In This Issue - Michigan Runner

Running with Tom Henderson
By Tom Henderson
Old age has its rewards. Fatter and
slower, sure; hard to see the reward
there. But also more likely to stop
and stretch during a run, to walk up a steep
hill, to stop and look at a
pretty view, even to take off
the shoes and shirt and hop
into a creek or lake, if one
comes along.
Running with my Lab,
Maddie, has taught me several
equivalents of stopping to
smell the roses. It's not roses
she stops to smell; it's other
fragrant things left behind by
other mammals, or occasional
dead things in the woods. But
the joy isn't just in the run
anymore; it's also in what
you find along the way.
And there's more to find
during summer, which seemed
to pass faster this year than
normal -- though maybe
that's always the case when
you turn 59, as I did.
We got Maddie three
summers ago, thanks to a
Web site for abandoned and
shelter dogs, petfinder.com.
Actually, we found her brother,
who looked nothing at all
like a Labrador retriever. He was listed as
part Australian, had one blue eye and longish
fur, and we thought we'd found the dog we'd
been looking for for months, still a puppy at
10 weeks old, a big, mixed breed with a reputation
for intelligence.
So we drove from Detroit to the Jackson
area farm of a woman who takes in abandoned
dogs, nurses them to health, gets rid of
their fleas and ticks and gives them away.
The dog was named Blue, for his eye. But
when we got to the farmhouse, Blue walked
out into the yard, sat and stared at the
ground. His sister, who hadn't been named,
yet, came flying out, raced around the yard,
chased a scrap of paper, spotted Kathleen sitting
under a tree, bounded over, gave her a
big kiss, then took off again after the paper.
“I think we found our dog,” I said.
Rather, she'd found us.
Turned out the dogs were part Lab, part
Aussie and Maddie got all the Lab genes,
except for one paw that was half white.
The next weekend, we went up to our
old schoolhouse in the woods not far from
Traverse City. The DNR had cut down a big
field of jack pines near it and a thicket of
raspberries had sprung up there. Most of the
berries were pink and hard, but a few were
dark red and ready to eat.
38 S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7
Photo courtesy of Tom Henderson
To our surprise, the puppy knew instinctively
what to do. Gingerly, avoiding the
barbs, she nosed her way into the raspberries,
gently pulling the ripe ones off one by one
and eating them.
Maddie quickly became my running partner,
working her way up from a few minutes
Maddie,Tom Henderson’s frequent running partner
at a time to a mile, then two, then three as I
made sure not to overtax her young bones.
Soft surfaces only, trails through the forest.
And I'd look for berry patches on our runs,
giving us excuses to stop and stretch, take a
pee, chase a squirrel and scarf down fruit, all
the better if they were hot from the sun.
In June, it's mulberries we look for. Some
look like bushes, many are big trees,
branches hanging down, laden with purple,
dimpled berries. They last for weeks and
are incredibly abundant. The first mile or two
of a run, the dog's not interested, yet, in eating.
But get to the eighth or ninth mile, we'll
both be inhaling 'em. She can't pick her own
mulberries, so she waits for me to pick them
and hand them down by the palmful.
Also in June, red-wing blackbirds look
for me. June must be their nesting season
because these normally-friendly birds become
hostile and aggressive.
They attack less when I've got the dog. If
I don't have Maddie, for two weeks it's like
something out of Alfred Hitchcock's horror
film “The Birds.”
The scary thing is, a lot of times they
attack before they start screeching. I don't
know how many heart attacks I've had running
on the grass along Lake St. Clair in the
Grosse Pointes when I'm rudely reminded
that red-wing blackbird season has arrived by
one of them landing on my scalp, digging in
its talons and screeching. I should paint owl
eyes on my bald spot; that'd teach them.
They fly off, circling, diving and screeching
all the while, waiting for another chance
for a landing in my hair as I
wave my arms and yell back.
Early July, it's a berry
that looks like a raspberry
when it's not ripe, and like a
blackberry when it is. I don't
know its name and it lacks
the flavor of a mulberry or a
raspberry, but it hits the spot,
nonetheless, on hot mid-day
runs.
Later in July, raspberries.
August, blackberries.
My grandson's dog,
Jade, runs with us sometimes
too. She never used to eat
berries, but over the last couple
summers has watched
Maddie and me go at it. This
year, for the first time, Jade
started wading into the berry
bushes too, plucking her own
ripe berries and gobbling
them down.
The other thing Maddie
does, being a Lab, is joyfully
bound into any body of
water we come across. Which has taught me
to joyfully bound into some of them too. We
run a lot on the eastern end of Belle Isle,
where a bike path circles a large grassy pasture.
If you go around the lighthouse at the
far end of the island, where the Detroit River
opens up onto Lake St. Clair, a trail continues
on the far side of a lagoon and along a
creek.
There's a small patch of sand at the
creek's edge, the water flowing clear and
clean. She races in, I take off my shoes and
tip-toe in. She hunts harmless snakes that live
along the shore, or muskrats that fish in the
water, or swims next to me to make sure I'm
not about to drown in mid-creek. Then we
resume our run.
My job at Crain's Detroit Business takes
me to Ann Arbor frequently, to talk to hightech
entrepreneurs or venture capitalists, and
I usually try to bundle two or three interviews
on the same day. If the schedule has a
sizable break between meetings, the dog goes
with me and we run in Gallup Park or, more
often lately, in Barton Nature Reserve along
the Huron River, which links to Bird Hills
Park, a big, steeply-rolling woods.
We'll get done, I'll towel off, change back
into my work duds and show up for my
appointment. I felt the need recently to