Running Thousands of Miles in Search of Yourself – The New York Times

SPIRIT RUN
A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land
By Noé Álvarez

In a 1979 address at Brown University, Ralph Ellison called cultural exchange an American inevitability, the logical outcome of the waves of movement and migration that formed the country. His parents, who had been born in South Carolina and Georgia, understood how the arbitrary borders of the Mason-Dixon line, the 49th parallel and the Mississippi River defined the limits on their freedom. By the early 1900s they had moved west, to Oklahoma, then a “relatively unformed frontier state.” Ellison said they understood the extent to which “geography has performed the role of fate.”

Some 140 miles southeast of Seattle sits Yakima, a fertile desert city of 94,000 known for its apples, wine and hops. First inhabited by the Yakama people, the town grew as waves of workers washed in over the centuries — white, Japanese and, eventually, Mexican, who began arriving in the 1940s with the advent of warehousing and corporatized farming. As the 20th century wore on, Central Americans arrived, too, urged along by economic collapse and political destabilization at home. The poet and short story writer Raymond Carver, son of a sawmill worker, grew up in Yakima and drew heavily on the town’s grittiness to enrich his stories of desolation. So did Noé Álvarez, whose lyrical if uneven debut book, “Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land” — part travelogue, part traditional memoir — comes face to face with the many strands of his inheritance, revisiting Carver territory while treading a new path.

In Yakima, “a paradise on the surface,” white families live on the town’s west side while a growing Latino population concentrates on the east. Álvarez’s mother was born in the Mexican state of Michoacán. At 15, she fled to the United States and has worked for decades in fruit production and distribution centers. It’s thankless and grueling work. ICE agents lurk, shift leaders menace. Álvarez tallies the physical toll on his mother’s body — her knee deformities, her eroding posture, the disfigurement wrought by tendinitis in the joints of her fingers.

His father, “a spirit born of hunger” descended from Indigenous Purépecha, was born in unmapped Mexican territory and hunted birds and iguanas for food when he was young. He made the trek north at 16, working for a time in the hop fields in Washington, before being deported and returning stateside with the help of a coyote.

The story of the striving, first-generation kid made good is a familiar one; Álvarez makes his ache. He excels in honors classes and is aware from a young age of a yearning to free his mother from “the assault of the fruit industry.” To do so, he knows he must outrun his geography — a metaphor he comes to embrace literally when in high school he becomes a serious runner. “When the rhythms of working-class life cut inside me like broken beer glass, I run,” he writes. He wins a full scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla, but is thwarted by his own high expectations and shame about his upbringing. The dining hall presents a challenge, as does going to class and staying on top of assignments. Only while running does he feel solid in his skin.

At a conference, he learns about Peace and Dignity Journeys, a six-month-long quadrennial run through the whole of North America, in which “numerous and diverse Indigenous nations reunite and reclaim dignity for their families and communities.” Pacquiao, the calm young man in charge of the journey, speaks of running as “connective tissue,” “a form of prayer” that “renews our responsibility to community.”

Álvarez drops out of college to join the group, never more than a couple dozen runners, in one of its early stops in British Columbia, and the intricately threaded narrative about his family morphs into a journal of his travels — on foot, and also, at times, in the vans the runners use to transport themselves and their supplies in their relay-style race across the continent. As they go, they learn the different ways “the rain strikes, strums and plucks at our skins.” They run through mountainsides, forests, small towns and large urban blocks. When they are dropped off for a shift, they receive few instructions. “When in doubt, turn left,” is a motto. Food is scarce.

Sometimes Álvarez’s language seems vague and overly laden with the weight of his mission. (“People’s paths are unique, beautiful,” he notes to himself upon meeting a new recruit to the team.) At other times, it’s not clear how this epic run, with its attendant difficulties, relates to Álvarez’s desire to help his family. At one point, alone on the trail in Oregon, he meets a snarling mountain lion. At the last minute, recalling instructions from an older runner about surviving such encounters, he remembers to “thank the animal.” Moreover, some of the marathon’s leaders behave in ways that border on sadistic. The majority of the runners are recovering addicts or otherwise seeking redemption, and, like many of them, Álvarez believes in the transformative power of extreme sacrifice. “I run to follow as closely as I can the path of those who came before me,” he insists. “I run to find fragments of my own parents sprinkled over the earth.” When the group enters his home state of Washington after a month of running, he realizes he is “submerging myself in pain … so that I may control the turmoil within me.”

The runners practice a hodgepodge of Indigenous rituals along the way. At the conclusion of each shift, they gather in a circle for sacred reflection and to try to resolve conflicts among them. Álvarez experiences moments of true connection with fellow runners such as Zyanya Lonewolf, whose parents are survivors of residential schools for Native Americans. But it is when the group approaches the United States-Mexico border in Nogales, Ariz., that the disparate elements of the memoir cohere. “I too desired to retrace my origin story to a specific spot on this earth,” Álvarez writes, “a specific soil from which my people’s spirit first sprouted its first words.”

As he runs through Mexico’s states, through towns held by the Zapatistas and sites holy to the Aztecs, it becomes obvious that what Álvarez is attempting to recover on the marathon is his pride. “My father has come a long way,” he realizes, dipping his fingers into the Pacific Ocean on the coast of Oaxaca. By the run’s end, he is eager to go home, to see his parents, to rest and restart his life. The run, it seems, has absolved him of his need to flee.