Across the aisle from us on the train to Pamplona, I saw a man reading a newspaper.  I nodded toward the front page, which faced us all the way he was holding it, and said something like ¨there it is¨ to Shane, Carl, and Johnny.  The cover photo showed a bull relentlessly pinning a man against a barricade, and the headline read to me, in my limited Spanish, like a tribute to the bull.  ¨Caramelo es el toro mas peligro¨it said.  Well, hats off to Caramelo for being so very ill tempered and dangerous.  We asked to borrow the paper, and we learned that the reader was one of a group of four gentlemen, a little older than ourselves, 30s probably, who had run with the bulls the day before.  One of them was more talkative and gregarious than the others, and he shared a lot of advice and warnings (not rare commodities at all in Pamplona, but we were all ears, this being the first first-hand testimony we´d heard).  He told us where and how early to position ourselves in the square to be sure to be included in the running, he spoke of the terror in people´s eyes when the bulls were coming, terror in the eyes when bulls weren´t coming but people thought they were, and he told us we would ¨feel alive¨.  One guy in the group was far more quiet and reticent than the others--one might say ¨shell-shocked¨.  He wore a knit cap pulled low over his brow.  His expression was always eerily blank, his eyes were glassy and he seemed to be using them to peer through the veil of appearances into the heart of darkness.  He did not lift his head from the headrest of his seat even to speak.  This man went further down into the spiral of the bull run festivities than his friends had.  He ran fast enough or positioned himself far enough down the course to make it into the stadium before the gates were shut.  I had kind of read up on it beforehand, but talking to these guys clarified some things and refreshed my memory.

In the morning, there are two parts to the bull run.  The first part is when six bulls, the six slated to participate in the bull fights that evening (¨participate¨here means ´die in¨), are released from a holding pen and sent running through the streets in a specified path that ends in the stadium at Plaza del Toros.  People are allowed to be in the streets to either cower, climb, dodge, or run alongside the bulls, depending on their skill level and bravery.  It doesn´t take the bulls much longer than 2 minutes to get from pen to pen, and a group of more docile steer are released slightly after the bulls to be sure the bulls find their way and don´t get too preoccupied with being on an uninhibited murderous rampage.  The second part of the tradition, following the running through the streets, is for those runners who make it into the stadium with the bulls before the gates are closed.  The six bulls are safely locked away, but some other bulls, their horns dulled a little bit with some foreign substance covering the tips, are let out one at a time to play.  In this second phase, I´m guessing there are about 300 or 400 people in a ring not quite as large as a baseball field.  300 or 400 people, and a confused, lost, angry bull.  The bull is permitted to run loose in the ring until it tires itself out from sprinting on a non-stop search and destroy mission.  Then a huge, but much better behaved, steer is released to guide the bull back to the pen.  This is repeated 4 or 5 times, for a total of 45 minutes or an hour.

But I didn´t get a good, thorough description of this from the guys on the train.  If I may shamelessly foreshadow for a moment, I picked up most of it through my own experience.  But anyway, the shell-shocked guy, who seems less to me like a weathered veteran and more like a bombastic pantywaste (sp?), told us with genuine horror glazing his eyes and dripping from his voice, ïf I had it to do over again, I would not go in the ring.  I saw a lot of people hurt in there.  It was an amazing experience, but I wouldn´t do it again.¨ About this time, Johnny is tugging at his collar and rubbing the back of his neck with his palm, saying ¨I probably won´t go in the ring.  I´ll probably just run.¨ I don´t point this out to embarrass him, only to make his reckless courage the next morning a little bit more surprising and inexplicable.  At this very moment of writing, I still find his actions surprising, inexplicable, courageous, and reckless.  

On the train, listening to survivor stories, looking at graphic, lurid newspaper pictures, looking at casualty statistics on a pie graph, fear became real.  I felt it in my body, like a foreign substance slowly filling a vessel from bottom to top.  I had anticipated this moment back home in the States.  I´d already bragged to a few people ¨I´m gonna run with the bulls¨before I had a chance to really be still and alone with my thoughts, and then that sentence sounded a lot more like it ended in a question mark.  ¨I´m gonna run with the bulls?  Really?  Am I?  Um, why, again?¨ So, I felt the fear become real back then, and I knew there was more to conquering it than simply denying it.  It´s too real to deny.  And now I´m on a train to Pamplona, not in South Bend, Indiana.

We met up with Mike and Greg and Chris and Sarah and Sarah in Pamplona, sat down together for a meal again, and the three guys had stories because they all ran that morning.  Greg and Chris had made it into the stadium, too, and they brought  it back down to earth a little bit.  Greg even had digital photos on his camera from inside the ring, which were impressive, but also soothingly demystifying.  Our friends confirmed a lot of the advice we heard on the train, passing on the unanimous wisdom of the ages to those who needed to hear:  if you fall, don´t move, just cover your head until all the bulls have passed.  If you want to make it to the stadium, make sure to start far enough down the course,  you can´t keep up with the bulls for 900 yards.  Do not stand in Dead Man´s Curve.  Listen carefully ¨Dead Man´s Curve¨ Yeah, don´t.  That´s where a group of bulls collectively weighing many tons slams into the wall because they can´t navigate a 90 degree turn at high speed.  We walked through the course with them, and Mike, Chris and Greg all pointed to the spots where they believed they were, to the best of their adrenaline-clouded recollection.  They left Pamplona with the extra touchy-feely goodbyes befitting possible death the next day.

Pamplona was a drunken, orgiastic fiesta that night, but I was having none of it.  Shane was having even less of it--he left the city int he late afternoon in favor of a park across the river, where he set up base camp for us.  I think he had pretty much the same instinct that I did, to rest and prepare, mentally and physically.  I spent the entire evening at an internet port, where I worked hard but temperately at catching my online journal up to date.  When it closed at 11:00, I made my way through town toward the park, stopping only to buy some food for immediate consumption, and perhaps pick out a little something calming, plain, and ordinary to eat and drink in the morning.  The town was lively and pretty well buzzed at 11:00, and while that night I retreated to peace and quiet to get myself ready for the next morning, I saw enough with my own eyes the next night to interpolate what went on while I slept in the park, between 11:30 and 4:30.  In short, the town went ahead and got smashingly drunk.  People filled bars to overflowing, and flowed on out into the streets until the streets were full, too.  Dressed in traditional white and red, people danced and sang and puked and pissed all over.

Shane set the alarm on his watch for 3:00 a.m., but that´s just something stupid we continue to do knowing full well that it has no effect.  Soft beeping does not wake a human being.  Nervous anticipation does a much better job of that.  I woke up naturally at about quarter after 4, looked at my watch, and calmly announced the time to the guys as  away to wake them up.  We didn´t have much to say to each other as we packed up and got ready to go to town.  There wasn´t really a surplus of conversation as we waited the 3 1/2 hours until the run.  We said what we needed to say, and we were all free to say what we wanted, but nobody abused the freedom to distract himself from the task at hand with nervous chatter.

We got to the square in front of the governor´s mansion almost an hour earlier than even our most reliable sources recommended.  It was one of those things that are so important to you, and yet so hard to believe, that it makes you a little superstitious and obsessive-compulsive about making sure it happens.  I felt the same way about the trip as a whole before it started.  Speaking of superstition, on the way to drop off our packs at a baggage check place before the run, on the very same hill where they first release the bulls, a scruffy black cat ran right across our path about 10 feet in front of us.  I looked at Shane, and he said ¨that´s not a good sign, is it?¨ Johnny said ¨yeah, that black cat almost crossed our path.  That was close.¨  I couldn´t help laughing.  Almost?  I´ve never seen a more textbook case of denial.  We debated some about how close a black cat actually has to be to technically cross your path.  Johnny maintained, with all seriousness, that that one owas ¨too far away¨.  I maintain that that was my path, and the cat perpendicularly bisected it at a distance close enough to startle me.  I mean, what does the cat have to do, trip you?

Darkness changed to daylight while we waited in the square.  We were there as they swept the streets, and then hosed them down for good measure.  We watched as they carted in and assembled the thick wooden barricades that would separate runners from spectators, and later conjoin runners and bulls.  It got crowded and noisy as the time approached 7:00 a.m.  A big machine passed a TV camera back and forth overhead, and people in the crowd of runners reacted  like they do at college football games, except instead of saying their team was #1, this time they had a little more right to say ¨I´m cool!  I´m #1!¨ Almost everyone had on the uniform, white pants and shirt with red neckerchief and red sash around the waist.  Carl went all out, and he had ¨the look¨ totally nailed.  Johnny and Shane were in street clothes, althought Johnny added a sash and Shane added leather gloves to further incense the bulls.  All I added was a thugish red bandana rolled and knotted and cocked to the side 4 Life.

At 10 minutes to 8:00, officials removed some barricades around the square to give the runners a chance to go ahead down the course and find their spots.  I didn´t know exactly how to feel.  You don´t need to run yet, and there´s certainly no call for panic, you have 10 whole minutes before the first bulls are released.  But then again, you think ¨hey, it´s 10 minutes and counting, and this isn´t practice.  What if somebody gets to my spot before me, and what if there are too many people competing for the same spots?  Hasn´t everybody been hearing and recirculating exactly the same advice?¨  So my pace quickened or slackened depending on what was running through my mind at the time, and also how susceptible I was to the influence of the mob, whether they were moving fast or slow.  I was feeling out my footing on the uneven cobblestone streets, and I was also discovering on the fly how to navigate through people with my hands without doing them any harm or throwing them off balance.  I kept my hands up a lot of the time ot announce my presence to other people and detect what was in front of me when I was looking backwards.  I was definitely getting the hang of everything, and it felt good.  The four of us could only manage to stay together through about half the course.  Shane was spotted using his video camera by a cop, who dragged him forcefully outside the barriers.  I don´t think he could resist taping the people leaning over balconies, two, three, or four stories above us, cheering us on.  Then the first rocket sounded, signaling the release of the bulls, and the location of Carl and Johnny slipped to the back of my mind.  Apparently, I needed some ¨me¨ time.  

My strategy for avoiding the bulls on the street was formed by transposing some advice I´d heard.  I´d been told that bottlenecks are dangerous parts of the run, because when the bulls have a wider space to run and they´re forced into a narrower space, they´re more likely to be running flush against the walls.  So I had picked out a place on the street where there was the opposite of a bottleneck, where the street widened slightly.  I thought that if the bulls kept running straight as they left the narrow space, there ought to be room enough on the side for me and maybe a few close friends.  I didn´t have time to be afraid as the bulls passed me.  They were going about as fast as a truck, and they stayed in the lane I wanted them to stay in.  I could have been afraid if they dawdled for some reason and took notice of me, but they didn´t.  I could have also been afraid if they didn´t notice me but weren´t where I expected them to be, but that wasn´t the case, either.  They flew by, and I didn´t have time for or reason to be afraid, but that doesn´t mean I didn´t feel anything.  I was surprised and quite impressed by how fast they were going.  They were moving so fast, all one bigwhite and tan blur, that I couldn´t tell how many there were.  I saw rippling muscle and horns.  They seemed to be covered with rippling muscle and horns.  Getting into the arena became my top concern.  The bulls had caught me standing still, and I knew that they closed the doors to the stadium as soon as all the bulls and steer are in.  Two groups of bulls had passed, and I didn´t know how far behind the steer would be, so this was the point where I ran with urgency and had to thread my way through the crowd.  As it happens, I won my race against time by the widest of margins.  It felt like the steer were several minutes behind me, but I got a charge out of coming through the tunnel into the stadium, a narrow bottleneck in its own right, without knowing how far behind me a herd of charging steer was.