Life as I knew it changed completely in 1985. My girlfriend Elena came home one day from the campus health clinic with some news: we were going to be parents. Kyle was born later that year.
I remember feeling happy and excited in many ways, but also extremely overwhelmed by this turn of events. It was all so completely over my head, and there was no roadmap, no guidance, no older male friends to tell me they'd been through this before.
I used to fantasize about taking a train, due East, letting it carry me far far away from Eugene, Oregon and all that I knew. Hurling me away from all this confusion, this responsibility, maybe even myself.
We were going to a couples therapist to deal with some of these feelings, a guy we knew because he had taught the dream class we’d taken. "Gary" combined gestault therapy, Arnold Mindell’s Dreambody approach, ancient drumming rituals, and pretty much anything else you could find in a New Age bookstore. I liked Gary's highly fluid, in-the-present-moment approach to therapy, but sometimes it sure would’ve been nice if he could’ve actually remembered what we had talked about during our last session.
One day we went out to Gary's place, which was way out in the countryside near Cottage Grove. During our session, I told him about how I sometimes felt the urge to run away. Gary got one of those wild-eyed looks that came upon him whenever he was struck by a therapy-related epiphany, and he turned to us and said, “Well, let's do that then! Run!”
Right then and there, Gary decided that our session that day would involve me acting out my running fantasy. Elena was supposed to go with whatever feelings came up -- maybe chase me, whatever. Then we'd regroup and process what had happened.
It seemed kind of forced and unspontaneous, running under these conditions. But as I started down Gary's front walkway and then along the long entrance road, it began to feel quite alright indeed. I picked up the pace, heading right onto the country road abutting his land. Yes, it felt good to be running! The wind roared in my ears; my instincts were fully engaged. RUN, RUN! Go with it! I had been given full permission to do exactly what I'd been longing to do! Living the dream!
I ran for miles, past neighboring farms and cornfields, past mailboxes and dirt roads. I was rushing alongside a field of sheep when suddenly the thought occurred to me:
Is he charging us by the hour?
Seems like kind of a rip-off.
I knew that I had to go back, sooner or later. I suppose I could have kept running, across Oregon and Idaho and through the Great Plains, never to return -- but it would have been wickedly expensive.