Echoes from Boston, across the country in Santa Cruz

By KIRBY SCUDDER

This past Monday I was working on a video project in my studio while watching CNN catching up on news. I heard the announcer mention the Boston Marathon. Having lived in Boston for 20 years and watched the marathon for 18 of those years at the finish line in Copley Square, I realized that I had forgotten, today’s the race. I had stopped following the race several years ago and excitedly thought that I would get a glimpse of top runners crossing the finish line. Instead of a runner breaking the tape, I saw what everybody has now seen, a cloud of smoke cascading across Boylston Street and the shock and panic of runners collapsing.

I immediately thought of friends and family that might have been there and, concerned, spent the next two hours calling. Cell phone access had been limited and like everyone else, I would have to wait.

I lived in Boston from 1980 until 2000 when I moved to California. It was in Boston that I went from being a casual runner for fitness to running marathons. Ironically, art school guided that transition. I knew four artists who ran semi-regularly and we ran along the Charles River as a group three times a week. In those days, it wasn’t very hip for artists to run or even participate in sports. Consequently, we kept running a secret. One day Shane, one of the five, mentioned that Bill Rodgers, a local guy, had just won the Boston Marathon. Enthusiastically, Shane encouraged us to sign up for

a marathon that Spring in Lowell, Mass.

We trained every day and at night we would hang out in a dive pub called The Blue somewhere in the Fort Point Channels area. On any given evening, it seemed like every artist in Boston would eventually stop by for a drink. When it got late and some got too intoxicated, it would be compared to the Cedar Bar in New York where Pollock punched de Kooning, calling him a wanna-be artist.

That June we ran the Lowell Marathon and unbelievably finished with respectable times. While our running was kept secret from other artists, we began to dream big. One of them suggested that we try and enter the Boston Marathon. We lived in Boston. We had just finished a marathon. Why not? As it turned out, it wasn’t that easy. We would have to qualify, and only certain marathons were qualifying races for Boston. At that time Boston was the biggest and most prestigious marathon in the world and only the world’s elite runners entered. Today there are about a half-dozen marathons that compete with Boston and Boston has opened up a field for runners and walkers that don’t qualify.

During those years, we would enter qualifying races, run and barely come close to our age category qualifying times. Every year we would go to the finish line of the Boston Marathon and cheer on runners like Bill Rodgers, Alberto Salazar, Greg Meyer, Geoff Smith, Ibrahim Hussein, Cosmas Ndeti and dream of the day we would be on the other side of the barricades. We were part of a huge running community and we were part of a growing artist community. By 1994 I gave up long distance running due to leg injuries and moved to competitive cycling, a low-impact sport. Unfortunately, none of us ever qualified for Boston.

I was able to speak on the phone with two of the five on Tuesday. Danny lives in Houston and upon hearing the news experienced a similar set of feelings as I did. An overwhelming sense of remorse about another public event used to harm and kill innocent people and yet the pride in witnessing a community we had all spent a lot of time in, rally together in a time of crisis. Steve, who still lives in Boston, still runs and hasn’t missed a Boston Marathon in 20 years, was on upper Boylston Street Monday, about a mile from the finish line when he heard the explosions. His first reaction was that it was firecrackers. Even the first signs of smoke didn’t tell the true story. When runners started running back up Boylston Street away from the finish, he knew something was wrong. His comment to me was “Even though there were people everywhere in a state of panic, I couldn’t believe how many runners ran toward the smoke to help out. They ran with shirts off sweating toward the medical tents, they ran to help the police, they ran to the aid of other runners. That’s the kind of community I live in.”

I thought about the art community that I have come to know in nine years in Santa Cruz and the broader community here and how they have recently dealt with crisis and I said, “That’s the kind of community I live in. I miss you Steve.”