It's a runner's world...

Living in a small town definitely has an interesting feel to it. So many people try to capture the quaint aspects of "small town life" in books, songs (think John Cougar Mellencamp), movies, and even plays. ConVal, where I went to high school a few towns over from my own small hometown, Antrim, delights in listing Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" on the required, or at least strongly recommended, reading list for its students. To not add this play to the curriculum is unpatriotic in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the locale of ConVal, because Wilder himself based the play upon this very same small town of 3,000 people. The rest of the world's population, however, as I have unfortunately discovered, has never even heard of it.

I myself am not a huge fan of the play, but it is, again, an example of how so many artists try to take small town life and narrow it down into stereotypes--for example, there is almost zero anonymity, and everyone is perfectly content to choose from the following activities: sitting on their front porch, attending Sunday services, or going down to the local bar every single night to see the same familiar faces over and over again.

This past summer I worked at the Admissions office at Middlebury, which itself is located in a small and rural town in Vermont. The majority of the people that visit Middlebury, while all not necessarily hailing from cities or urban areas, come from a significantly larger town. I would always tell my tours not to worry about being bored, since the campus is always very active and there are always things to do on weekends, and even, in most cases, during the week. After the tour, however, I would always get at least one question from a student who wanted me to tell them what the social life was REALLY like. "Do people go to Burlington ALL the time?" "How often?" "Do you get bored on campus?" they would ask with an air of "really, tell me the truth, now!" I would automatically, yet secretly, laugh a little at these oh-so-oblivious children--probably because I'm a student that comes from a town much smaller than Middlebury. When I came to Middlebury for the first time, I saw all the shops, the restaurants, the grocery stores (okay...all two of them...), etc., and identified Middlebury as a "big town." It's by no means a city, but still, there is no reason for people to call it small--it is much larger than Antrim, and any town with stoplights has to have SOMETHING going for it.

My point in juxtaposing these two towns is to highlight just how small Antrim is, and to really emphasize how desperate I have become for the past few weeks that I have been stranded here. Living in Antrim requires a car--or a really rugged individual on a bicycle. The former I don't have, and the latter I have made a great effort to become.

Most people have been curious as to what I've been up to during my time at home this past month. Have you been working? Spending time with family? ... I tell them that I haven't been up to much, really, because most businesses don't see hiring somebody for a few weeks as practical. I also don't have a car, and both of my parents work all day. So, I've been running a lot, reading a lot. That's nice, they respond, it must be relaxing.

I politely respond, yes, a little boring, but by the time September 29th comes, I will definitely be ready to cross the big blue pond and traipse around Europe.



These people clearly don't understand who Amanda Quinlan is, nor have heard any of the thinly disguised Misadventures of Miranda and Friends, who only a few individuals were privy to this past summer (disclaimer: let's hope that, for my own sake, this blog thoroughly disappoints those of you who have heard such misadventures. Miranda could use some time away from dog bites, bee stings, and journeys to Rutland [nothing good can come of that town...nothing] on low levels of fuel).

Clearly these individuals don't know that, when bored, Amanda Quinlan is left to her own devices--which, for the most part, are responsible for many entertaining stories, more often than not involving running. Because that's what she tends to do. Run. And tell (mildly) entertaining stories about such an addictive hobby.

So, yes, my time at home has been a little dull. My time while running, however, is an entirely different story.

The first week I came home, it wasn't unnatural, in continuing with our earlier stereotypes of small town life, to run by neighbors who called out "Amanda! When do you leave?", or people on the street asking me where I had been all summer. People drove by honking, waving, or even pulled over to ask me if I had gotten a haircut recently. By the end of that week, however, I had been getting antsy. It was time to go explore, do something new, try a different road.

Now the last time I felt an impulse to try a new route with an entirely different road involved, I was attacked by a black lab (well, two, I suppose). I'm not sure if that is much worse than what happened this particular time.

I had decided to hike up a small hill in my town, where there used to be an old hotel/resort called Greystone Lodge before 1970, when it burned to the ground after a few local kids held a seance there (for some reason Antrim kids must have been bored at the time). I hiked back down, and had decided to just run back from the base of the hill and keep the run nice and short, as I was recovering from yet another bee sting that had made my foot swell like a balloon. But, when I came to the intersection at the base of the hill, I was tempted to try a new road. My friend Brian had told me that this road looped around Gregg Lake, the lake less than two miles away from my house, and I was tempted to see if I could find the route for myself. I continued down the road, which eventually turned into a bunch of logging trails/routes for four-wheelers. Now, these trails usually go along for less than a mile and then split off in a gradual Y, continue on for another distance less than a mile, and then split off again. I decided to stick to the right, because my infallible (cough) sense of direction told me that Gregg would be in that direction.

Eventually it came to the point where, if I turned around, I would be running for two hours. So I decided to keep going, knowing that wherever I came out, I would be able to find a road somewhere and make it home. Eventually, I found a body of water. I was thrilled! Eureka! I had found it! Shortly thereafter, I had the choice of continuing to follow the trails, or following some trees that were marked with tape (presumably another sort of trail, right? Wrong). I went with the trees marked in pink tape. I quickly discovered that it wasn't a trail at all. It just marked trees in a consecutive fashion, but requried much bushwacking. It did, however, get me to Willard Pond, another body of water in Antrim. Now, last summer Brian and I had actually found a trail that went from Gregg Lake to Willard Pond--so all semed well. Dorothy would be back in Kansas soon!

Unfortunately (I'm sure by now you were expecting that very word), I have a tendency to blindly follow people on runs and not pay attention to where we are going, especially when wooded areas are involved (and they are, quite often in my case, very much involved). I'm a very trusting person in that way, but also very unintelligent. I couldn't find the trail that Brian and I (okay...just Brian) had found last July. I did, however, find another trail system that I happened to know started at the beach/canoe launch at Willard Pond. Since I knew how to get home from Willard, I decided to follow that trail back, and just run along the highway until I either 1.) saw someone I knew driving along the road, or 2.) found a payphone so I could call my Knight in Shining Armor (aka Mama Q) to come and rescue me from my trials.

Now, I had only been to the beach of Willard Pond once before. It's technically in Antrim, but the way one drives to it, one has to go through Hancock, another small town (I'm sensing a theme here). Mostly Hancock residents go there, and, since Gregg Lake is literally 1-2 miles up the road, there is no reason for me to go anywhere else. I'm loyal, what can I say. My point is that my estimation was that Willard Pond was two, maybe three miles at most from the center of Hancock, where I KNEW there had to be a payphone (again, we know from previous experience that Amanda is never wrong--NEVER).


But Willard Pond is five to six miles away from Hancock.

And I had already been running for two and a half hours.

Needless to say, my legs were pretty tired. And covered in mud (at one point in the woods I got a little stuck).


Say it with me people:

SAD.

All was well--I saw the bright lights of Hancock, and felt indescribable gratitude. Or maybe I just felt the indescribable gratitude. There aren't any lights in that town. And if there were, it wasn't dark yet. Maybe it just seemed like it was all aglow with salvation.

Okay, so let me take one little opportunity to go off on another little tangent--post offices. Is it old-fashioned of me to think that there would be a phone for public use in a small-town post-office? Mama Q says yes, it is indeed old-fashioned. Maybe I'm just bitter, because the first thing I came to in Hancock was the post-office. My legs couldn't handle going 75 meters down the road to the inn or the country store or the...no, that's all there is in Hancock. But it's a post-office--they get you passports, they hook you up to communicate with people via POSTAL services, so why can't they get a LITTLE technologically advanced and incorporate a telephone into that?

The nerve.

So after going to the post office, asking if there was a phone to use, being told no, and then asking where a payphone would be, I went down to the Hancock Market and again felt indescribable gratitude as I saw the booth for the phone from a distance. For purposes of this ridiculous story, we will say that it, too, radiated a heavenly glow. But my world, as the Rolling Stones would say, was shattered when I found that there was, indeed, a box for the payphone, but no PHONE inside. It was like a nightmare in Pleasantville.

But all's well that ends well. Hancock Market let me use their phone (only local calls, mind you)
and the Knight in Shining Armor came to rescue me in a black, 2005 Ford Taurus with leather upholstery (which, as I will tell in another blog post, some other day, I had a little accident with this past weekend...) from running another seven miles home.

My plan to go on a short run that day? Well, it never really happened. Foiled again.


Peace, love, hardware stores (pronounced hahd-weah stoahs) and muddy running shoes,
Amanda