Cloud City Running Club

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m a science person, first and foremost. When I was younger this may not have been the case – science seemed to ruin everything, rob the world of a lot of its mystery and magic. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve increasingly accepted that science itself is magic. I mean – we’ve taken something from one planet and put it on another, how many spells did that take? Equations can be spells. Engineering is not unlike transfiguration. To a lot of people it may seem that we’re living in a cold, technological world, but to me it feels like we’re living in a world where we finally understand and can manipulate the things around us, turning them into new things, accomplishing feats past generations could only dream of, and we’re using this knowledge to conjure new realities and make the world a generally better place. But maybe that’s just me being romantic about it. Maybe magic is only magic if you don’t understand it. Maybe science is just a boring name for magic that is understood.

That said, I still like to believe real bits of old world magic exist. Moments where primal things can be summoned and you don’t understand why - a wind whips by and seems to tell you something you needed to hear, the sun bursts through and shines right on the thing you needed to see, a heavy fog comes in to wrap around you, obscuring you from view long enough for you to get your head together.

This happened to me one day. I was driving home from work, which was generally a miserable undertaking because the freeways always seemed to be under construction. All of the commercials on the radio seemed to sync and air during the one long stretch of road where I’d be jammed between a barren, dusty embankment littered with all the sad detritus of an urban metropolis and an ugly sanded brick wall that, visually, wasn’t offering much. It was this stretch of road, geographically so close to home, chronologically a daunting distance, that always brought me closest to losing my mind. Particularly in the summer, when the asphalt was so hot it was easy to imagine the tar turning soft and swallowing up all of the cars like a molten river overtaking a herd of doomed creatures in some prehistoric day. (These were the kinds of thoughts that stretch of road would inspire in me on a daily basis). I can’t remember what had been so harrowing about my day, just that it hadn’t been great, and life wasn’t what I wanted, and I wanted to get home but I wasn’t sure why, because there was nothing interesting waiting for me there. Life was dull. I needed something.

Once I’d cleared that dreaded bit of road it was on to my exit ramp, which sloped up and over the freeway and, on this day, was occupied at the half-way point by an enormous bank of fog that was very unusual for a summer’s day in a beachside town in southern California. It was weird. It was thick and gray and it clearly confused everyone. I passed through town and could just make out college students in flip flops and t-shirts huddling at bus stops, nonplussed. As I drove towards my apartment the fog grew thicker, its origins being offshore and my apartment being a mere three blocks from the beach. By the time I parked everything was eerily quiet, like a giant pause button had been hit and I alone had been immune. I was inexplicably excited, and I knew just what I wanted to do. I wanted to go for a run. Now, I had been known to run enough that I had an established path through the neighborhood down to the concrete running pad that led me straight to the pier, some three miles away. But I ran without frequency and running in the exhausted hour after I got home from work was rare. I remember as I got out of my car, though, that I felt IT. This was magic, and it was for me, and I had to change and get on the running path before everything disappeared and the world was normal again. I only had a small window.

I changed quickly and was out of the house before I was sure I even had everything I needed. Keys? Probably, but who knows? I think I was dressed suitably. I probably hadn’t stretched enough. And then I ran. I ran with giddy energy, I ran so fast through the thick fog that beads of moisture were gathering in my eyelashes, along my eyebrows, on my shirt, soaking me before I even had a chance to work up a sweat. Everything was quiet. I saw no one. I could hear traffic like it was outside of a wall somewhere, like the fog was holding it back, protecting me, allowing me have this quiet, muted world for now. Once I’d reached the beach and descended the stairs to the running path the world grew even more distant and I felt like I had stumbled upon some mystical, ancient place. My surroundings took on a dream-like quality, seeming both familiar and foreign to me at the same time. The moss-covered stone bluffs to one side were holding the real world out, the distant sound of waves crashing down the beach were telling me where this world ended. It was only I who existed then, and it was one of the rare times where my body and my mind have been in sync enough to want the same thing: to move, to be alive, to be happy and feel joy and feel like, even though all of this was serving to separate me from a world I’d been bitching about not 30 minutes before, I was alive and I was in it and magic still existed and the universe wanted me to be there and feel it all. I’ve struggled with depression. I still do. Sometimes the memory of that jog - that odd, mystical jaunt through a cold, wet, welcoming cloud - is enough to pull me out of the fog that will occasionally descend in my own brain. To remind me that, as much as I love science and thinking and working through my problems in my own mind, sometimes I need to be nudged out of my own head and into the real world. Sometimes magic will descend, and you’ve got to be open to it. Because if you’re not open to it, you’re going to miss out.