This is a continuation of Bayou Bryan and the Huba Buba Classic – Part 1: The Office.

Now we find ourselves in Natchez, Mississippi on road to the Huba Buba Classic where we stayed at Hotel Erola.

The Hotel Erola was both a faded Art Deco masterpiece and a relative architectural newcomer to Natchez. The wide streets and the slave era mansions had been largely spared by Sherman’s Union army in 1865 after Vicksburg had fallen, 100 miles to the north. Natchez remained intact and relatively serene as the final and fatal hemorrhage to the Southern supply lines brought the war to a close.

I ran to the river along the high cliffs that gave Natchez its military value during the Civil War. To the north were great advancing clouds of rain, dark and magnificent, punctuated by random and ferocious strikes of lightning. Down below was the Big Muddy, unperturbed by a mere storm no different than the thousands that had beat on its banks before. There were flowers everywhere along the cliff; I had no idea what kind – whites, pinks, and lavenders, all beautiful in the face of the advancing storm.

I dreamt of a finish line that I had never seen, besting runners I did not know.

I looked west into what remained of the sunset, across the river to Louisiana and the immediate future. We would be in Lafayette tomorrow, and two days later, I would run in the Huba Buba. Since the past October, this esoteric world championship had taken an ever increasing importance in my life. I had found myself talking of it incessantly and I did not care. As the Canadian winter had closed me in, my mind staked out a position somewhere on the imagined Huba Buba race course, poised to deliver my killer finishing kick. In my workouts on the snowy streets in Ontario I synthesized the pure unadulterated rush of athletic triumph in Lafayette. Victory was now more than merely possible, it seemed fated and inevitable because it could be so powerfully imagined. Nothing was more important than a race that meant… nothing, in the greater scheme of our life. I made it more important than anything and I doubt that I shall ever truly understand why.

I felt that spirit as I looked west that evening. It was a feeling of supreme invincibility – you, Bryan, can do whatever you want. This race and any other race you ever chose to run are yours to take, in sports and in the broader swing of your career or in life itself. It seems a crazy, almost absurd sensation now and it’s an embarrassment to recall given all that followed. We would run these races and make these junkets whenever we wanted! It’s yours! Take it!

We assume so often that because something is done once, it is available forever more.

I know now that it is better to do whatever “it” may be in the moment that it arises. Living for a future expectation over which you have imperfect control can be painful. I cast out such thoughts then. They had no chance against the push of those powerful feelings, as roiling and as determined as the Mississippi that passed below.

On the cliff, the rain was really close. The showers refracted in the weird half-light of sunset during the stupendous downpour that was being played out a quarter mile away to the north. I saw the graceful outline of Hotel Erola against the sky and I made a dash for it. As the advance guard of rain spattered on the pavement, I thought of the 200 pound Huba Buba weight minimum. A stripling of 187 pounds back in October, I had eaten like a condemned man for four months. Through weight training, revved up beer consumption, no limits desserts and my usual running routine, I weighed 199.6 pounds, stark naked, on the day we headed south. When we hit the gravy and biscuit eateries that first appeared in southern Ohio, I was home free.

A cataclysmic thunder clap boomed as I bounded into the Erola lobby. I stood there, sweating, as the rains poured onto the cobbled pavement. I was two days away from the one event I had built into something extraordinary.

“You can do whatever you want” – the most dangerous mantra on earth.

You say to yourself, quietly, that the rules are your own, and you are as limited as you choose to be. I had always fancied myself as a free spirit, cool and literate and athletic all at once – jock meets new age. I was privately smug in my certitude that I was not like other lawyers, so hidebound and so dull, for whom non-conformity was riding a Harley on the weekends or getting a tattoo; the really bold ones might do both. I saw myself as the edge. I could do what I wanted and winning this race was just a first step in an explosion of successes – the concussion from one detonating the next.

Over their protests, I dragged my wife Marianne and our children into the local joint called the Pelican for chili and the as advertised 50 cent beer, one last assault on the weight restriction for the Huba Buba. It was two days until the race, and a five mile triumph that was as certain as the sunrise.

The change that was triggered the day that I read about a world championship running race in Louisiana for big men was made complete that night in gorgeous old Natchez, as the rains washed along the antebellum streets. New water followed an ancient path to the great river, taking what was left of my old self along. I was headed to the Huba Buba, the battle in the bayou, and I was gone for nine years.

Read Bayou Bryan and the Huba Buba Classic - Part 3: The Starting Line.