Coping Mechanisms

Near the end of that first winter in Bulgaria, when I’d been in the country for a solid ten months, that’s when I knew that a needed a life preserver, or a ladder dropped from above, maybe a jolt of electricity to the heart - some sort of metaphorical life saving intervention. That winter the water in my toilet froze. I wore metal spikes on my shoes to walk thirty feet from my apartment in the center of town to the elementary school where I taught. I put my coffee pot on the headboard above my bed so all I had to do was flop one languid arm out from the warmth of my heavy wool blankets to hit the Start button, but it wasn’t enough and many days I still couldn’t get out of bed to face the day. 

My friend Tom called on a Friday night from his own lonely village three hours away. He asked what I was doing. 

    “Drinking.”

    “Drinking what?”

    “Black Ram.” He knew what I meant, the bottom shelf swill with a label that boasted un-ironically in bold, gallant letters: Black Ram Whiskey “Proud Inner Strength from the Legendary Hills.”

    “What are you mixing it with?” was his next question.

    “Tap water.”

    “Oof,” he said. “Are you ok?”

    “I can’t go outside for mixers,” I said. “The whole world is frozen and there are people out there who want me to converse in Bulgarian.”

When the snow melted, storks began to appear in the sky, and red and white martenitsi bracelets hung on every blooming tree to welcome the spring, Valya and Georgi came to my village of Chavdar for an annual site visit. It was one of the strangest things about the Peace Corps, that a program founded by John F. Kennedy to “promote world peace and friendship,” an agency that still attracts so many idealistic, save-the-world, free-spirit types, would involve so much bureaucracy. In one breathe the staff would say to you, “We are your friends. We are here to support you. You can talk to us.” And in the next moment they would pull out a clipboard and ask about the progress of your third mission goals, how you were “integrating” into the community, because sure, that’s how friends talk. 

Valya Demitrova, Director of Volunteer Relations, sat on the couch across from me in my cement-walled apartment. She was tall and cold and blonde with harsh, angular eyebrows, a thick Eastern European accent, and a prominent beauty mark just to the right of her upper lip. Georgi Vitkov, Assistant Outreach Director, sat next to her, stone-faced and utterly silent - the perfect henchman. After some disjointed small-talk Valya asked me, “What coping mechanisms are you employing to deal with the stress?” I knew what I could not say. I could not say, “Proud Inner Strength from the Legendary Hills.” So I answered, “I guess I’m running?”

Springtime in Chavdar was filled with the noises of a small, boisterous, close-knit community: the raucous laughter and shrill arguments of the teachers at the elementary school, the constant excited chatter of ninety school children all vying for the attention of the one American girl, neighbors greeting each other warmly from across every street and around every corner, the squealing tires of twenty-something man-boys, revving their engines before peeling out of the town square, tossing empty beer cans in their wake, followed by the grumbling disapproval of the old, hunched over babas shuffling through the town square with their grocery carts in tow. Every day was exciting, hilarious, overwhelming, beautiful, strange, exhausting. I soaked up as much as my heart and brain could handle in a day, and then I ran.

From one side of Chavdar to the other was 0.7 miles. A loop around the entire perimeter was barely three miles and staying within the village limit meant that the school children would follow, keeping up for miles at a time in their tattered flip flops, chattering happily as I panted for air. Some days I took the only paved road out of town which stretched for a mile and a half before linking up with what could arguably be called a highway to the next little village.  

In America no one would have given a second glance to the girl on the side of the road in running shorts, headphones in her ears, eyes on the ground, but in Bulgaria almost every car that passed stopped to see if I needed a ride.  

    “Какво правиш?” strangers would ask. “What are you doing?”

Even buses would pull over to offer their services. I would shake them off, explaining that I was “doing jogging” in my broken Bulgarian. When that didn’t work I added that I was “without money,” hoping this would be a more rational argument.

    “Безплатно!”

    “It’s free!” the bus drivers would insist, but still I declined and they would shake their heads and turn back to the rest of the passengers, announce that I had said “No,” and shrug their shoulders before finally closing the doors and continuing on to the center of town. 

One day in mid April something must have happened. It could have been a day when my students decided that instead of learning, they wanted to throw each others’ backpacks out of the second story window in our classroom. It could have been a day when I laid out all the ingredients for dinner and started heating my electric stove when the town’s power went off, and stayed off until the following morning. It could have been the day that I stood at the grocery store for ten minutes insisting that the woman behind the counter get me “an airport” instead of “lentils,” the words for which in Bulgarian both sound very similar. Whatever it was, on this particular day I burst from my apartment full of venom, looked toward the steepest hill in Chavdar and decided I was going to conquer that bastard. 

I started at a slow jog, plodding past the soccer field which was more divots than grass, past a group of sheep and their shepherd congregated around a water trough on their way back to their respective homes for the evening. I ran half way up the ascent then had to slow to a walk, then a hobble as I held my side the rest of the way up. I reached the summit wheezing hard and was about to start jogging again on the mercifully level ground when instead I came to a full stop, dropped my hands from my aching sides, and turned off my iPod to stare in silence. 

The hill overlooked a wide expanse of farmland, no homes or power lines or people anywhere in site, just a swath of trees to one side and a vast expanse of vibrant yellow sunflowers all turned towards me like the faces of a welcoming crowd. I stood and grinned back before continuing down a serenely winding path that lead through shady groves of trees and past babbling brooks. It felt like I’d found heaven, or at least my new favorite path.

By the time my friend Sharon in a village five hours away suggested I join her Facebook group titled, “I Think We Might Actually Run the Athens Marathon,” the idea of running 26.2 miles along the route of the original marathon in Greece did not seem like an outlandish fantasy. It seemed like a goal, something with parameters, a timeframe, a finish line. Maybe I need a goal, I thought, somehow ‘teach kids English’ has not been cutting it. 

I remember the train station that Friday, humming with activity and the sound my myself and six other Americans talking excitedly about training times and whether or not we would eat that running goo during the race. I remember the overnight train rain from one capital city to another, being rocked to sleep in the top bunk of the train car inches from the ceiling. I remember waking at 5:00am at the hostel, packing our bags so we could jump back on the train that night. I remember 5:30am, heading downstairs and a sound rising from somewhere outside, growing louder, engulfing us in the tiny stairway until someone yelled over the din, “It sounds like the building is being flushed down a toilet!” I remember by shoes squishing in the rain for the next four hours until the sun came out.

I remember sitting next to a fit, 40-something man on the bus on the way to the starting line who told me about all the marathons he’d run around the globe: London, Paris, Prague and the way he grimaced when I told him this was my first. 

    “A lot of hills,” he said. I remember scoffing at the people who were warming up on the track before the race and shoving a chocolate-filled croissant into my mouth like I was an invincible, inhuman running machine. I remember waiting in line at a Port A Potty six miles later when that croissant and my own hubris came back in the form of a wicked stomachache. 

I remember the video cameras set up at every 10 kilometers, poised to capture each triumphant moment of the race. I know that somewhere in the world there exists a video of me plodding along with my eyes on the ground, looking as if I am at the very brink of vomiting while a white-haired man, his back just beginning to show the hunch of age runs past me, turns around and trots backward across the 20K mark waving directly at the camera with a giant grin on his face. I remember that a marathon is a humbling experience indeed.

Seventy-two hours after I’d left, my feet touched ground back in my tiny village. The first snow of the season was floating to the ground and the streets were nearly deserted. The din of the village had dispersed. Everyone had moved inside to hunker down for the cold. I learned that school was closed for the whole week thanks to the flu, which felt like a godsend, and then a curse after the forth day spent alone in my apartment.

So I began at a slow jog, my knees aching with each impact, still recovering from their long sojourn. I hobbled up my favorite hill, feeling as if I had aged fifty years overnight. When I finally made it to the top I was greeted by a cold blast of wind that stung my eyes. As I squinted over the field, I saw a sea of brown dirt and the remnants of sunflower stalks, jagged, and broken after the harvest. I thought of school beginning again on Monday, of the roads freezing over, of the end of my running, of Black Ram Whiskey, and hours spent alone in my apartment and wondered what coping mechanisms I would use for another Bulgarian winter.