Fable 5.1 [0b1d174]

No certified marathon is 42.195 kilometers long. The rules do not allow it.

A road course is measured by one person on a bicycle. First they ride a straight, steel-taped stretch of road four times, to learn how many clicks of the counter on the front wheel make a meter that morning. The answer is inflated by one part in a thousand. Then they ride the course along the shortest line a runner could legally take — every tangent cut, every corner hugged — and ride it again. The two rides must agree within eight hundredths of a percent, and where they differ the shorter one is believed, and the finish moves until it is satisfied. Last they ride the taped stretch four more times, because the tire has warmed across the day, and whichever constant makes the course longer wins.

Every fork in the procedure breaks the same way. A certified marathon is at least 42,237 meters, and the extra 42 are not the error. They are the method.

The counter is a Jones Counter, built by an IBM engineer near Binghamton after his first race, advertised as twenty kilometers, came up a mile short on his car's odometer. His nine-year-old son assembled them for a dollar apiece.

The method has teeth. In December 1984 someone re-rode the 1981 New York City Marathon and found it about 150 meters short. Alberto Salazar's 2:08:13, the fastest marathon anyone had run, stopped being a record three years after the fact. Nobody had cheated. The course had been short all along.

I like that the fastest people alive run a distance fixed by someone at cycling pace, hugging the curb, pretending to be greedier than any of them. Whatever the winner ran, the bicycle ran it first, and farther.

A laid hedge is a row of trees that have been cut almost in two and told to carry on.

The hedgelayer takes a billhook to each stem near the ground and chops downward, more than half way through, until the stem will bend. What is left is a hinge: bark, a little sapwood, the thin layer underneath that does the growing. The stem is pushed over to about forty-five degrees and laid along the line, and it lives. Sap crosses the hinge as it did before. In spring the laid stem throws new shoots up along its whole length, and the gap beneath it, where an animal used to get through, closes.

Cut too shallow and it will not bend. Cut too deep and you have firewood. The craft is the width of that tongue.

Hedgelayers lay uphill. Sap rises, they say, so the trees keep climbing through the wound. And they lay in a dialect. The Midland style, meant for cattle, keeps its brush on the field side, so a ton of bullock leans into old thorn rather than new shoots. The Welsh Border style packs the finished hedge with dead wood, because sheep nibble. Devon puts the whole thing on top of a bank. The society that keeps the craft counts around thirty-five styles, some belonging to a single estate. You can read the animal off the fence.

Then it grows out, ten or twenty years, sometimes fifty, and someone comes and does it all again.

I keep coming back to the arithmetic. The fence works because every tree in it was nearly killed, and the only thing still joining each one to its roots is the part the blade decided not to take.

A tower bell that swings full circle can weigh as much as a car and takes about two seconds to come round. You cannot hurry it and you can barely hold it. So an English tower cannot play a tune. The notes arrive as a falling scale, highest bell to lowest, and the most a ringer can do is nudge one bell a single place earlier or later in the line.

Out of that limit came an art with no melody in it. Change ringing: five to twelve bells, each struck once per row, every row a different order from the one before. The rules were first printed in 1668, and the strictest one has not moved. The unit of the art is the extent, every possible order of the bells, each sounded once. If any order comes round twice inside it, the performance is false. Not boring. False, the way an equation is false.

On seven bells the extent is 5,040 orders, three hours without a break. On eight bells the number is 40,320. A band at Loughborough rang every one of them in 1963, in seventeen hours and fifty-eight minutes, while eight umpires listened for a single repeated row.

What I keep turning over is where the music went. Nobody in the tower is expressing anything. Each ringer holds one bell's path through the method in their head and answers the calls with their whole body, and the rows come out of everyone at once. The sound is the receipt. Listeners hear something that never resolves, because it is not heading anywhere. It is heading everywhere, once.

Most music wants to come home. This kind is forbidden to, right up until the last row, when the bells fall back down the scale, treble to tenor, and the thing is allowed to be over.