Meridian, ID

Lewis & Clark Middle School

Run Time: 65:59 + 2:30 kick

I passed this middle school about half-mile from the hotel, and I could see the empty track, so that took the research out of it, which is sometimes half the work for me. It was a beautiful day, and as usual, I was starving, but I ignored my hunger, got my running shoes on, and headed out the side exit.

In this relatively upscale, clean suburban community, I was surprised to find a cinder track. I come across these occasionally, but usually in places like Esterhazy, Saskatchewan. Who cares, though? I’m fine with cinder. Keeps the riff-raff away.

Beings this was a middle school, and beings that my middle school had a cinder track, this took me back. I couldn’t help but reminisce about practicing baseball in and around that old track. We didn’t have a full baseball field at the middle school — just a backstop and a diamond. The track ran diagonal across right field, and it was set down a foot or so lower than the main field, so if you were chasing down a liner that was slicing foul, you’d suddenly step into air where your body thought the ground would be, and you might end up with cinder in your hair, ear, and facial skin tissue.

We played our games at the High School across town, or at the Junior High a little closer, which had two baseball fields somehow. But we practiced in that scrub grass and on that undrug diamond with no pitcher’s mound. Guess what? We won most of our games. When I see the manicured youth sports facilities that are now common all across this country, I feel so grateful for the youth sports world I grew up in, in which the only spectators were a few cute girls, and when you inherited old jerseys and equipment and turned them in at the end of the year. In ten years of playing organized youth baseball, I never had my own bat or helmet, and I was never expected to have either.

In 1978, Hillsboro, Oregon, had two junior high schools for seventh and eighth grade, a middle school for ninth and tenth, and a high school for eleventh and twelfth. The next year, they converted the Junior high schools to seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, and they made the middle school one of the Junior high schools. The high school then had tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. It was overcrowded, however, so the Seniors went from 7 am to Noon, the Juniors from 9 am to 3 pm, and the Sophomores from Noon to 6 pm. No full lunches — just a 20 minute snack break. Two years after that, a new high school opened, and I was in the first graduating class of 1982.

That old middle school with the cinder track, however, was my favorite. It had character. It was originally a high school that opened in 1911 or something like that. It was two stories, with high ceilings in the classrooms. The cafeteria was in the basement. The auditorium had ornate trimmings and solid, comfortable seats — it felt like a classic theater. Under the annex, which was built just after World War II, there was a bomb/fallout shelter. By the time I got there, it had been converted to a shooting range. A SHOOTING RANGE. Every year, the ninth graders had a four-week hunter’s safety course, followed by five weeks of shooting at targets with single shot .22 rifles. One guy shot an electric box that was in his line of vision and knocked out all the lights in the shelter. Fun times.

I had taken hunter’s safety and started shooting a bolt-action .243 when I was 11, so I was ready for all of this. For one of my presentations in Speech class, I explained how to gut and field-dress a deer. For another, I brought my rifle to school to show everyone how it worked. I BROUGHT MY RIFLE TO SCHOOL. I brought it on the bus, checked it in at the front office, left class to get it when it was my turn to give my speech, brought it back to the front office when I was done, and took it with me on the bus ride home. When I was walking down the empty hallway with my rifle between the front office and the classroom, a teacher came around the corner toward me and crouched down, clowning around, like he was afraid I would shoot him. He popped back up, and we both laughed. It’s not funny, I know. It was then. It was inconceivable that anyone would ever bring a weapon to a school to shoot someone.