City Running: Seeing the Sadness

This morning on my run I saw a dead cat on the path. And that was not the saddest thing I saw.

Tito's listening?
Near the train station in Zagreb

I love running in the city--any city--and have had many adventures this year. A couple of runs along the Tiber in Rome, where there were tented homeless encampments, but also construction workers preparing for festival season by building booths on the riverbank.

A run in Zagreb early on a very hot morning, very few people about, featuring sober and silly public art projects.

I took a long and beautiful--if slightly dusty--run in the countryside in Russia. I stopped to drink from a natural spring and was passed by a silent Russian man, dressed in a proper outfit for the country--high rubber boots, long pants, a jacket--and carrying a bunch of birch branches over his shoulder. I saw him ... and then I didn't. If he had been in a Russian film or novel he would have earned the sobriquet "vechnyi ded," Eternal Grandfather, as in the Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky film Siberiade that I made my students watch earlier in the year.

Eternal Grandfather

Disappearing silently into the woods

But this morning I was running in Philadelphia, along one of my favorite routes. The Schuylkill River Trail has been a huge amenity for Philadelphians ever since it was opened--I myself have watched the birch trees grow to full height over the years. Gorgeous landscaping, a great pathway for walking to the Art Museum, biking to Manyunk or the Wissahickon forest, or indeed running. No matter how early you head out for your run, there are always other people on the trail.

And inevitably there are a few people sleeping rough. Morning runners get used to this--I've even seen it on the bike trail I run on in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I don't know when I first began to observe how the homeless manage overnight, probably when I became an urban runner. It's tough. People often cover up with a blanket or sleeping bag even on sultry mornings, for the privacy more than anything, and they have their belongings around them, in roller suitcases or bags or both.

Which is why I just ran past the dead cat this morning. It was nowhere near its home, I'm sure--I saw it on the other side of the Penn athletic fields, not too far from the Schuylkill Expressway. It may be that some undergraduate gave up his lease for the summer and released the cat into the neighborhood, thinking it would be able to fend for itself. In the end, it couldn't. 

Market Street, Philadelphia

Sad, but not as sad as what I saw a few minutes earlier on the Market Street bridge. The new improvements there feature benches with planters, and inevitably at 7 a.m. those benches serve as sleeping spots for homeless people trying to catch some zzzs before the pedestrians begin to flow by on their way to work. 

The guy I saw this morning was sucking his thumb while he slept. 

It was fully inserted into his mouth. I'd never seen a grown up suck his thumb like that. This man could clearly use some services. I wished I could encourage him into a van, take him somewhere for a shower and a decent bed, offer him some food and perhaps some mental health attention. I even wished I could just make a phone call to facilitate some or all of that. 

Instead I ran on. But I will remember this sight, the saddest sight I've seen in a long time. I hope he finds some cooler shelter today. It's headed to 95 degrees.

Cool as a cucumber in Zagreb, Croatia