After the race and celebration, we returned to the van, and there it was: a big, chubby penis on the van windshield, drawn over the driver’s side in purple chalk marker — with shots of cum dashed from the tip, like bullets in a video game.

My teammates and I, six strong women, had collectively run 203 miles in the Ragnar Relay Reach the Beach event — 203 miles through mountains and valleys, through heat and rain, through fog and pain. From the Bretton Woods ski area to the sands of Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Through nausea and self-doubt, we had run.

And yes, we wore our technicolored pigtail headbands so we could find each other in the crowds — because all of us are mothers and we think about these things — and we cheered loudly for one another at the exchanges because we were a team of six instead of twelve, and were therefore running twice as much as most of the people in the crowd. Including, I suspect, even you.

Were we too loud? Too proud? Too exuberant in our mutual support?

Or was it because we rolled our eyes at the testosterone-driven teams who tallied their number of “kills” — the people they had passed during the course of their legs (a somewhat infantile statistic, considering the staggered start and the number of runners on Ultra teams such as ours who were running twice as far)?

At one exchange, a man belonging to the van parked next to ours walked up after his run and announced, with his arms held high in a victorious reach: “Seventy-five kills, you guys! Wahooooooo!!”

(To which I uttered not so much to myself, but at least with my back turned toward him: “Really? You are making me so hard right now.”)

Yes, we all agreed. There’s some dick-swinging going on.

Here’s the thing:

We all passed people on our runs, every one of us on our team. Except that, instead of silently shaming the other hard-working souls who chipped away at the 203-mile pursuit a little slower than ourselves, we said, Looking good. You got this. You’re almost there!

That’s a difference between you and me — besides, of course, what we carry below the belt.

What does your penis even mean? Your micro-essay, your little piece of flash nonfiction?

Does it seek to elevate your team’s accomplishment by diminishing our own? Even you must be aware that your after-the-fact purple penis doesn’t have magical powers — doesn’t negate or un-do the fact that we still ran all the miles, just the six of us forty-something mothers with our party headbands on.

Are you worried that this fact somehow compromises the terms of your own team’s accomplishment? As in, maybe it wasn’t that amazing if these six women were able to finish it, too? Hey, I think any team of any number running 203 miles is amazing. So that would be your narrative, certainly not mine.

Or did you intend for your penis to be an act of violence, like a Swastika, or a gun? Was it your Trump card?

And what, exactly, did you mean when you scribbled the word, “SLOT” on the side window of the van, next to our decorated names and the checked boxes for all the miles we had run? Is this another slang for the opening between our legs? Like some kind of restrained, passive-aggressive way of calling us cunts?

Or did “SLOT” mean to kill? An in what manner did you mean?

Or were you instead suggesting that we were lesbians in this van — that being in close quarters without the company of a man somehow skewed our collective sexual preference toward vagina — and did you assume that, in between all the running and re-hydrating and nausea and muscle pain, we were hanging out in our rented van “playing the slots”?

Is it your belief that the fact of a woman is unfinished and incomplete without the imposition of a penis, like an uncrossed ’t’ or an un-dotted ‘i’?

Or is a van-full of strong feminist women who have also accomplished your goal simply some kind of a threat to your inflated idea of you? 

Maybe you did have something to fear. Maybe you were worried that we indeed had the power to turn the fact of a penis — penis as a noun, that thing on the windshield — into something lesser, something less required for the completion of a sentence. An adjective even, a modifier to a fact — as in, That insecure person just made a dick move. He must be one of those Trumpy, penis-kind of guys.

Then again, we really didn’t do anything but run a bunch of miles. The reduction of your penis? Yeah, you did that to yourself.

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Watching updates of Sandra’s arrest, along with all the other protests on social media and TV reminds me of how demanding this work can be.  Reminds me of the challenge of trudging uphill, of the stamina required to proceed forward despite the forces working against.  Rick Bass wrote a beautiful essay about activism fatigue several years ago: “Activism’s Paradox Mountain“ — a piece to which I find myself returning every now and then.  But there’s a reason they continue to climb, almost always a story behind the sacrifice.

A few weeks ago, I completed an application for a writing retreat, in which I was asked to provide a personal response to the following Virginia Woolf quote:

“I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider.  I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It’s an odd feeling, though, writing against the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current.  Yet of course I shall.”

As a writer whose work is often motivated by environmental issues, this quote speaks to me directly in terms of the margins from which I write — and from which others write, as well.  I know that my ideas and those of my literary heroes aren’t always popular, because they push back against traditionally held American ideals.  Things like capitalism and exceptionalism, the rights and responsibilities of individuals verses corporations, guns and “scientific proof.”  It’s hard to question our traditions — because these ideals have taken many of us far, have rewarded some of us well… well, except for those people and places whose needs are at odds with our traditional American beliefs.

But it seems to me that our greatest truths don’t begin as commonly held beliefs.  Rather, they come from stories — stories of pain, of injustice that we labor to deliver so that the truth may be revealed. That we are all created equal, for instance.  There is still much work to be done on that.

The work is difficult, unsupported.  It would be easier to fold into one’s self and float, bobbing and weaving through the rushing water, propelled by conformity and the sound of its applause, along the path of least resistance.  Easier still to allow your direction and destination to be determined by the urgency and velocity of someone else’s values, of other people’s rules.

And yet.  A salmon will leave the ocean and return to its natal stream, whose salt-free waters will assault its cells and strip the skin right from its flesh.  And fourth generation monarchs will ignore the impulse to mature and mate, saving their energy instead for the long flight from as far north as Canada to Mexico’s southern tail — a journey whose distance and hardship defies all logic, but without which would define the end of its kind.

The work that we do is hard.  We shed our skins and bare our vulnerable selves, and for some of us, this pilgrimage can feel like death.  Or maybe it’s our birth.  Either way, we must continue to write our stories.  The survival of our kind depends on it.

Cover image courtesy of Ecowatch.org

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