The Gym That Walked Down Main Street

I want to tell you exactly how much it was, because people have argued with me about it at the café.

I had weighed all of it once, the year before, for the insurance man. There were eleven bars at 45 pounds each, and two lighter bars for the women just starting out. There were a little over 2,800 pounds of plates, from the 2-and-a-halfs up to the 45s. There were the dumbbells on their rack, about 700 pounds of those, and the kettlebells.

All of it together, not counting the racks or the benches or the rowing machine, came to just a hair over 4,000 pounds.

Four thousand pounds, three blocks, by hand.

When I said that number out loud on the sidewalk, Neva said, “That’s only a hundred pounds apiece if we get forty people.”

“We don’t have forty people,” I said.

“Not yet,” she said.

Word gets around a small town faster than any phone. One of the ranch wives called her sister. Her sister called the café. Somebody at the café said it out loud at the counter, and three men in seed caps put down their forks and paid for their eggs.

By nine o’clock there were twenty people on that sidewalk. By a quarter after, there were forty. I counted twice, because I did not believe it the first time.

Some of them were my members. Some of them were not, and had never set foot in a gym in their lives, and did not intend to start. They just picked something up and walked.

Four boys from the high school football team came down the street in their practice sweatshirts, because their coach had heard about it at the gas station. They each took a bar on one shoulder and walked down Main Street in single file like an honor guard. An old man in front of the drugstore took his cap off as they went by.

Two ranchers I did not know very well, men from out north of town who came in the winter to do their backs, went to their pickups and came back with a socket set and a pair of crescent wrenches. They had the first squat rack unbolted into its pieces in about fifteen minutes, the uprights and the crossmembers and the J-hooks in separate piles.

“Your dad build this?” one of them asked me, turning a bolt over in his fingers.

“He built the benches,” I said. “He bought the racks used, out of Rapid.”

“He used good bolts,” the rancher said, and put it in his shirt pocket so it would not get lost.

Then they each took an upright on one shoulder, seven feet of steel tube, and walked down the sidewalk with it like they were carrying fence posts out to a new line.

I carried a 45-pound plate against my hip, back and forth, trip after trip. I had my old maroon hoodie on, the one I have worn for years, and my hair up in a ponytail, and I remember the sun was so bright on the brick that I had to squint going one way and could see my own shadow going the other.

You learn things about your town when you carry iron down the middle of it on a Saturday morning.

You learn that the woman at the bakery will come out with a tray of day-old cinnamon rolls and set it on a folding chair on the sidewalk, and not say a word, and go back inside.