I simply ran the pain away...

In my pajamas, I ran from the hospital. Across the road the park sprawled with its winding paths. Blinded with a headache and vomiting at intervals, I ran through the park oblivious to the pain, breathing fresh air as I reached my stride. The year was 1974. I was sixteen years old and had been a runner all my life. This year had been spent in hospital under observation and having tests for a suspected brain tumour. It would take twenty more years for medical technology to diagnose the multiple lesions on my brain. My white cells had already started ravaging my own body and demyelinating the nervous system.

I simply ran the pain away. My years as a boy holidaying at my grandmother’s farm hotel in the hot, arid Karoo had taught me the thrill of running across the vast open veld, racing wild animals along dry river beds. With clay between my toes, I was a boy filled with all the spirit of the African bush. Behind the hotel, separated by the Fish River, lay the wide open farmlands where thousands of sheep grazed. Here too lived the farmer’s greatest fear, the lynx and the jackal. Post colonial South Africa in the sixties was abundant with people of colourful character; Traders and cattle farmers, travelling salesmen and migrating entrepreneurs. The evenings were a spectacle of excitement as the giant generator resembling a locomotive hissed and burst into life. The smell of biltong drying on the verandah, butter being churned by one of the native cooks, the hotel bar was a noisy place of strange smelling men at the end of each day.
                                  

 So it was no surprise to see a cheetah lazing in the sun behind the hotel kitchen! My Grandmother had accumulated a menagerie of every living creature that could be tamed. Dozens of cats lived beneath the railway platform right in front of the hotel. It was not uncommon to be bottle feeding tiny Caracals, often orphaned by a farmer’s snare. These Rooikat were regarded as vermin. Leopard were present, Vervet monkeys raided the hotel kitchen at night, baboons barked from the river behind. And then the best part was Spot the Cheetah raiding the chicken run…after all, these chickens would only be served in due course to guests in the main dining hall.

 Only a few years later and a thousand kilometers north, with the African sun on my face, my legs carried me swiftly along while ahead lay one hundred kilometers of dirt track. For many this may have meant a challenge, but my body knew only one thing and that was to run and never stop. I glided along the dusty landscape. They call the camel the ship of the desert for its endurance. Wild buck would run for hours on end in this same environment. I understood all of this. This was 1977 and Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” was blaring out in every army base across Southern Africa. Oh, did I mention that this was war and I had just crossed a firing line? My Air Defense Artillery unit was deployed all around, with regular incoming targets being fired upon. Constantly tucked away in my pocket was a tattered card with the words…”Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil”

Thirty years later and I am still running, walking and searching for mountains to climb. It is when you stop that momentum ceases, and since momentum equals energy, your soul is sure to die.

"When the root is deep, there is no reason to fear the wind."

Regards,

Sean