Michael Northrop

I went running a little later than usual tonight. I run 5 miles, which takes me around 45 minutes, so I was circling the Central Park reservoir from around 7:45 to 8:30. When I started, the sky was that thick, saturated gold that you sometimes get at the end of the day in the summer. When I finished, it was that light gray that you get the rest of the year. In between, I saw no fewer than four rats scurrying across the path in front of me, heading away from the water. Which means, of course: How many did I not see? And how many are flooding across that dusty little track now, with the sun down completely?

I wonder if they had gone to the reservoir to drink and, like, wash up. Or if they live there—river rats like running water, right? And the Central Park reservoir has running and water—and were heading toward the park and the city beyond to scavenge. To scavenge for garbage. To scavenge for garbage nocturnally. To scavenge for garbage nocturnally and maybe brush past your foot as you walk by a row of recycling bins.

Kind of cute, right? At least compared to the other 20 pages of image search results…

I will admit, I have gotten some class-A scares from rats late at night, but they aren’t scary at all when you’re running full-speed around a track at sunset. They’re just little animals sprinting—“booking it,” as we used to say at Salisbury Central School—to get out of your way. And, of course, flooding the trail, unseen, behind you.

I went for a run at the Central Park Reservoir yesterday. I did three laps, and my t-shirt was soaked through by the second. The path around the reservoir was full of tourists, and as usual, the Europeans were going the wrong way: walking clockwise in slow, ambling groups, right into the teeth of the type-A, Manhattan runners.

As I approached a group of Germans, I saw a little girl blindly pushing a stroller toward me. She was visible only as a mop of curly blond hair above the top of the thing and a pair of small pink hands along its sides. It seemed like I had plenty of Lebensraum to get by, but at the last second it was like someone radioed in a torpedo warning, because she veered due left, directly into my path. I literally had to hurdle it.

Replace the armored truck with a stroller, and you get the idea.

A stand-up stroller, turned sideways, is essentially an isosceles triangle, and I estimate that I cleared it at its midpoint. I was careful to lead with my left leg, which had to pass over the higher part of the slope, and trail my right. I made it with a few inches to spare. And so, once again, irrefutable Anglo-Saxon math triumphed over German aggression. The code-breakers at Bletchley Park would be proud.

An artist’s rendering of my leap.