But he is quiet and kind and struts ahead of us for the two weeks, drawing arrows in the dirt that tell us where to go when we can’t see him. In a tiny teahouse in the high Himalayas, we meet a Dutch woman we take to be someone like us—a person who doesn’t belong on a mountain much bigger than she is.

  But she is not that at all, it turns out, and she tells us she summited Mount Everest in 1999, and then her stories start tumbling out. She tells us of the inexperienced climbers she has seen tumble to their deaths and says it is a pity that people no longer climb just for the love of the mountain. Last year she met a blind Dutch man making the climb, and days before he ended up dying on the mountain she asked him, “Why are you really doing this?”

  Everyone goes now, she says. Just to say they have. “What to do?” she says, shrugging her shoulders, swearing this will be her last climb.

  In the end, the woman confesses that she did her Everest climb while going through a divorce.

  “Typical life reinvention,” Lara says the next day as we hike away. She means it in a good way, but I’m not sure the Dutch woman and I are so different. Isn’t that what I am doing, after all?

  Then Lara tells me the story about her brother and his trek in the Himalayas ten years before. He had a guide, she says, who told him simply, “Look when look, walk when walk.”

  Lara has always done that better than I can, I think.

  In Thailand, we stay on a beautiful island called Ko Lanta, where the two headwaiters at the lodge we stay at met and married after he saved her from the tsunami two years before.

  I spend days writing a letter that will be read in a courtroom in San Francisco, where a judge will decide if my father will go to prison or if his appeal will save him. My father is a journalist, and he has exposed one of the most famous sports stars in America for steroid use. The year before, the government subpoenaed him for his sources, and when he told them that giving up his sources is against everything his profession stands for, they sentenced him to eighteen months in prison.

  I have spent an inordinate amount of time on this letter, and I have two versions. This morning I must decide which to send. I remember a book I read once in Mexico about a woman who used the I Ching, opening it up at a random point to help her determine something important about her life, so I do the same thing with my Bible, the small Spanish version Lara and I bought on the Canary Islands. I open it up and land on Colossians 4:6: “Let your conversation be always full of grace.”

  I take this to mean to send the nicer of the two letters, the pleading one, the one that points no barbs at the injustice.

  After sending it, I wander out to the beach to think and stand looking at all the garbage I had seen when running earlier that day. As I walk along, I see a shower curtain with the green fur of mold, a syringe, a Pond’s acne gel tube. I wonder about how much more dramatic it would have been after the tsunami, when the remains of the lodge’s spa would have been mixed in with the everyday garbage of always.

  I am feeling tense and jittery and scour the resort’s equipment shack for a plastic bag, because I think that picking up garbage will do wonders to calm me. The repetitive motion, the mindless movement—like when a high school boyfriend once broke up with me while counting change.

  I can’t find a bag of any kind, though, so I take a seat on the sand and go back to my Bible and the book of James. Just then a small boy of five or six walks onto the beach, dressed head to toe in a wet suit, cap, and snorkeling gear. He had been at the pool earlier that day, and I had watched him contemplate the dark, inky water. Now the boy and his mother walk to the surf, and he acts much as he did at the pool, except this time the thrill of approaching water makes him wild with excitement. I watch the boy scream with delight as each calmly approaching wave grazes his foot, and I put the Bible aside.

  All is going well for the mother and the boy until suddenly he slips and falls down into the shallow but fast-moving water the wave has left. And I don’t fully understand how, but all of a sudden he is tumbling head over heels in a kind of jumbled ball that I wouldn’t have thought possible, given that nothing appears to have actually happened. But I scramble up because I am bored and because his things are flying about, and I start hopping awkwardly through the shallow waves in search of all he has lost. He is crying as his mother pulls him to his feet, and they both stumble to high ground.

  “Is okay, ma’am!” his mother begins to shout, but I have nearly come upon his cap (neck flaps still attached) and am playing what I hope will be a short game of tag with it beneath each coming wave. When I get it, victorious and fairly breathless, I ask if there is anything else, and she makes a motion near her face: the tube from his snorkel is gone too.

  The prospects look bleak, as I see nothing of the sort, and that item’s particular construction lends it to the possibility of prompt sinking. I am agitated, though, and want to solve this, so I begin dancing about in the waves, hoping something will come to me. The mother sees it is hopeless, because she starts a long chain of “Is okay, ma’am,” which she continues for far too long as I refuse to take in that the thing has really disappeared.

  I am worried, you see, that the boy won’t go back in, and that he’ll always remember this early nasty experience with the ocean and not want to come back, and somehow it seems that finding the tube—showing that the ocean did not take it from him after all—will make it better.

  As they start walking up the beach to the safety of the lodge, where a calm pool can host the young snorkeler, the mother keeps yelling, “Is okay, ma’am.”

  At some point I stop looking, because the tube is a hopeless cause (and has been since the beginning), and I go back to sitting on the beach, thinking about how hot it is, and the letter I have sent, and how wild with excitement the boy was before swimming, and then the fall and the crying and the lost things. And how even all the good equipment he had on could not totally protect him.

  I tell myself that it is okay, that there’s only so much we can do, and that our best is enough. And if we are healthy enough, and if we have the right types of support and some calm pools to be in before and after, we can regroup and then once again face the ocean. And maybe it will be better next time.

  On the five-year anniversary of September 11, Lara and I find ourselves in a country that is learning well to forgive.

  Arriving in the airport in Hanoi, Vietnam, late at night a few nights earlier, we learn we’ve missed the twenty-hour train south to Hoi An, where we’ve booked a hotel. We are annoyed and try to blame each other and start a self-pitying rant about home that always indicates that things have really gone downhill—we whine for cell phones, and knowing what time zone we’re in, and Mexican food, and having enough clothes to dress appropriately for an occasion, and Jon Stewart, and getting our points across, and people who understand us.

  Quite simply, it is a night when another logistical nightmare with people we can’t communicate with might just put us over the edge. Luckily, though, Vietnam steps up. Specifically, two kind individuals at an airport information tourist booth look at us—the sad beings we must have appeared to be—and decide to make it all better. For half an hour, they ask us kind questions about home and present simple travel options from which we can proactively carve out the next few days of our lives as we wait for a bus, and they smile over and over. And, of course, they refuse all money.

  And at that moment, Vietnam seems a genuinely lovely place to be.

  Over the next couple days driving south on the bus, we talk a lot about how incredible those two individuals were to us just when we needed it, and what it said about this country that they could give us our best experience at getting things done overseas, even when the bus can’t go more than thirty-five kilometers an hour because the roads our country helped destroy a generation ago have never been fixed. The farther south we get, the nic
er everyone seems to be, and we feel amazed and happy—especially when nobody stops being nice when we say we’re from the United States, which we had worried about because we feel pretty sad about some of the things our country did here.

  And when it becomes September 11 and we stand in a shop with a tailor watching names of the deceased being read at Ground Zero, we begin to talk about how lucky this world would be if they could pull off this kind of miracle of forgiveness in the Middle East by the time our daughters are traveling there.

  There are themes that come up on such an anniversary, five years after something very terrible, and we can name them. Here is one: forgiveness. Like most everything in life that is really worth something, forgiveness can be really hard. There is an easier kind of forgiveness that we see more often in our world, when the bad thing is reversed and you get what you want in the end: when your sister buys you a new cashmere sweater to replace the one she ruined, when the teacher decides at the last minute that you can do extra credit not to fail, or when the judge changes his mind and grants the appeal. And this mini-forgiveness does have merit, and it makes you think a lot, and learn, and grow.

  But the harder kind, the kind of forgiveness that is most difficult to come by, is when whatever you lost is really gone—because the doctor just can’t do any more, or because the towers really did fall, or because things just will never be the same. And it’s the harder kind that is the most important to find.

  I do a lot of thinking about forgiveness. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that I came out of the womb judgmental and cranky when people don’t act the way I want them to, and the fact that I like to complain that things aren’t fair (except when I’m getting the good stuff, and that happens because God likes me and because I deserve it, obviously).

  Sometime last year I was reading a book that talked about forgiveness, and it had a line in it that got me upset. It made the assertion that the phrase everyone says, “I can forgive, but I can’t forget,” is actually not true, not by a million light-years. Instead, it said that in order to truly forgive, you actually do kind of have to forget. At least somewhat, because remembering the specifics of hurts is usually just a way to catalog how good you’ve become at forgiving, and how much you’ve overcome, and how much better you are than the evil force that did the bad things to you.