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Notes


This essay was published by
Pirelli World Magazine
Milan, Italy, 2018

¹ Mount Whitney is the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States rising 14,505 feet in the Sierra Nevada.

² Los Angeles applied for water rights on the Owens River in the eastern Sierra Nevada, 250 miles away, in 1905. After years of water wars, the 233-mile aqueduct was completed in 1913. Los Angeles’ water supply quadrupled with the new aqueduct, which allowed swift expansion of the city and population. 

³ “If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in the lonliest land that ever came out of God’s hands, what they do here and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have the lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it.” - Mary Hunter Austin, from her book The Land of Little Rain, 1903

Running Through the Land of Little Rain
~ Erin Ruffin

My alarm goes off at 5am on the days I run. It yanks me from dream back into body, which today is sprawled on a cheap motel bed in my running clothes, ready. I smooth my socks out over my toes and slip them into trail shoes careful not to make any creases. I pull my hair back into a ponytail, brush my teeth, and acknowledge my face in the mirror, the face of an insane person about to run more than 20 miles through one of the deepest valleys in the United States – alone.

It will be hot today, I can already feel it on my skin. If I hit the trail soon enough I’ll run through the split in the air that happens on mornings like this when the cold of night still clings to the ground around my legs, while the top half of my body stays warm from sleep. I love that feeling, of being in the physical space between night and day, my reward for getting out of bed.

Air is its densest right next to the earth, dense with dust, pollen and exhaustion from finding its way around rocks, roots and vegetation. We don’t imagine air moving through an obstacle course but it is, all the time. This is the “friction layer,” down near the ground, where air moves too slow to circulate what little the sun has had time to warm up. Lay on the ground on a windy day and you’ll know what I mean. That delicious stillness is there, so close to the dirt, only because of the presence of adversity, which is essentially the definition of trail running and also kind of the definition of the desert.

The valley I am running through, the Owens Valley, wasn’t always a desert as Mary Austin writes about in “The Land of Little Rain” (1903) when she fought, alone, for the region’s water rights. It is a desert now, though, because she lost and Los Angeles took all of its water. I’ve come to know this corridor on my drives north to Mammoth and Yosemite, by reading Austin’s books over and over again, and lately by running through it. 

Running through this landscape is not easy but as the friction layer and some life experience has taught me, difficulty can provide extraordinary peace. When you’re actually on a mountain, you stop thinking about molehills. You have to slow down, focus. What isn’t absolutely necessary loses its grip.  

Though I seem to have been born with an ache for the mountains—and the desert is exactly what mountains are not—these swathes of arid land whose name “desert” literally means “forsaken, uninhabitable” are where I have learned about slowing down and being present. An artist friend of mine who lives in New Mexico once told me if I can learn to love the desert for what it isn’t, I will have grasped its essence. It is the necessary negative space to life’s complicated focal points, and it has only been able to remain that way because of how extreme it is in its nothingness, which is of course something. 


"Void of life it never is, however dry and villainous the soil…One even finds butterflies about these high, sharp regions which might be called desolate, but will not by me who love them." – Mary Austin


The Owens Valley unfolds between the towns of Bishop and Lone Pine and includes some of the sharpest relief stretches you can find in the country. The valley runs along a thrust fault that raised California’s highest peak, Mount Whitney, to 14,505-feet and threw the eastern Sierras’ sharp vertical walls into their dramatic resting places like kings and queens overlooking the valley. 

This is the backdrop I run towards and up into today. I take only what I absolutely need: the clothes I’m wearing, one extra layer, pocket-warmers, my phone with a satellite map, water, electrolytes, and a little high-calorie food.

Trail running demands a lot of attention, a rock the size of your thumbnail can turn your ankle if you’re not careful, and everything your body does is in compensation for the unevenness of the land. The shorter strides, critical importance of your arms, and tricks to keep your lungs expanded especially at elevation can feel awkward at first. Keep running and it begins to feel fluid and natural, you find the path of least resistance with less focus. Your body becomes lighter on the ground, slipping through the landscape like attention in a dream, there but not there. That’s when the stillness creeps in, even as your lungs struggle to pull oxygen as deep as you want and your muscles ache. Something about running in the wild feels exactly like coming home, pain and all.

Today I listen to music for the first few miles to get my pace down, which is slow in anticipation of the elevation gain, but I feel strong. As I climb into the Sierras I can feel the temperature drop every 15 minutes or so which can be tough after starting in the hot desert – sweat turns cold and can slow you down at best, give you hypothermia at worst. I have to add a layer and take in some calories earlier than I expected. Over the course of my run the temperature drops by 42-degrees, and climbs all the way back up as I descend again. 

It’s been said about running that “the blessing comes just outside of your comfort zone” and today that is my mantra, the longest single run I’ve done this year. Step after step, mile after mile: “blessing…outside…comfort zone.”

In Austin’s “Land of Little Rain” she says, "For all the toil that the desert takes of a man, it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep and the communion of the stars.” Maybe these blessings are clearer to see when set against the backdrop of utter challenge. Today I’m thinking about rationing out the fuel I packed for this run, not my emails or the international flight I have in a few days. I’m thinking about the tiny lizards that race across the trail at my feet who I don’t want to step on, the two red-tailed hawks that follow me overhead for hours, the desert senna bushes that are blooming glorious yellow and vibrating with bees. I’m thinking about the words Mary Austin left for me here: “As I walk, as I walk / the universe is walking with me / beautifully, it walks before me / beautifully, on every side / as I walk, I walk with beauty.”

The natural legacy of this valley was forever transformed by water diversion. The Los Angeles aqueduct allowed a megalopolis – the one that I live in – to be built and inhabited by nearly 20 million people. When I turn on the tap in my Los Angeles home, water from the Sierras comes out if it. My city has helped to catapult this state to the world’s fifth largest economy, but it has come at an indelible cost to the valley I’m running through – sacred Shoshone land, biologically diverse with its own separate microclimate.

Now a concrete aqueduct cuts an angular, pale scar through it and I can’t scoff because I need it, but I do wonder what would be growing at my feet if it had never been built. “Trust Indians not to miss any virtues of the plant world," Austin says, but that plant world was changed at a basic level, H2O, and the Native Americans were forced out.

My run started at my car near Lone Pine, wound up and into the mountains toward the glory of Mount Whitney, and looped back down to Lone Pine again. I reach my car just as I take in the last of my water and right before my legs refuse another step. After being worried I had underdressed for the lowest temperatures, I’m back in the indifferent heat of the desert. It feels heavier than air, draped over my skin like a blanket. As I stretch and change out of my running clothes, a cool breeze barely slips through the heat like a whisper. After 26-miles, I can’t believe how relaxed I am.

I pack all the gear up, stretch my body, eat everything I can find in the car, and point myself back towards home. Stopping every 30 or 40 miles to walk and stretch again, the drive takes forever and only gets worse the closer I get to the city. “Man is not himself only; he is all that he sees, all that flows into him from a thousand sources,” Austin wrote, “He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys.” Which – along with fatigue, some weird bug bites, and a spike in my mileage log – I take with me all the way back to Los Angeles, a new mantra: I am the land…the lift of its mountain lines…the reach of its valleys. 

And I start planning my next run.