A Dragging Before St George

Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack. Clickety-clickety-clickety-clack.

Ya know that feeling in your stomach that comes as the roller coaster gets pulled up the incline, the chain dragging the cars up, up, up to a peak so that gravity can send them careening this way and that? It’s a hollowness and knot in one.

That’s how I’m feeling today as I gear up for the St George Marathon tomorrow. The call time to get the race shuttle is 3:30 AM. I’ve flown into Las Vegas and driven two hours to the southwest corner of Utah. I’ve got a ten-hour AirBNB for the evening because of the bus time. For the record, I am not paying by the hour.

I’m nervous. And my stomach is telling me as much. It’s a different kind of nerves than Surf City a few weeks back. Part of this is the difficulty of making it back to Vegas for a flight at 4 PM. There’s a lot of moving parts… and I used to schedule things like this all the time in “the before times.” But in the fall of 2021, I’m feeling a mess.

Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack.

Ages ago I decided I didn’t like roller coasters. My brother and I played hooky from summer jobs and drove out to the Six Flags near us. We rode coasters all day and though I was barely 20, the toll it took on my body was immense. Rattled and bruised from the coasters, I realized that on top of the wear and tear on the body, I actually didn’t really like the sensation of dropping down a long slope, the stomach falling out. It wasn’t the weightlessness… or maybe it was? It was the feeling that it would most definitely end and I’d splat into the ground like Wile E Coyote. But whereas that cartoon super genius would accordion walk out of frame and be instantly restored, no such quick fixes awaited me.

Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack.

I went to the Dixie Convention Center to pick up my bib.  Almost no one was masked.

It’s like Utah has decided Covid 19 is over.

Clickety-clickety-clickety…

Ker-chunk!

The car is at the top, and the chain has released us… we plummet downward.

What the actual fuck?