Kudzu Running: Pastoral Pleasures, Wilderness Terrors, and Wrist-Mounted Technologies in Small-Town Mississippi
Click here to download pdf version.

by Adam Gussow
Assistant Professor of English and Southern Studies
University of Mississippi
6 County Road 1069     
Oxford, MS 38655
U.S.A.
agussow [@] olemiss [dot] edu

Keywords 
pastoral, wilderness, running, Mississippi, Bruce Wilshire, Michel Foucault, global positioning satellites, technological obsession

Abstract
What sorts of pleasure do runners take from nature when they train in urban parks and small-town woodlands? How are those pleasures mediated by one runner’s desire to discipline his aging body — i.e., whip himself back into shape — and by new technologies for measuring distance and pace that promise metrical perfection in pursuit of faster race times? In this essay I explore my own mid-life romance with exemplars of two radically divergent technologies: the Fitsense FS-1, a foot-pod-based accelerometer, and the Garmin Forerunner 201, a GPS unit. One technology, grounded in the moment of foot-to-ground contact, looks to Earth; the other looks 12,000 miles into space, towards the orbiting array of NAVSTAR satellites. Both technologies inflict a range of unforeseen distractions — a result of operational successes and design flaws alike — that subtly corrode the pleasures of the run, including the hunger for deep and unmediated wilderness encounter articulated by Bruce Wilshire in Wild Hunger: The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction. Yet when my own “wild hunger” leads me unexpectedly into just such an encounter one summer afternoon in the North Mississippi woods, I’m forced to reassess both the implicit romanticism of my own understandings of nature and the real utility of the competing metric technologies I’ve grown addicted to.

Prelude:  Inwood Pastorale 
In August 2002, after 22 years in Manhattan and a lifetime in the Northeast, I moved to Oxford, Mississippi to take a teaching post at the University of Mississippi. I had been a serious, if not especially talented, distance runner when I first came to New York in my early 20s, but I’d given up racing in 1984 after suddenly losing my taste for self-inflicted pain in the aftermath of a failed five-year relationship. For my remaining 18 years as a New Yorker, I simply jogged. I rarely wore a watch, kept no record of my modest mileage. I wasn’t “training.” My running practice, such as it was, could hardly have been less disciplined. I couldn’t have told you the brand of shoe I wore. Yet the ritual I evolved — a daily encounter with wild nature in its urban incarnation, unmediated by technology — was extremely important to me.

Four or five afternoons a week I headed out the door of my apartment in the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan and floated down Indian Road into Inwood Hill Park — gliding out past the soccer field, cruising slowly up into the hills on a crumbling macadam road. I usually paused as I passed what I thought of as “my” little grove of sassafras saplings, near the top of the first long incline, to chew on a glove-shaped leaf and savor the root-beer flavor. As wineberry season in July followed June’s bumper crop of mulberries, I’d pluck and taste those too, enjoying the curiously dissipated white sweetness of the earlier fruit, the translucent red tartness of the later. Sometimes I’d accidentally flush a pheasant and pause, heart thudding, as a squawking brown bird exploded off into the brush. After meandering on one of half a dozen paths threading through old-growth oaks and maples, I’d flow downward through the western half of the park, skip up and over the rusting rails of the Hudson River Line on a gravel-strewn overpass, and jog along the river itself, losing myself in the brackish green scent. Another minute or two and I’d glide back out onto Dyckman Street at the Tubby Hook boatyards, crunching on broken glass as young Dominican men lazed against their tricked-out sport compacts and chatted on cellphones above the thumping blare of salsa. The homeward leg of my run was concrete sidewalks on upper Broadway. Half an hour after I’d left my apartment, I’d be back in the elevator.

There was something profoundly restorative about this ritual. If you’d asked me at the time why this was so, I’d have said something about the relief I felt at being off the grid, away from degraded clanking industrial civilization (the subway), away from the mediated images proffered by the information age (television) and the frantic, violent world in which they sought to catch me up. I’d certainly have said something about the renewal I felt in the presence of Nature, spelled with the romantic’s capital N. As a boy growing up in suburban Rockland County, 15 miles north of Inwood, I’d spent countless hours chasing Monarchs and Fritillaries through the tangled weeds surrounding Swarthout Lake, butterfly net in hand, losing myself in sun, sweat, ecstatic play. Dissolving into what sustained me. My Inwood jogs, I’d have said with a nod at Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, were a way of ritually reconnecting with a freedom from bodily regulation that lived for me as pastoral pleasure:  a remembered sense of safety, wholeness, and ecstatic relationality with a green world. 

These days, after reading Bruce Wilshire’s Wild Hunger:  The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction [1], I’d theorize the matter slightly differently. I’d note, for example, that

[t]he roots of the word wilderness convey its attractive/frightening ambivalence, its uncanny power to excite frightened desire. At first glance they simply mean “wild place.” But wild and self-willed or willful are connected. In this reconstruction, the roots of wilderness are wil, plus der (of the) and the Middle English ness which means place. Most revealingly, “wil-der-ness” connotes “the will of the place.” Wilderness has its own periods and ways. Cultures since the advent of agriculture nine thousand years ago have striven to conquer the will-of-the-place. Yet we have continued, apparently, to long for the excitement of will-of-the-place that catches us up as a vital part of itself.

Wilshire’s etymology helps me understand that a hunger for pastoral pleasures, as an antidote to “civilization” and its ever-more-subtle regulative regimes, wasn’t all that drove my ritual jaunts into Inwood Hill Park. I also hungered for a deeper encounter with true wilderness, will-of-the-place — hungered not just for safety, not just for the regenerative comforts of nature’s seasonal procession, but also, when it came, for the sudden SQUAWK! of a pheasant exploding out of the underbrush, thudding into my heart, destroying all thought for a second or two except the most terrifying thought of all: I am its prey.

This explosion would resolve itself almost immediately: a large panicked bird. My prey, I’d realize. That’s what it thinks it is. And I’d laugh. That’s the laugh of pastoral pleasure supplanting wilderness terror — a moment of ecstatic panic resolving itself into sun-dappled woods and the fading clucks of needless avian dismay.

Disciplining the Runner’s Body
Fast forward to Oxford, Mississippi.  After far too many years as a blues musician and graduate student in New York, I have relocated to a small, fragrant town that sits on gently rolling hills 75 miles southeast of Memphis. I have a tenure-track job and a wife-to-be. I am happy. Not only have I begun to jog again, but I’ve begun to train seriously, and race. I’ve dug my old runner’s journal out of an attic box, drawn a line across the page below the final race report from May 1984, and picked up where I left off 18 years ago.

Much has changed since my last immersion in the world of competitive distance running. My 10K time, I discover in my first race, has ballooned from 36 minutes to 47 minutes.  Although a 45-year-old obviously can’t hope to run as fast as the 26-year-old he once was, I’m mortified by this development — and spurred, with surprising passion, to reengineer the physical plant and recoup what has been lost. “[T]he body,” writes Foucault, “becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body” [2]. I am determined to transform my flesh and bones into an instrument for the production of faster times. This use-need requires that I subject the body in question to the disciplines of time and distance.  Pastoral pleasures are well and good; the woodland romantic who extracted them from Inwood Hill Park knows how to savor them in their Kudzu-scented Mississippi reincarnation. Four days a week I’m content with gentle half-hour jaunts in Patsy Lamar Park, a former nine-hole golf course that has been sculpted into a jogger’s paradise. The joys of fresh-cut grass! But now, perhaps because my daily life in Oxford savors far more of pastoral than did my life in New York, I am galvanized by the prospect of bringing modernity and its cutting-edge technologies to bear on my reanimated desire to excel as a distance runner.  Three days a week I intend to run longer, harder, with real focus, and I want to keep close track of all that.

Two remarkable new devices present themselves in the service of my cause. I learn about these at a website called Coolrunning.com, where I sign on as “KudzuRunner” and begin contributing to a board called “Boomers and Beyond.” The first, purchased six months into my renaissance, is a Fitsense FS-1:  a wrist-mounted, foot-pod-based accelerometer with which I am able to monitor not just elapsed time, but accrued distance and current and average pace-per-mile. Set the distance alert at 1.00 miles and it emits a beep at each successive mile point, recording the time and enabling detailed post-run analyses. In the early 1980s I trained with nothing more than a Casio chronograph on my wrist, estimating distance by estimating pace and then multiplying, or occasionally driving a particular route and trusting in the accuracy of the car odometer. I have now entered the modern age.  I fall in love with my Fitsense, but I also soon discover that it, like the aging body it regulates, has quirks.

For maximum accuracy it must be calibrated against a precisely measured mile. I use my 10-speed bike’s odometer to measure a mile in Lake Patsy Park, spray-painting Start and Finish marks on the macadam when nobody is looking. Then I zero the Fitsense, run the mile, and adjust the “CalVal” setting upward in line with the three-hundredths of a mile overrun I’ve just registered.  I jog back to the start and run the same mile in the same way: same speed, same number of footstrikes per minute, repeating the process until the Fitsense registers exactly 1.00. Once zeroed in, the device continues to make demands. I must precisely regulate my stride rate when I’m using the thing — 170 footstrikes per minute is my baseline — or it will register too little or too much mileage, a misleadingly slow or misleadingly fast current and average pace.  Too, the foot-pod sending unit is invariably fooled by the shorter, harder slap with which I attack uphill grades into thinking that I’m pounding along faster than I am, and fooled by my rearward weight-shift on downhill grades into telling me that I’m slowing down. Put on a different pair of shoes — or even a new pair of exactly the same type — and the CalVal needs to be tweaked.

All of this required calibration and momentary (and accrued) minor inaccuracy lends a certain instability to the ceaseless entrancing flow of information the Fitsense directs at me. In one respect, I’m profoundly disciplined by the device  — it requires that I vigilantly monitor my cadence, whether I’m jogging on gravel or racing on macadam — but since my cadence inevitably varies under real-world conditions, I’m also a little skeptical of the truth-value of that information. Discipline and skepticism combine to produce perpetual distraction. When I’m engaging most deeply with the device, processing its information-feed and mentally adjudicating its metric quirks, I’ve utterly lost touch with wild nature: with the subtly shifting currents of lukewarm air that filter out of the woods on lambent fall afternoons, with the chirr of late-summer crickets and the rich vegetal tang of kudzu, with the deer that suddenly darts across my path on an abandoned railroad right-of-way and crashes into the underbrush as I lift my head, dazed, to see the flash of white tail. Attention is a zero-sum game: focus it in one direction and it ceases to flow in another. So too, I slowly realize, have I lost touch with an entirely different information-stream: the subtle play of energetic currents inside my own running body, a gentle and progressive opening-up of the aerobic system as I gradually accelerate from the stumbling slow jog of the first quarter-mile of a longer run through a series of ever-increasing but stabilized paces leading towards my maximum steady-state, a sweet notch just below my lactate threshold. With practice and focus, ignoring all externals, I can surge five or ten seconds a mile at that already-brisk pace, feel the drip of accumulating lactic acid tightening my solar plexus, then slow slightly, relax, take a deep breath, and feel a bubble of energy float up and into place, a seemingly bottomless reserve dedicated to slingshotting me down the road. Catch the wave and ride. I used to do this 20 years ago, during my youthful marathoning days. Now I’ve forgotten how to listen to my body in that way — seduced away by the multiple distractions and addictive promise of precision-engineered rebirth offered by the Fitsense.

Tabling the question of attentional deficits, I willingly subject myself to the Fitsense for a year and a half. I lower my 10K time from 47 to 41, my 5K time from 22 to 20. Still, after the device performs badly in several races — registering too much mileage on certified courses, delivering gibberish rather than plausible paces in several large races where thousands of pod-based devices on other runners’ feet are apparently crossing signals with my own — I get fed up. So I purchase a piece of hardware that my compatriots on Coolrunning have been swearing by: a Garmin Forerunner 201 wrist-mounted GPS unit.

Garmin vs. Fitsense has echoes of Ali vs. Frazier: two utterly divergent approaches to getting the job done. The Fitsense grounds itself in the moment of foot-to-earth contact; the Garmin looks away 12,000 miles into space. The Fitsense demands, for maximal accuracy, that I maintain machine-like consistency of stride-rate; the Garmin frees me to ignore stride rate, but falters whenever I veer from open-skied roads and paths into the woods, where tree cover interrupts the ultra-low-wattage signal from however many of the twenty-one orbiting NAVSTAR satellites the device has managed to lock onto. When I run my measured loop in Lamar Park, for example, the Garmin beeps and flashes “Low GPS signal” if I dare to drift onto the grass under several groves of shade trees. The “current pace” reading balloons towards absurdity; the “lap distance” falters as the device scrambles to trilaterate a dozen scrambled signals from on high. Rather than deliver me into the utopia of bankable metrics that the Coolrunning Boomers have promised, the Garmin has saddled my running practice with a whole new dimension of distracting uncertainty.

The sort of techno-obsession into which my quest for accuracy has dragged me — an unintended consequence of my desire to discipline my aging flesh and reclaim my youth — can have only one solution, at once utterly absurd and, to obsessives like me, perfectly logical: I decide to wear both devices on every longer run. There’s barely enough room on my right forearm for six ounces of strapped hardware, of course, and my stride is slightly thrown off by the upper-body imbalance, but now, with the ability to adjudicate between two parallel-processed data streams, I’m approaching something like real accuracy. The two devices almost never beep at precisely the same moment during a run  — the one-mile point noted by the Fitsense may come 10 seconds before or after the same point noted by the Garmin, no matter how carefully I calibrate the former — but I discover that it’s possible to focus in a Zen-like way on the emptiness between the two beeps. When I return home after runs with my cornucopia of data, I’m able to average the two talleys and log my total mileage with greater confidence, if not a fool’s perfect confidence.
           
Thoroughly distracted by this quest for metric optimization, needless to say, I’ve lost touch with most of the pastoral pleasures that first drew me towards the fragrant loop of Lamar Park and summoned dreams of a comeback. As for wild nature, will-of-the-place: I’ve forgotten all about it, and couldn’t care less. Until I make a fool’s mistake.

Lost in the Woods
It’s Pablo Sierra who gives me the idea at a runners’ clinic in Oxford in early May 2005. Sierra, a slight dark-eyed Spanish national and 2:12 marathoner, is the greatest distance runner ever to have attended Ole Miss. He tells three of us, older wannabes who have come to bask in his presence at a fitness club, that he used to run the same routes we run — used to work the long incline up Thacker Mountain, used to cruise those red-clay fire trails that flank the abandoned railroad right-of-way. “I used to run back in there,” he says. “That’s how I got so strong.”

A few days later I decide to explore. I’ve jogged the right-of-way many times — a four-mile stretch that veers down through the shadowy, vine-strewn woods about a mile in from the road before resurfacing — and once I ventured half way up the mountain before turning around. I’ve never gone all the way to the top, though, and I’ve never explored the fire trails. I drive my car to a trail head not far from the foot of the mountain, park in a place I’ve never parked, and jog in. It’s late in the afternoon, almost 6. Still quite a bit of sun.

Since the Garmin is useless under tree cover, I’ve chosen to wear only my Fitsense. I’m planning on a half hour jaunt.

The run begins on what a coffee-taster might call bright notes. I lean into the grooved red clay as I slowly ascend the logging road that leads to Thacker’s summit — breathing deeply and well, forgetting about pace and time, letting the academic year, recently concluded, leach out of my system. Summer is the season of pastoral, and mid-May is summer’s beginning in North Mississippi. Kudzu vines are already eagerly snaking towards my feet; I inhale the fragrant, sagey lushness.

I reach the top, jog in place as I gaze up at the fenced-in fire tower, then circle back and head downhill, darting sideways onto a ten-foot-wide fire trail, taking note of the sun’s position. I’ve always had an uncanny sense of direction. With lots of sunlight left, I have faith in my ability to find my way back to the logging road after a brief frolic in the hinterlands. So I let myself go, lazily circumambulating on washed-out red clay roads that nest like a
sunny, mazy series of gashes cutting through the brushy longleaf pine. My Fitsense tells me I’m averaging 9:18 pace, but pace is irrelevant today.  Today, as Bruce Wilshire might say, is about dwelling with the great and glorious world-whole as refracted in this small postage stamp of native soil, a hidden quadrant of my new Mississippi home that I’ve somehow left out of my calculations until now.

I dart hither and thither — 15 minutes stretches to 20 or 25 — and then the halfhearted attempts I’ve made at finding my way back to that first fire trail become a more focused attempt to feel my way downhill through various overgrown paths and onto the railroad right-of-way that has to be somewhere down below me. The sun is beginning to decline in the sky. Every overgrown path turns out to be a false lead.  I’m not lost, but I’m not doing as skillful a job of navigating as I expected to. According to the Fitsense, I’ve been on my feet for almost 45 minutes.

I keep moving. I break away from the maze of fire trails, charge through the brush, and find myself in semi-open country — an abandoned estate of some sort? — in which several large ponds sit complacently, rimmed with birch. The air is full of familiar summer sounds: frogs ribbiting, insects thrumming in old trees. The ground appears to be an old lawn transformed through decades of neglect into a tangled mass of Kudzu runners and other vine-like plant matter. I yell Hello! several times. My own echo answers faintly. I jog with lifted knees across hundreds of yards of the Kudzu-waste — hoping, with the first faint flicker of panic, that no rattlers or cottonmouths are lurking, since I am apparently out of earshot of medical assistance.

None of the mental maps that I’ve constructed prove to be accurate. None of my postulates about what should be down the next path or behind the next stand of trees prove to be correct. I manage to find my way back onto a fire trail that looks just like the one that got me into this mess and, noticing some bright blue blazes obviously applied by the Ole Miss cross country team to denote an “official” training route, veer sideways out of the sunlight into the dappled vine-laced nether-world of the woods themselves. For the next 15 minutes I jog somewhat more quickly through the semi-jungle, up rocky hillock and down muddy dale. I have no idea where I am, but I trust my fellow runners. I follow the blue blazes as the light from above, filtering through the heavy canopy, slowly begins to fade. My Fitsense reads 5.47 miles.  The absurd precision of that number seems to mock me.  I’m suddenly very thirsty. 

By this point the word “lost” is making its presence felt. I am lost in the woods. Without my glasses — which I never wear when I run — I am looking at no more than another half hour of useable light. After that it’s camping without a tent or wandering all night. The chances of me stumbling over a rock or a fanged snake are growing exponentially. I’ve been shouting “Hello!” for the past 10 minutes as I keep moving, hoping to scare up a response from another runner, a mountain-biker, anybody. At some point  — perhaps when I discover that the blue blazes have led me to double back on my own trail — I decide to upgrade “Hello!” to “Help!” “Help!” is not a word that most of us shout loudly and repeatedly into the void unless we’re beyond humiliation. The moment I add that terminal consonant is the moment at which all remaining pretense to pastoral pleasure has been routed by the terror of an unwanted wilderness encounter.
           
My new wife — I’ve been married for a year— has no idea where I am. My car is parked in a place she’ll never find. I have, for all practical purposes, disappeared. I’m off the grid. The jungle is closing in. If by some chance I actually did step on a cottonmouth and get bitten, I would die. I’m working that close to the edge right now.  How did this happen?

Hoarse from shouting, I suddenly stop and, in a softer voice, begin to pray. I’m almost crying. “Running” is the last thing on my mind. I would simply like to live. Please God, I pray. Please let me live. Please help me find a way out of this place and back to my wife, my life. 

My feet find their way onto a narrow path that looks like every other path I’ve been circling helplessly for the past half hour. I let my feet take me. I’m flowing with the terrain, careening slowly through the woods like a riderless mountain bike, letting the vines swish my face as I brush by, my feet taking me where they will. Minutes later, remarkably, they take me out of the jungle and into one more clearing. Thank you God! I cry as I see first the rich orange sky, then the high-tension power lines disappearing into the distance over a steeply terraced red clay cut-through. I’ve never been in this particular spot, but I think I know where I am. I construct one more mental map to replace the 50 that have failed me and head towards the power lines. Another 10 minutes and I heave myself over a rise to see, from an unfamiliar angle, a familiar stretch of the old railroad right-of-way. I am four miles from Thacker Mountain and my car. I crunch onto gravel, swing left, and, three minutes later, come out onto the road by the Westinghouse Plant, where I always start off when I jog down here. My Fitsense reads 7.47 miles. I am saved. A guard in a booth at the plant entrance lets me telephone my wife, who will be here in 15 minutes. We’ll rescue my car and head home. Exhausted, thighs quivering, I walk in circles for the next few minutes, then fall onto a grassy bank and stare at the woods as dusk falls. It’s lukewarm, an early summer evening, and I’m shivering.

Postcript
How far off the grid is too far? That depends on who you are. I had always thought of myself as an intrepid soul who liked the wilderness. It turns out I’m a romantic who likes Nature with a capital N. A startled pheasant squawking through Inwood Hill Park is the sort of wilderness exemplar only a romantic would conjure up.  I know that now, and I’m glad. It’s important to know who you are and what you stand for. I will always be a suburban kid chasing butterflies in sunlit vacant lots and mowing the grass when I get home.

I still use my two wrist-mounted runners’ aids, but I rarely wear both of them at the same time. Sometimes I just wear an old Casio chronograph — or nothing at all,  when I’m only jogging a couple of laps of Lamar Park.  I’m much less invested in error-free metrics these days. Fuzzy math is OK. There are worse things than fuzzy math. Some of them live in the woods.

I’m thinking about going back to Thacker Mountain. Hill repeats build strong runners. My wife would prefer, though, that I stay away from the fire trails. She doesn’t raise her voice when she says this, and doesn’t need to. I’ve had enough will-of-the-place to last me a long, long time.

References
1.  Bruce Wilshire, Wild Hunger:  The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction (Lanham, MD:  Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) p. 8.

2.  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish:  The Birth of the Prison (New York:  Vintage Books, 1979) p. 26.

Author Biography
Adam Gussow is an Assistant Professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi.  A former member of the Harlem-based blues duo Satan and Adam, he is the author of two books:  Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir (1998) and Seems Like Murder Here:  Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (2000).

Citation reference for this Leonardo Electronic Almanac Essay

MLA Style
Gussow, Adam. “Kudzu Running:  Pastoral Pleasures, Wilderness Terrors, and Wrist-Mounted Technologies in Small-Town Mississippi.” “Wild Nature and the Digital Life” Special Issue, Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol 14, No. 7 - 8 (2006). 30 Nov. 2006 <http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n07-08/agussow.asp>.

APA Style
Gussow, A. (Nov. 2006) “Kudzu Running:  Pastoral Pleasures, Wilderness Terrors, and Wrist-Mounted Technologies in Small-Town Mississippi,” “Wild Nature and the Digital Life” Special Issue, Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol 14, No. 7 – 8 (2006). Retrieved 30 Nov. 2006 from <http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n07-08/agussow.asp>
.