In this week's second detour from Christopher McDougall's 2009 best-seller Born to Run, I have also found myself reading about a remarkable man named John Joseph Crowley.
He's mentioned only once in the book, in passing, and as a mere backdrop to one of the world's craziest athletic events, the Badwater Ultramarathon. That, as McDougall explains, requires participants to run 135 miles across Death Valley California, including a precipitous climb to "the Father Crowley lookout".
For indeed, having been born in Kerry 130 years ago this December, the man they named the lookout after did indeed to grow to be a priest, and to be based for most of his adult life in one of the most inhospitable places in America.
We’ll return to Crowley in a moment. First a few more details about the Badwater Ultra, to better convey the event’s insanity. Naturally, it is held every July, when daytime temperatures are at their worst, regularly reaching over 50 degrees Celsius.
Staff problem – Frank McNally on the strange Irish pilgrimage of Antonin Artaud
Ring Cycle – Frank McNally on Brendan Behan and the Fáinne wearers
Jail Journeyman – On Behan’s lighthouse, the glory of French supermarkets, and confidence-building Christian names
Don Juan’s date with destiny – Frank McNally on another great liberator with Kerry roots
That’s just the air. The ground gets even hotter, so that runners have to stay on the white lines of the road or the soles of their shoes might melt. Dehydration is one obvious hazard. Hallucinations are common too, as the hellish event progresses.
Because this part of California includes both the lowest and highest points in the US, the race was originally designed to go from the former to the latter. Since permits are now required to climb Mount Whitney, that’s no longer practicable.
Still, even walking through the area can be dangerous. One Badwater regular, Dr Ben "Badwater Ben" Jones, told McDougall he had to stop mid-event once to examine the body of a hiker found in the sands, making him perhaps the only athlete "who has ever performed an autopsy during a race".
Anyway, back to Fr Crowley, whose time in California was also dominated by water, good or bad. Born near Killarney on December 8th, 1891, he emigrated to Massachusetts a decade later, trained for the priesthood in Maryland, and then headed for Los Angeles.
Covering 30,000 square miles, the parish he moved to in 1919 was almost the size of Ireland. It was 200 miles from his most northern church – in a town named Bishop – to the most southern, a distance he covered in a Ford Model T. But comparisons with Ireland ended there.
Much of the parish was desert. Exceptions included the Owens Valley, where many of Crowley's parishioners lived and farmed. But as the local water supply was increasingly diverted to Los Angeles during the 1920s, the once-fertile valley became a wasteland too.
That was part of the backdrop to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, a film not so much about bad water as bad men.
Fr Crowley was posted elsewhere for a decade while the crisis developed. Returning to his former base in the 1930s, he found poverty and despair everywhere. For the rest of his life, he would campaign to bring the irrigation back to the valley and create new economic opportunities for the displaced farmers.
His big hope was tourism. Athletic masochists were an unsuspected market then but in meantime the Eastern Sierra could offer hunting, shooting, and fishing. The area also soon became popular as a film location, allowing Crowley to cultivate helpful friendships with Hollywood’s biggest stars.
One of his more spectacular promotional events, in 1937, was a thing called “the Wedding of the Waters”. It marked the opening of the road now followed by the ultrarunners, from Death Valley to Mount Whitney.
To celebrate, Crowley arranged for a gourd full of water from the US’s highest lake to be carried, over three days and by a relay involving everyone from a native American on horseback to a first World War combat pilot, to the country’s lowest reservoir, Badwater Sink.
Thanks to such stunts, the tourists duly came. But Crowley also brought the water back, eventually. On a visit to LA, he once locked the chief water engineer into a room until he agreed to build a new dam on the Owens river.
Alas, Fr Crowley’s life ended prematurely in September 1940 when, returning from yet another promotional visit in his old Ford, he hit a “steer” that had strayed onto the road. Veering into the path of a lorry, he was killed instantly, aged 49.
The aforementioned viewpoint of Death Valley, enjoyed by all who pass there except the climbing ultramarathoners, is more properly called the “Father Crowley Overlook”.
And forgotten as me may be in his native Ireland, the “Desert Padre” has not been overlooked by Californian geographers.
The viewpoint aside, he is also now commemorated by Crowley Lake, the body of water created when the Owens River was dammed.