Getting back into the race
digg it!
Facebook
del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit
BY COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star
HURON, S.D. — This is the first thing he remembers: It's dark. Maybe 3 a.m. He's in his hospital bed in Rapid City about a month after the seizure.
Something takes hold of his legs and pulls him to the foot of the bed.
He hears animal noises. Buffalo.
He thinks he's hallucinating, or dying. Then he remembers the vision he had five years before, when he was a boy in a sacred run around the Black Hills.
The brown buffalo and the white buffalo cornered him on the road, told him he would be the fastest runner around.
You are a good boy, Patrick. … Don't lose yourself.
v v v
"All runners, pull your sweats!"
Patrick Grass shakes his legs and arms to keep his muscles warm. He hops high on his Nikes, splattering mud on his legs.
He's smiling through the pressure of being Patrick Grass, the three-time South Dakota Class A cross country champ from Pine Ridge, a national all-American.
Even though he's no longer the fastest runner around.
He hears his coach's advice in his head.
Get to the front. Don't get bottled in.
Broadland Creek Golf Course is in the white farming town of Huron, six hours across the state from Pine Ridge. It rained a couple of inches overnight. It's windy, muddy and cold this late October afternoon. Just the way he and the other Pine Ridge kids like it.
A former teammate in jeans sneaks into the starting block to shake Patrick's hand.
"Good luck. Hope you take your fourth one."
Austin Tollefson, now in college in the Black Hills, tells Patrick he drove across the state just to encourage him today.
Patrick is a legend on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Not just because he's so fast, Austin says. He's a good guy, too. He pulls himself up, and, in his quiet way, pulls the people around him up, too.
Now they're lifting him.
Doctors say he had a seizure in May. He spent weeks in a Rapid City hospital, sitting in a chair like a zombie. He could barely speak.
Didn't want to run.
People on the reservation say someone dumped drugs in his beer at a party. His mom isn't sure about that. He used to get seizures as a little kid, she says, maybe because she drank when she was pregnant.
The fastest runner now may be his best friend and nephew, Alex Wilson Pine.
Alex is the Pine Ridge runner winning meets this season. Patrick didn't make the first meet. He was sick, he said.
Alex kept coming around in the mornings, picking Patrick up for school, taking him to work up a sweat on the reservation roads. Alex knows running is medicine for Patrick.
Patrick placed near the bottom at the first big meet. Alex kept an eye on him to catch him if he fell. He didn't.
Each meet, he placed higher. He started working hard again. He placed fifth at regional, good enough to stand here today, smiling and trash-talking with Alex about who will finish first.
Alex worries what will happen tomorrow, though, when cross country is over. Will Patrick still come to school? Or will he just sit around his house again staring blankly at the TV?
"Feeling good?"
"Yeah," Patrick says, still smiling. "It's a good day to run."
Come out like a racehorse, his coach told him.
Patrick's older brother isn't here.
In August, Wes Cottier and his wife got in a fight on the dirt out front of Patrick's duplex. She'd come from work for the babies. Said they were filthy. Wes had been drinking again.
The cops came and put Wes, a former cop, in jail.
He and his wife are back together, living and working in Iowa. They are happy again, Jen Cottier says, now that she pulled him out of that duplex.
Patrick's mom isn't here.
She couldn't make payments on the pickup after quitting her cleaning job at the hospital. She and Patrick's sister, Alex's biological mom, couldn't find a ride to Huron.
Patrick's dad, once one of the fastest runners around, isn't here, either.
One day a few weeks before the state meet, Patrick and Alex decided to run along Nebraska 87 through the town of Whiteclay, the town of beer stores just south of the dry reservation. The boys ran past the people drunk in the dust outside the stores.
One was Clifford Grass.
He shouted, lifting a beer in the air.
Hey, runners! Go, runners!
Patrick looked away.
Don't lose yourself.
He prays when he runs.
For his family. For his team. For his Lakota people. That's always the way it's been for him, ever since he was a kid in his first Sacred Hoop Run around the Black Hills and the two buffalo told him to take the good road.
Patrick slaps hands with Alex and the others one last time.
They stand in the starting box, wearing thin red shorts and tanks, a colorful line of 133 runners. Patrick knows he'll be lucky to break the top 25 today. His heart beats fast.
Maybe the fastest around.
A man raises a gun to the blue sky and high white clouds, like feathers in the wind.
A herd breaks loose over the slippery grass.
vvv
He stands with the Pine Ridge High boys on the platform to receive their big team plaque. They placed fourth.
Patrick finished 12th. Alex placed third. The winner finished 15 seconds slower than Patrick's time the year before.
But a month after the state tournament, even with college coaches still interested in him, Patrick stops running. He stops going to school.
One cold morning in January, Alex walks into Patrick's house.
He wakes Patrick up, asks him to go to the school with him. It's the week to register for the new semester at Pine Ridge High.
Sure, Patrick says. But let me shower first. Go ahead. I'll be there soon.
He doesn't go.
"I go so good like that," Patrick says later that day at the duplex. "But then I just quit one day. It goes good like that … I don't know. I just start missing."
That night at his house, Alex and his dad, Dale Pine, talk about Patrick at the table.
When there's no season to run, they're saying, it's like Patrick sees no reason to go to school.
"I asked him a couple times, ‘What are you going to do if you don't finish high school?'" Alex says. "I ask him, ‘Don't you want to go to college and get out of Pine Ridge?'"
During Patrick's illness, the coach says, he told all the college coaches Patrick would make it. And he did, physically. And he did, spiritually.
The coach shakes his head. His voice turns softer.
But why come to school, he says, when you can't read? Why come to school when you stare at a book for five minutes and can't remember what it says?
vvv
Patrick has a new girlfriend. She's a nice girl, everybody says.
Alex has been teasing Patrick about starting a family with her, asking him if there's going to be a bunch of little Patrick Grasses running around the reservation.
Yeah, Patrick tells him. They're going to run cross country at Pine Ridge High, and Coach Pine will be there, shouting instructions at them from his wheelchair, and he'll be there, too, in the crowd.
A proud father cheering as they run by.
Hey, runners! Go runners!
Yeah, Patrick says, smiling. They're going to be the fastest around.
Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.
Post Your Comment
Standards and RulesYour posted comment will appear after it has been approved.
Frequently asked questions about story commenting.