The Runner (2 page)

information, Jeremy said. “One of his books, on edible plants, was incorrect. You try to prepare yourself, and then you have books that are misleading and there is no hospital next door.”

Jeremy is an appealing kid, whose quiet, clueless manner, and his willingness to learn,

reminds me of myself when I was his age. He grew up in Seattle and left home when he was

eighteen, and traveled around Mexico and Latin America, making money and feeding his jones

for travel. He headed up to Alaska, and made his way down to Colorado. The advantage of the traveling life is that you never get bored. For some people, it’s the only thing they know. I told him about the years I spent wandering without a fixed address, and about the people that you meet riding buses in the Pacific Northwest.

In school, Jeremy was diagnosed with a speech impediment, which is just barely audible,

a soft footfall behind lace-curtain consonants. Because of his diagnosis, he explained, he was placed in special education classes, where he stayed until he left school. The kids in special classes aren’t any dumber than anyone else, he said. It’s just that the school district gets paid extra for each kid. “I needed to run away,” he told me. He has six brothers and sisters. His father worked all the time. In the mountains it gets dark by five thirty. Stands of pale white aspen trees lined the snow-covered roads that took us even higher up into the mountains on our way out to Rico.

Sitting behind the wheel of his Jeep, in his parka and blue jeans, Jeremy was a dead

ringer for James Hogue, the fugitive who was also known as Alexi Indris-Santana, Jay Mitchell Huntsman, and various other people with false names and invented histories who might be best understood as more or less temporary incarnations of a single transcendent spirit or idea. What Hogue’s avatars had in common was that they led highly individual lives, ran long distances, alternately captivated and betrayed the people they met, and inevitably wound up in jail. Jeremy had heard about the drifter who stole from everyone in town, and who educated himself using only his wits and his talent for telling fantastical stories designed to ingratiate himself with the people he encountered along the way “In an ideal world, he’d just be a hero, and he wouldn’t steal,” he said. “But if he saw what he needed to do, and he did it, what’s so terrible about that?”

Having spent the past ten years tracking Hogue’s strange journey across America, I was

tempted to agree. Hogue’s impostures showed no small amount of resourcefulness and courage, which are qualities that I admire. They also had the effect of showing up some of the larger deceptions and impostures that serve as the foundation of the American class system, which we sometimes celebrate and occasionally criticize as an affront to the Jeffersonian democratic ideal.

Hogue also did what all liars do, which is to diminish the universal store of truthfulness that makes it possible for human beings to connect to something larger than themselves through

language, which makes it possible for us to learn new things and establish meaningful

connections to others.

Now both the trees and the snow had vanished into the darkness, and all that was visible

along the road are the headlights of the occasional passing cars and the moonlight on the high mountain peaks. My feet were extra warm from the heater in the Jeep. Jeremy believes that a person can become whoever he wants. He wanted to go to college and study Spanish, he said, but it was too expensive, so he went to Mexico instead. I studied the ice patterns on the window as they are illuminated by the reflection of our high-beam lights off the snow-covered pines. It was easy to see why Jim chose to make Telluride his home. “You’ll lack luxuries, such as comfort and companionship, and at other times (or at the same time) you’ll even miss out on necessities, such as food, sleep and shelter,” he wrote in a personal essay that defined his fervent approach to existence, submitted in his application to Princeton University. “You may be excited, bored, confused, desperate and amazed all in the same day Or hour.”

Telluride is one of the most beautiful places on earth, Jeremy agreed. But there is

something about the town that bothers him. It’s not so much the people who come here to ski, he said, but the people who own these huge houses and live in them for two weeks a year. While stealing is wrong, there is a part of him that hoped all along that James Hogue would make good on his promise and escape once more.

Cindy Putnam lives with her husband in a stand of new houses in a valley in Rico. There

aren’t enough new houses to call the place where Cindy lives a neighborhood or even a

subdivision. It looks like ten or twelve families found some decent land in a good location at a reasonable price and decided to cash in their chips and settle here. During the day she cleans other people’s houses, and she keeps her own small house spare and neat, without a single

overgrown plant or misplaced paperback. She is a gorgeous older woman from Iowa with long

blond hair that cascades down to the middle of her shoulder blades and the translucent skin of someone who has achieved a state of exceptional good health by paring away every stray gram of sugar and fat and every other substance that is not essential to proper nutrition. Her husband does landscaping, and their son Robin is in his second year of art school in Oregon. She was Hogue’s friend and running partner here in Telluride, although she still hasn’t visited him in jail.

Settling in on her beige couch with a glass of white wine, Cindy told me that she first met Hogue in January of 2000, on a bike path about three miles out of town. For a real runner, not running, even in the dead of winter in the Colorado Rockies, isn’t really an option, unless you take up skiing in a serious way. She is forty-eight years old, and started running in college in Montana. She ran nineteen miles a day with Hogue and her friend Kari Distefano, who ran for the U.S. team in the Olympics. She ran on the bike path because the trails were full of snow. One reason that she keeps running is that she enjoys the runner’s high, the feeling of losing track of time and being transported outside the limits of your own body, she told me, sitting up straight with her legs curled up beneath her and smiling brightly.

There is something entirely innocent but also mischievous about Cindy, a kind of

introvert’s sense of humor that makes it very pleasant to talk with her. The runner’s high is more like spacing out while driving at night than getting high on drugs, she explained. You can vanish entirely inside your own head.

“I just remember the day I met him,” she said, of her sometime running companion. “He

was running towards me, and there’s probably thirty or forty people who run fairly regularly in Telluride. And I didn’t recognize this guy”

It’s easy for Telluride runners to spot tourists, even if they’re in pretty good shape.

World-class runners often choose to live in places like Boulder and Albuquerque in order to improve their ability to absorb oxygen. The towns they choose for training purposes tend to be about five thousand feet above sea level. Telluride is closer to nine thousand feet, and the lung-expanding benefits of breathing the oxygen-thin air are outweighed by a decrease in the rate of leg turnover. Cindy had reached the turnaround point on the bike path, a scenic pathway

through the forests outside of Telluride, when Hogue stopped and stretched, and then began

running towards her. “He had great form, and he was running towards me really fast,” she

remembered. “Usually I’m competitive enough that I’ll try to not let somebody catch me,” she added. She quickly realized that she didn’t stand much of a chance of outrunning her new

companion, who turned out to be modest and encouraging. “He said, ‘Oh no, I’m just trying to get back into running. I haven’t run much since college.’”

The man she met barely looked thirty, which meant that he was still at his peak as a

distance runner. She introduced her new friend to Kari Distefano, who could run faster than any man in Telluride. Running up to twenty miles a day together, Cindy and Kari learned that their new friend had in fact been an Olympic-caliber runner, until he had suffered a trauma that had stopped his college running career cold. Arriving at the University of Wyoming on a track

scholarship, he told them, he had found himself competing against more mature Kenyan athletes in their late twenties who had been recruited by the college and were headed for the Olympics.

“Kari got a big kick out of the story, ’cause she thinks that it’s great for American

distance running that the Kenyans did show up and forced everybody to run faster,” Cindy

remembered. “But I felt sort of bad for him.” She was charmed by Hogue’s offhand humor and

boy-next-door demeanor. When she complained about her worn-out gloves, he brought her a

brand-new pair of expensive Marmot ski gloves that he claimed to have found at a swap meet.

Hogue also showed a parental interest in Cindy’s son Robin, who was then twelve years

old and having trouble in school. “He’d tell me, ‘Well, you know, he draws all the time, and he writes,’ “ she remembered, trying out a dead-on imitation of Hogue’s quiet drawl.” ‘I wouldn’t worry about him. He’s obviously a smart kid.’”

In addition to his degree from the University of Wyoming, Cindy learned, Hogue had a

master’s degree in engineering from Princeton University. He had purchased a large ranch in the San Luis Valley, a remote and shockingly beautiful area with huge valleys shadowed by some of Colorado’s tallest mountains. The nearest town was Cuchara, a small ski area that was famous for getting lots of natural snow, and for attracting a mixed bag of artists and writers and cult-like Christian groups who shared in common an attraction to extreme isolation and natural beauty.

There is an inspirational quote from the runner George Sheehan that Cindy had found in

an old issue of
Runner’s World
magazine and mentioned to me earlier in our conversation: “The more I run, the more I want to run, and the more I live a life conditioned and influenced and fashioned by my running.” When she was younger, Cindy told me, and didn’t have any money to travel, she used to enjoy making up stories about having lived in faraway places like New

Zealand. She told these stories to people she met at bars or parties and whom she was unlikely to ever see again.

Cindy’s habit of telling tall tales is familiar. On long bus trips, talking with strangers, I made up a past for myself as a kid who’d grown up on U.S. Army bases. I had never been to a U.S. Army base in my life, I told Cindy. Perhaps there was something I was trying to express about myself that could best be expressed in a lie. I’d moved around a lot in my twenties, and grew up outside of what might be generally considered to be normal American society. I was

raised by a loving mother who worked and a loving father who was subject to sudden, intense outbursts of anger which in my adulthood I have mostly taken out on myself by smoking two or three packs of cigarettes a day and using illegal drugs. In a funny way, the drugs connected me to my childhood, because they gave me a solid feeling of connection to a higher truth that was invisible to everyone around me. I was raised in an orthodox Jewish community where I wore

special clothes that were intended to set me apart from the people I saw on the street. I prayed three times a day, observing holidays and fast days where it was forbidden to drink a glass of water or swallow a mouthful of toothpaste. Partly as a result of my father’s anger, or the

suffocating austerity of the lifestyle that was imposed upon our family, or my own faulty

chemistry—who knows why, exactly?—I felt uncomfortable in my own skin. I remember getting

off the bus one day in my late twenties, and walking in the rain—I think I was going from

Portland to Eugene, Oregon.

“That’s where my son is in school,” Cindy interrupted. It rains all the time in Eugene, I

told her. The experience of walking away from that bus felt like the way Cindy described the runner’s high. Where did those last five miles go? There was something scary about the ease with which I became a new person, a fictional character, with attributes that had bubbled to the surface five minutes ago and had never been part of my identity before. The person sitting next to me conducted a long conversation with a made-up person that wasn’t me, while I sat

somewhere off to the side, observing. The sense of power I obtained through the practice of self-abstraction was undeniable. At the same time I felt cold inside, and detached from my own body.

Perhaps one reason that James Hogue has held my interest for the past ten years is that I

felt like there was an understanding between us that would make it possible for us to speak with each other in a meaningful way. He was a member of the Ivy Club at Princeton. He was a

homeless drifter who exposed the emptiness and pretense at the heart of the so-called American meritocracy. He was an impostor, a teller of fantastical tales, a perversely self-destructive imp.

My Russian grandfather would have called Hogue a
chort
—a devil. I found him mildly amusing and mildly off-putting in person, but I took pleasure in the mischievous spirit that animated his cons. The best of his lies were only minor, handmade versions of the greater institutional lie that has encouraged any number of successful Ivy League graduates to believe that their youthful achievements were something other than an inheritance from their parents and grandparents. He was Exhibit A in my personal catalog of reasons why the Ivy League should be abolished, a

cause to which he contributed in a unique and highly original way that all the self-satisfied inheritors of privilege around him could never have dreamed up, even as he hurt some of the people that he met in ways that they could never forgive or forget.

Hogue was a convicted fabulist who attempted again and again to impose the freaks of

his imagination on the world around him, a practice that struck me as being entirely in the American vein. Americans are fibbers. Our national literature celebrates the whopper and the tall tale, beginning with the story of the boy who could not tell a lie. The fact that we lie like crazy while pretending to always tell the truth is such a common narrative strategy in American