Day Four: How to Eat an Elephant

John and Marsha Rae Ratcliff, two great people and terrific friends, have mentored Innovation Symposium students since the beginning of the program. One of their favorite sayings about tackling challenging tasks starts with the question "How do you eat an elephant?" The answer always makes the students smile: "One bite at a time." It sounds like an old vaudeville joke (if you've never heard of vaudeville, use Google). But during today's walk (which started at my own front door and covered one of my typical running routes), I thought of their wise advice several times. As you can see by the field photos, my "neighborhood" (what do you call it in the country?) is flat, and the landscaping can be unvarying. Soybean and corn fields. Or corn and soybean fields, depending on the year and the crop rotation. A landscape like that for five miles can turn walking into sleepwalking.

We rarely pay close attention to what we see every day, but one of my goals for this journey has been to focus on the moment. So, that means I am constantly scanning the landscape--even when it's flat and unchanging--because "eating the elephant" requires awareness of where I am and why. I could plod along mile after mind-numbing mile, but that would make this trek drudgery rather than an event. It would be easy to lose the joy that this journey has brought me.

What I know for certain is that there is always something interesting to see, and that fact does propel me when I'm feeling the heat and my feet hurt and I reach an uphill just when I don't need it. I have found that thinking of the 15 miles in bits rather than as one large distance helps. It's the same strategy I give my students when they have to write papers. I tell them to do it in chunks rather than as ten pages of writing. One bite at a time. When I got to Potter's Bridge Park in Noblesville today, I was intrigued to see that the riverside trail is marked in quarter-mile increments. A mile and a half may sound like a lot to many people, but when they see their progress by the quarter mile, I'm guessing they are encouraged and keeping on moving.

When we can see on the horizon where we're going, when we have some idea that the goal is literally in sight, we can move forward and keep heading toward it. Even on today's flat terrain during the first five miles, I could keep my focus--getting to the crossroads stop sign, getting to the curve, getting to the Overdorf Road/234th Street sign. After that, it was a friend's house on Overdorf, the intersection at Cumberland Road, the roundabout near Potter's Bridge. One bite at a time.

The miles flew by today. Once I left Potter's Bridge Park, I retreated to my childhood in Forest Park. I learned to swim at the Forest Park Pool, and I have deeply ingrained memories of the perfection of growing up in the 1960s...based in great part on the weekends spent riding the ponies in the ring, driving the little boats in what seemed at the time to be a big water tank, and bouncing up and down on the carousel. The pool (upgraded several times since) and the carousel (see the photo) are still there. There is also a poignant tribute to race driver Bryan Clauson, who died in 2016. He was, as the sign says, an organ donor (see the photo), which I would not have known had I not taken the time to stop. Though being in the moment slows the pace, it does bring rewards.

I had the old county courthouse (see the photo) in my sights as the next goal in my journey--for purely practical reasons. (I drink a lot of water. Here's your travel tip for today: always know where to find the facilities on your journey. In the old county courthouse, it's one floor up, west side.) After that, because I was a mile short after exiting the park (Google doesn't always get it right), I had some making up to do. Without a clear next goal, I found myself losing focus. I wandered along the Riverwalk heading south, found an old cemetery, left the end of the Riverwalk, wandered into a neighborhood I'm not eager to see again, and began to feel the effects of 14 miles. I began focusing more on the ache in my heel rather than seeing what there was to see. I knew I would be ending the day at my favorite Mexican restaurant, El Camino--but I still had that mile to complete. Tenths of miles grow longer in such circumstances.

What was convenient was a street to the east I have been told to avoid. What I found when I stopped looking at my activity tracker and started paying attention (I'm pretty good at that when I'm on streets I'm supposed to avoid) was a pleasant surprise: in a traditionally blue-collar neighborhood near what used to be Noblesville's biggest employer, Firestone Tire, are the signs of gentrification in the best sense. Victorian cottages and bungalows from the 1930s and 1940s are being tastefully redone, looking a lot like the finished products on shows like Good Bones. A man was out carefully repainting the small deer statue in his yard. Many of the original brick sidewalks had been weeded and cleaned. A couple was unloading new siding for their home. Vibrant flower gardens were showing off in tiny yards. When I turned a corner at 16th Street, I saw what was left of the place where my grandparents used to work. Now I had a goal in sight. Even though Firestone--the reason my father's parents came to Hamilton County in the early 1940s--is now rubble, the area around it still maintains a positive working-class sense of pride. And I would have missed all of that if I had not needed one more "bite" to finish off today's elephant. It wasn't a chunk I had planned to add, but I'm really glad I did. That last mile made the two tacos at El Camino taste even better.

Tomorrow, I am heading back to my roots once again, starting on the Noblesville/Westfield line on the Midland Trace Trail. I promised my mom I would stop and see her on my way to Sheridan. I'll also be passing by my church, my high school, and several places my dad built. The goals will be easy to see, and the miles will fly by. You could join me!