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Welcome, Publisher's Letter
PUBLISHER’S LETTER
“ Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it,” concludes the hauntingly beautiful ending of Norman Maclean’s short fly-fishing novel, “A River Runs Through It.”
I quote it here, in my first publisher’s note of our new “Run NH” magazine, because I feel the same way about our New Hampshire roads and trails that Maclean felt about his beloved trout streams
In the last quarter century of my life, so much has changed, as in all lives and in the world more broadly. Putting foot to ground, one after another, in an endless string of miles and decades has drawn a solid thread of permanence and consistency through time and space, binding them together.
All those miles gave context to the wild vagaries of life and became a unifying story. A story I’ve shared with so many incredible people who, through running, became some of the closest friends a person could have.
If this mythopoetic take on being a New Hampshire runner doesn’t sound like it’s overstating the case, then running probably holds the same relevance in your life that it does in mine. Welcome to “Run NH”!
There’s something about the way the human memory works that likes to tie itself to locations. Run a certain stretch of trail five years after you ran it with a good friend, and your foot will land just right, and you’ll remember the conversation, exactly what you were talking about. Run for long enough in a small state like New Hampshire, and it’s hard not to find stretches of road all over the state that have become evocative memory machines.
For those of us with non-runners in our lives (my wife, for example), they may wonder, perhaps with some affectionate exasperation, at why so many conversations on car rides include, “I remember running through here ... I think I was with John, and he was talking about ... it was 40 and starting to snow ... neither of us were wearing gloves.”
Recently, my wife and I bought a house together in Manchester.
It’s only a few blocks from where she lived as a girl, was once lived in by one of her great aunts and is two doors down from where another relative lived. There’s certainly a powerful claim to connection.
But, I tell her, this is part of one of our Saturday morning long-run group’s regular routes. I’ve run past this house a hundred times in the past 20 years. It was meant to be!
OK, maybe I understand the exasperation.
Listen to runners talk, and you’d think all these memories we’re carrying around are only bad weather and nagging injuries.
But the conversation really isn’t about weather and injuries. Those things are
all symbols of the running life. And here, that’s a life inextricably entwined with a landscape and a people.
What a spectacular people. The running community in New Hampshire is supportive, welcoming, warm, funny, quirky and dedicated. We’ve all been there together through births and deaths and divorces and new loves and all of the triumphs and tragedies that accompany human life.
We’ve sweated together through summer morning long runs for fall marathons, when it’s already 75 at 7 a.m. and 22 miles will be an eternity. We’ve spent more than 30 hours sleepless together in pursuit of the Hampton Beach finish line of a long relay race. We’ve cheered each other on, even when the going was hard; especially when the going was hard.
I woke up in Jackson a few mornings ago; I’d stayed up north following a Mount Washington Valley Chamber of Commerce event and dinner afterward. It was a cold, October dawn. I was underdressed for the temperature, but the first steep half-mile up Carter Notch Road past Jackson Falls was plenty to warm me up.
It had been a long time since I’d been up that road, but like always names and faces and conversations swam up out of the past, and I was running on the same road I run every day, the one that runs from Nashua to the Notches, from Keene to the Canadian border, through all of New Hampshire and all our lives. To paraphrase Maclean, eventually, all things merge into one ... and we run through it.
