By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Recording
Lawless Park, not yet flooded, still furnished islands on its 820 acres. As runners splashed between them, video gear I lugged and tried to make work to track their soggy treks didn’t always.
Audio sputtered picking up voiceovers, drowned by 1970s and ‘80s pop tunes DJs pumped out to put pep in people’s steps. Even on Carter’s clearer audio, recorded on a plugged-in mic dry inside the shelter, my thoughts came out syncopated, jumping point to point, rarely liquid.
Assured Great Lakes Sports Publications maestro Art McCafferty would find crap easy to cut before posting on YouTube, I prowled the park, seeking more.
Five minutes before starts of each Sandhill Crane All-Trail Run — 9 a.m. half marathon, 9:30 10K and 10 a.m. 5K — race director Ron Gunn would drive up and pop out of his yellow Ford Bronco to shout, through a megaphone, instructions.
First, runners circled the softball field a half-mile clockwise past the start again, then followed Monkey Run Street west briefly.
Almost doubling back past the main shelter, they could pass or go through a discarded white picket structure with lattice roof, as if it were Saugatuck’s Chain Ferry, ready to debark.
Ahead loomed Lime and Weatherbee lakes, the Roller Coaster, Corn Valley and the Old Railroad Bed leading to Scout Bridge Check Point.
Carter always shoots that turnaround, on one of the course’s six wood-plank stream crossings, this over Hogback Creek between Lewis and Hogback lakes.
Some capered as they slowed for a Gatorade jug, whose top he shot soft-focus at frame bottoms as if it were rim of another planet at which they would briefly dock.
The way back wound and doubled back often too. Hugging Hogback Creek, runners veered west past Doanne Lake, the Eagle’s Nest, Swamp, Hogback Lake, and on.
Cranking out The Doors, Cars, Rolling Stones … DJs stood under a 30×15’ shelter, soundboards set before them on picnic tables. Caged bulbs in eaves overhead glowed red.
If I pointed my videocam straight up at one, zoomed in and out, would it be like returning to film darkrooms days? That might make a quick cut.
The concrete floor was too wet with boot prints to lie on. No available steady-backed, square-on angle shooting that way. Kneeling, craning my shoulders, neck and head to point the lens vertically didn’t work either.
Art’s hoped-for segue from that to red-and-green winking console lights indicating volume of BTO’s “Takin’ Care of Business,” its chant and frequency, might best be deleted too.
Sam Wallen Russell, 31, who finished eighth in the 10K, was a typical runner, coming with his twin brother Kit. The latter pecked at a laptop inside the main shelter while Sam, in salmon-hued shirt and pants, splashed down northern rain forest paths.
While I dried off between shootings, Kit said they were physicists — Sam specializing in astro-, him in geo- — raised in London, now advancing studies while teaching at Notre Dame University.
“The South Bend campus is 40 miles southwest,” he said, “just past the Michigan-Indiana line.”
Looking to learn about skin microbiomes and/or build a higher-pressure ionisation chamber detector to measure radionuclide Zirconium-93 while testing current stellar nucleosynthesis models — after the race, at least? These two were your guys.
Carter wanted me to video men’s and women’s overall and master’s winners of the three races, 12 total — but 2x2x3 was too hit-and-miss for me. Stagger-started races meant all would finish in jumble, many with bib numbers hidden under now-shed clothing layers or pinned in back, fallen off, never worn in the first place — kids, say, joining Mom or Dad as they crossed off one more test on their bucket lists.
Souls distinguished themselves sans numbers. The guy with two poles, one in each hand, running with a blue-bandanna-ed poodle … a mermaid in splashy, green-patterned tights … One woman was so absorbed by her iPhone earbuds and nature she almost ran over me, standing with camera on monopod and umbrella, too near her path.
Paces ranged wildly. Half-marathon winner Vince Orzel, 26, of Kalamazoo, ran the long course near solo from the start, finishing 8:37 ahead of second-place Elisabeth Wardell, 22, of Midland.
Two more hours till timers, in their trailer or under a tent beside it — watching specimens stream in, spread out sporadically and/or in clusters — got the go-ahead from on-course sweepers: all were accounted for. Time to turn off clocks.
I collared Sam (whose name I misheard as “Tam,” ears ringing from Iggy Pop) by the shelter fireplace.
“Your name’s Tam?” I asked.
“Tam I am.” We’d dry out the back of “Steaming Tam”’s shirt in no time. That exchange, alas, was lost to “Lust for Life”’s refrains and/or my camera conking out for good.
Carter, back from the bridge’s end, still had more shots to tick off his list.
“Do you want to flood Art?” I asked. “You’re ticking me off. Why not the one-shot approach?”
“I took lots of slides,” he said. “Art can pause on favorites, fast-forward others, timed to music playing or sounds of nature … if you can hear them.”
“It’s a slippery slope,” I said, looking at mud-splotched pants.