Running down a hill

There is a steepness past which running stops being something you decide. You come over the top at a jog, the field tips away in front of you — longer and steeper than it looked from the bottom — and for three or four strides you are still the one doing it, leaning back, heels first, braking. Then the hill takes the decision away.

It happens in your legs before it happens in your head. Your feet start coming down faster than you are putting them there, out ahead of you now, each one landing further down the slope than you aimed it, and to keep from going over you have to throw the next one out even faster, and the next, until you are not running so much as falling in a way that keeps catching itself just in time. Your arms go out. Nobody teaches you that; the arms simply leave your sides and start doing something older than instruction, balancing a body that has become a problem to be solved forty times a second.

And somewhere in there the fear turns over into something else. For a stride or two at the start it is real fear, the true animal certainty that you are about to eat the whole hill face-first — your body running now at a speed your body chose and not you, the ground coming up hard and green and close. And then it doesn't. You don't fall. Each impossible stride finds the grass, and the one after it finds the grass, and your legs turn out to be cleverer than you are, and the fear, with nowhere to go, disproved forty times a second, becomes the laugh. You cannot help the laugh. It comes up out of you in bursts timed to nothing, shaken loose by the pounding, a sound you make nowhere else, and you are going faster than you have gone under your own power all year and it is entirely out of your hands and you are, for these few seconds, completely safe inside something completely out of control.

The wind is loud past your ears now, and the bottom is coming, and you can see the flat where it will let you go. You don't slow for it. You couldn't if you wanted to. You run the speed out on the level grass, the hill's gift spending itself down through your legs — twenty strides, thirty, of gradually being handed back the controls — until you are only running, and then only jogging, and then bent over with your hands on your knees in the flat calm at the bottom, blowing, grinning, your heart going, the hill standing there behind you exactly as steep as it was.

You will turn around and look back up it. Everyone does.