The Endurance Nation Forum has featured a thread recently on how to execute the Boston Marathon, which is upcoming in ten days. I went back to my race report from 2006, and discovered that I had written a pretty good story, with angles quite beyond a simple race day diary. In honor of Patriot’s Day, I’m going to serialize the story over the next week.
CABBIE
“Can I sit in the front?” I asked the cabbie after I took one look at the rear seat of his big yellow taxi. With the partition covering the air space above the front seat back, and the rigid wall extending from there to the floor, it had all the room and appearance of the back seat of a police cruiser – about 8 inches from rear seat to front. Not where I wanted my knees 36 hours before the start of my second, and hopefully last Boston Marathon.
“Sure”, he said, with a slight downward head bob. He looked about forty, dark, stocky, with a sparse wiry beard. From his vaguely French/West African accent, he certainly wasn’t a Somali, and absolutely not South Asian.
“Where are you from?” I ventured, after we’d had an opening round of weather exchanges – Boston in the mid seventies today, me coming from the Rockies and a snowstorm that morning.
“Haiti”, he answered simply. Instantly, all the horrors flashed through my mind – AIDS entry into the Western Hemisphere, deforestation, Duvalier, Papa and Baby Docs, Aristide, the poorest country anywhere near us. A litany of ecological, economic, political and social devastation. A pariah land (not to mention the apocryphal home of voodoo.) Where do I begin a conversation with him?
Turns out I didn’t have to. He started it all by himself, blasting full-blown into a highly scripted and lyrical story of how he is borrowing his friend’s cab, to make more money for his improvement project back home. He returns frequently to set up and oversee health clinics and a reforestation project. With 70% of his countrymen unemployed, the international monetary community refusing to provide assistance (and demanding loan repayments for money not even provided, he claimed), and an ineffective though mostly honest democratically elected government, the only real chance his people have, he feels, is overseas remittances from people like him. And he wants to make sure his money goes to improvement, not just subsistence.
While he’s careening around the 350 year-old streets of downtown Boston, with me trying to assimilate all of the human-built environment after a week in the American Alps surrounding Snowmass, I’m having a hard time keeping up with his lilting narrative. If what he says is even half true, he’s a fireplug of hope for a devastated country. I was glad to give him a 20% tip when we unloaded in the Theater District at the Courtyard Marriott.
Upstairs on the 12th floor, I enter my room. I might as well have been in a Japanese coffin hotel. The king bed easily took up 3/4s of the floor space. The narrow armoire jammed into a corner had doors which barely made it past the edges of the work table and bed between which it was wedged. I’m sure the re-designers had said, “Thank God for LCD TVs!” A standard CRT-based screen would not have fit between the wall and the foot of the bed. In the bathroom, if I’d been a six footer, my knees would have hit the wall while I sat on the (small rimmed) toilet, There was room for only a shower stall, which took up the entire width of this budget sized space. Space for a $200/night budget (parking, for those with cars, was an additional $15, and breakfast, for those with stomachs, was an extra $12-15.) Not the place I wanted to spend much time. Luckily, Boston is the “walkable city”, so outside I went, north 2 blocks to the Common, and the corner of Boylston and Tremont.
The corner was bustling with crowds leftover from the Red Sox game (the Mariners, in town for the Patriots’ Day weekend series, pulled out a 3-0 victory behind the stellar pitching of Joel Pinero and JJ Putz), theater-goers on their way in, and those who’d just been enjoying the first 70+F Saturday this year in the blooming park. Just as I got to the subway exit, my cell phone rang.