The Long Run

Abstract

The Long Run Linda Gregerson (bio) 1 There's always a moment before the moment when nothingis ever the same again. The moment before the leg of my uncle's overalls got caught in the baler pick-up. Themoment before the moment you decided to tell your lover the truth. The moment before the horses panicked, themoment before the acid splashed, the moment before the driver got distracted by his GPS. How was a fourteen-year-old girl supposed to know what it meant? It wasn't her job to answer the phone, her job was the attendance sheets.The phone rings, she's a dutiful child, Three minutes says the man on the line, hangs up. "But it wasn't," shetells us, "three minutes at all." She's come to give us a tour of the church: the basement where the four of them (AddieMae tying her dress sash) had just finished morning lessons, the staircase to the office and the nave with its pews. You'dnever know unless you knew already that the stained-glass windows, all but one, had been replaced. "Fifteen steps,"she says, from where she'd been to where she made it [End Page 42] when the bomb went off. "I can count them in my sleep.Fifteen." 2 Or slowly, the other irrevocables.The teething infant, chips of paint. The water that flows through the aging pipes. Is it something peculiar to us,do you think, this science-will-fix-it, somebody-somewhere will-figure-out-the-cleanup way of burning through our oneshared life. At the turn of the century in which I was born the topsoil here in Iowa was sixteen God-sent inchesdeep. We're down to half. Three tons lost per acre per year because we like our groceries cheap.I've sometimes taken comfort in the long run, in the long run some worthier species will, fate willing,inherit the earth. In the long run the creek bed…the coastline…the karst…In the long run the fern and thenautilus speak a single fractal language. My father loved the ginkgos on the statehouse lawn, the former statehouse,Greek Revival, columns and cupola painted to look like stone. And no more native here than we are, or the ginkgo, but heloved the trees. The species coexisted with the dinosaurs. A ginkgo in Hiroshima survived the atom bomb. It musthave been unforgivable, the thing I said that made him cut their visit short. Forgetting hasn't fixed it. [End Page 43] Linda Gregerson linda gregerson is the author of Canopy, among other works. She teaches at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the Helen Zell Writers' Program. Copyright © 2021 Yale University