Running Lights

The Connecticut road the next morning.

As I sprint down the gravel driveway at my mother’s house, the lights begin to dim and I begin to wonder if a 10 p.m. three-mile run in semi-rural Connecticut was a good idea.

I’ve made this run so many times since I was 11 years old that I push on. I’m fueled partly by the intense memory of this road, partly by the two glasses of red wine at dinner and partly by the fact that I’ve been sitting on my backside for more than 13 hours in a drive in my wife’s mini-van to get to Old Lyme, Conn.

I’m on the way to Maine this week to shoot a DVD (this one on using a workbench, natch) and to do a seminar on Saturday on workbench design at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. But for the next couple days I’m at my mother’s house, which also was my grandparent’s house. It’s where I learned to use a table saw and a band saw. It’s where I spent summers in my grandfather’s workshop, which is now empty except for a few boxes.

After a half mile, I look up and can barely separate the sky from the canopy of trees. Streetlights are few. Lights from the homes are infrequent, and I can see the median of the road as a slightly brighter line stretching ahead. I follow that line.

Almost 20 years ago, my grandfather walked this same road, just as he did every morning on his way to pick up the newspaper at the Laysville convenience store. But on that morning in the late 1980s, my grandfather had a stroke in this driveway, incapacitating him for the last years of his life. It took away his ability to walk, work in the shop and say more than three things: “Yes!” (which meant “no”), “No!” (which usually meant “yes”) and “love you” (which I hope wasn’t an antonym).

And now it’s dark on the driveway, like I’m in a sensory deprivation tank. The dim line marking the median is gone. I press on, and I look for the median using my feet instead of my eyes. I chuckle for a moment because this is all a bit like work in the shop. You need to use senses other than your sight. Your sense of touch, in particular, lets you know how a handplane is working, if a chisel is sharp, if the surface of your wood is free of plane tracks or planer snipe. Your hearing lets you know if your band saw is aligned, if your table saw is in trouble. (Yes, everything can be a blog entry about woodworking.)

I’m feeling my way across Sill Lane with my feet when I find the yellow center line. I can’t see a dang thing, but I know I’m running full-tilt down the center of the road and headed in the right direction. I laugh out loud and run the next two miles without seeing anything, navigating entirely by my feet.

Then I feel a brush of some brush on my legs and then my left shoulder slams into a tree trunk. I’ve lost my line. So much for navigating using your other senses. Next time I’ll run when there’s daylight.

– Christopher Schwarz