Walking from the office to the car this afternoon, the air had that heavy, unmistakable smell of spring: wet, green, growing. This contrasted sharply with my run on Sunday – the longest run of the new training year, from my house to the far northeastern corner of the Lower Arb, near the Waterford Bridge. I was out for a nice long time, and in that time, I experienced every season but summer.
I started into a brutal north headwind that was first just chilly but that, when I reached the Arb, started to create wet little squalls by blowing frozen and melted snow out of the trees onto me, the robins, and the squirrels. Where I could see them through the trees, the Carleton and St. Olaf wind turbines were spinning madly, trying to put that wind to more productive use. For one long stretch, as I crossed some open fields, a red-tailed hawk rode the gusts above me, using the wind for his own purposes and, I worried, deciding if I was edible.
Deeper in the woods, where the morning sun had only intermittently shone on the path, the trails were either still covered with supremely wet, sticky snow or with supremely wet, sticky black mud. At one point, the goo in my left shoe’s treads picked up a foot-long twig that was godawfully hard to shake off. When I stopped to yank the stick loose, a pheasant screeched somewhere nearby, giving me a literal and figurative start. A few minutes after that, just before the turnaround at Canada Avenue, I reached a mudpatch so wide, long, and deep that I turned around instead of eking out the last few meters to the parking lot.
The second half of the run was hazier, thanks to fatigue, but as I passed the perfect little Kettle Hole Marsh, I heard a bedlam chorus of spring peepers – this, just a few hours after the last snow of the season. And just a few minutes after that, the sun slid out from behind the gray-white clouds, spectacularly lighting up the still gray-brown fields.