It’s July in North Carolina. At six a.m. the storm door has sweat forming on its upper lip and pit stains starting at the corners. On the porch, I warm up for my run. The sauna air has descended, hunkering down like cumulus cloud meets mildewed beach towel. My hair has swollen into a fit of moist curls under my baseball cap. My soul has retreated to the inner part of my ribcage, crushed by humidity and torture of cardio amidst heat-index. I suck it up, start a podcast, and head for the bridges.

     On this hot-ass kind of day, I’m not training for speed or endurance. I’m single focused in trying not to die. Maslow said that survival was the first of our human needs, and on this morning, I am hip to his thinking. Left foot. Right foot. Don’t die. Left foot. Right foot. Don’t die.

     I turn up the volume on my device to outspeak the voices in my head. The episode is This American Life from a few weeks back. The lead story features William Cimillo, a New York City bus driver, who in 1947 at the age of thirty-eight, veered from his normal Bronx bus route of taking passengers to the subway and drove to Hollywood, Florida. Cimillo, the bus vigilante, became a folk hero. The charges against him were eventually dropped and he even kept his job.            

     In explanation, Cimillo said, “Well I thought I’d try something different, a new route… I come out of my garage and instead of making a right turn, I made a left turn. So, I made this left turn and went west towards George Washington Bridge. It was a beautiful morning, sun was shining. I stopped for breakfast, and decided to take a little ride.

     Cimillo changed the sign on his bus from “Subway” to “Special” and continued for thirteen hundred miles before the po-po caught up with him on the Florida coastline.

     While I’m not endorsing grand theft auto or worrying the dickens out of your family when you don’t come home from work for three days, I’m intrigued by this story and why it makes me want to stand on a chair and belt out a Braveheart battle cry. It must have struck others similarly back in 1947, hence the elevated hero status and accounts of piles of people lining up for years to ride bus #1310 with Cimillo at the wheel.

     Now that I have the rogue bus driver story to keep me company while I dispense a river of perspiration, I think about life’s twists and turns. Damnation, I’m tired of the word journey, and adventure is almost as bad, but life among us earthlings is indeed a moving action word and along with the clock, it travels, warp speed.

     This year marks twenty years of endurance running for me. I started with half a mile, then a mile, working my way to half a marathon, then a full. It was around the same time that I took my bus out of the garage and turned left instead of right, blowing up my life as I knew it and making a new path for myself, Wreck-It Ralph style.

     Of the many things that changed, the route, the driver, the other passengers, it was mostly me, car sick from my own choices, complicit in my own unhappiness and dissatisfaction.  It wasn’t an easy move, but small steps led to big ones, hard left at the light. I am supposing that this method might work for most anything small or big. Thoughts, behaviors, patterns, and habits all culminate into the story of our lives. 

     Becoming a runner gave me the physical strength and mental courage to do other hard things. Woven together, I became stronger as a whole. While it was running for me, (even in the hot jungle climate of North Carolina,) it’s not the ticket for everyone, the greater lesson I learned was to interrogate your spirit, speak truth into your own heart, and act.

     The podcast ended and I ran in solitude. The sneakers on road and sweating didn’t make for what I would label as peaceful, but I was alone in my mind with my thoughts. I time traveled back to Carthage Elementary and a reoccurring, irrational dream. 

     As a youngster, I ached to pull the fire alarm at my school. It sat on the wall and spoke to me with its shiny ruby red lips, “Go on, little yearling. Yank my lever.” I longed to make that alarm shrill and sing, sending us outside on a warm spring day. It made my teeth hurt to stare at that alarm, that’s how bad I wanted to beckon the firetrucks and have our principal, Gene “Tinker Bell” Bowen, comb the halls in a safety sweep, returning us to class with a somber nod of “all clear.”

     In my fantasy, I never got in trouble for the fire alarm transgression. I was William Cimillo. My fellow third graders hoisted me high on their shoulders, a celebrated heroine for rescuing us from math lessons and spelling tests. The teacher chuckled at my harmless mischief, admitting that we all needed a little break and then sent me to the office with the ice cream box to get a round of Nutty Buddies for the entire class. What a great day that was in my imagination. Never happened, but boy howdy if it had. 

     Maybe I was banking my left turns for a grown-up, jackpot kind of cash in, a personal bus route sign transformed from “Grind to Grand.”