Two Decembers ago, I stood in the small kitchen of my best friend’s apartment, leaning against the sink and watching in the mirror as she cut my hair. As the pieces rained down around me onto the kitchen floor, Nell told me about her new job and the past four months of her life that we had spent on separate coasts both starting new journeys. The last time we’d seen each other had been in July when I’d hiked to the Zealand Falls Hut in the White Mountains. It was there where Nell had been working as a summer naturalist in a small mountain hut stationed along the Appalachian Trail. My few days at the hut had been filled with fresh baked bread, loud laughter, early morning ukulele, and lots and lots of hiking. As the sun set late into the summer evening, I’d dunk my bare body in the falls running alongside the trail to wash away all the grime of the day before donning an apron and cooking dinner for the myriad of thru hikers that would sleep in the hut that evening. Both Nell and I were aglow that summer, but exhausted too; we knew that change was coming for us like an impassable cliffside, like the only way through was to take deep heaving breaths together and start to climb.

Some people just find you in the right moments of your life and Nell was like that. When we said goodbye in December, I didn’t know when I’d be coming back, when I’d see her again. And, in January when my feet hit the ground once more in Seattle, I felt as though our parting in December was like the first roots of forest succession, that we’d made it through our own wildfires and had started to see the new growth on the other side. Maybe that’s why I started running. Maybe I just couldn’t bear the thought of letting another year go by where I spent so much time behind my computer, constrained and beholden to the confines of coursework, regular work, and deadlines. So I bought my first pair of road running shoes, set a goal for myself I knew I could achieve, and started running the three mile loop around Green Lake three times a week in the early mornings before class. For months I ran that loop the same three days each week: nothing more, nothing less. I remember the way the buds formed on the trees and then blossomed in spring. I remember finishing a run and watching a small child and their mother crouched so still alongside the edge of the lake as several baby ducklings crowded around. I remember running through the largest flock of birds I’d ever seen as they startled into flight, wings brushing across my bare skin in a cacophony of chaos.

Slowly, I started to lean into Seattle in a way that I’d always thought impossible. In something that had seemed so startlingly loud and bright, so harsh and mechanical, I had begun to find the wild corners. I started to see the changes of the seasons and at the same time, I started to run longer distances, harder routes. My Green Lake mornings fell away in favor of running through the UW Arboretum and out to Lake Washington in early summer so that I could jump in the water and cool off after a hot five miles. And when summer seemed to finally release her claws from the city, I found myself more often than not at Discovery Park. In the early mornings of fall I’d lace up my trail running shoes and take to the loop trail as the dense morning fog burned off to reveal the Olympic Mountains across Puget Sound, hazy through the wildfire smoke. Soon, I’d find myself deviating from the main trail onto some small narrow footpath weaving through the woods or across the large field that overlooks the Sound where my arms would stretch out of their own volition and I’d run my hands through the tall grasses, collecting morning dew on my fingertips.

One week this fall, a friend and I were walking back along the boardwalk trail at the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge when he told me that he thought I had a Type B personality. We had both been taking a field-based course this quarter focused on environmental stewardship and restoration in and around Puget Sound. Our Friday trip that week had us walking out across the mudflat, where I’d seen great blue herons and small sandpipers, a jellyfish caught in an outgoing tidal current. When I asked why, he said, “I don’t know, I think you just go wherever you’re compelled to go,” and I think that maybe what he meant was that I was a bird called home on some migratory journey, only every new nook was a new home, every new view some kind of nourishment. The more running I’d been doing in the past few months, the more I felt like his words rang true. Just a week or so prior, I’d woken up on a Tuesday at 6 a.m. and cobbled together my running gear before dipping out the door into the pitch black of pre-dawn to drive all the way up to Chinook Pass in Rainier National Park just to go for a run. I’d hated the wildfire smoke that had lingered over the cityscape; I’d wanted blue sky, to swim in the red tones of October berry bushes, to not hear a single car for at least an hour. The Naches Peak Loop trail took me across the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) and past small alpine ponds– I felt the morning sun push her way overtop the ridge line and light up my limbs gloriously. I saw the mountain appear like a mirage on a road and stopped to take it all in. How could one small body be witness to so much joy? Chest heaving and out of breath from the altitude, I remember tossing my arms out wide, head thrown back, laughing and spinning. Laughing and spinning. 

Day by day, week by week, I had begun to discover the places out here where my heart felt lighter and before I knew it I had run nearly 400 miles. I started thinking about a text Nell had sent me a few weeks back that read, “I am scared to love another place because I can’t bear to have another place I keep leaving,” which is when I realized that I had started to let myself take root here, that all the miles I had run had slowly worn down the distance I had put between myself and this coast. I flipped back in my journal to a page where I’d taped in a piece of brown construction paper that Nell and I had turned into a cribbage board when we’d taken a little purple canoe out for one night on High Island off of Tenants Harbor, Maine this past August. Wearing matching dresses I had sewn for us the previous summer, we had paddled out of the harbor in an attempt to revisit the places our friendship had begun. In the morning, we awoke in our tent before sunrise to the croaking groan of a great blue heron and pushed off the island to float our canoe through the channel. We watched as a mom and calf harbor porpoise pair surfaced several times, their soft breaths whooshing out gently, before moving onwards. We watched as a flock of shags found a resting place in the calm waters, we watched as everything turned purple. 

And I kept running. I found new routes, new challenges, new views. I stumbled my way through late August on Mount Desert Island in Maine eating blueberries alongside the trails I’d run, stopping to talk to summer tourists who asked me to share some of my favorite, off the beaten path spots. I’d give them Little Hunter’s Beach but not the unnamed cobblestone beach on the west side of the Island. I’d give them Seal Cove Pond as a good swim spot but not Duck Brook Oasis. Some places just deserve mystery. I had my stepdad ferry me from our little island cabin on Lake Sysladobsis across the Narrows to the mainland side and I ran the four and a half miles up the winding gravel road to the head of the lake where he met me. Together, we took the boat back down lake, past Dollar Island, past the blueberry ledge, past the rope swing spot. I just kept moving.

On a grey Friday morning in November, I ran my 400th mile of the year. I’d loaded my car onto the Edmonds-Kingston ferry and headed out towards the Elwha River. I’d been there before, out to the old washed out Hot Springs road and up to the dam overlook to see the free flowing river, but I’d never run the trail. The river rushed alongside me as if in perpetual conversation and I saw a lone elk rummaging through the underbrush of a stand of red cedars. Everything was the color blue: the glacial water, the frozen treetops, the damp air. I pushed on and up until I found myself alone and cold on the edge of the overlook platform staring down into the valley as the Elwha found her way through the gravel beds and the deciduous trees tossed their yellow leaves in the air like a late fall dance. I thought back to a line from a Paul Éluard poem: there is another world and it is in this one. I thought about the things I can never quantify; how the wind takes a bird into another world, how I’d composed a poem in my head from the backseat of a friend’s car the previous Friday before I fell asleep as he drove me home– midnight, something slow and French on the stereo. I thought about a book I’d been rereading this fall where, even when the author knows the waters she loves will enter into some new irreparable identity in the wake of an oil spill, how even then her love can not be stifled or diminished; how instead it seems to rush in like a winter storm king tide, until it covers everything she can touch, until it covers even the things that she can not reach. 

A month later, when I am back on the island of my childhood, I run through my 500th mile of the year alongside the Park Loop road in Acadia National Park. On this day the tops of the spruce trees bend treacherously in the 40 knot gusts of wind and there’s ocean foam splattered across the road, tossed up from some of the largest waves I have ever seen here. I am soaked in a mix of salty spray and fresh rainwater. I pick up an urchin shell tossed onto the road by the waves and tuck it into my pocket to bring back to Seattle as a memory of this day. I text Nell a photo and write: “the unhinged ocean of my dreams. Today is otherworldly. I am alive, I am alive, I am alive.” She writes back: “the churning, the power, I can’t believe it.” There’s a poem I am already writing in my mind, there’s people I love on this coast and the next, there’s another year of running waiting for me.