Hugo Schwyzer

Ten days ago, I noted the passing of my uncle, Peter Roeding Butler. His obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle appears today, and it seems the right time to write a short tribute.

Uncle Peter was both my uncle and my cousin. He married his second cousin, my mother’s sister Marianna, after they met at a family reunion. As his obituary makes clear, he was born and raised in Hawaii, but spent most of his adult life in the Bay Area.

My parents divorced when I was six; though I stayed close to my father, after their separation, he rarely came to family gatherings at our Northern California ranch. My maternal grandfather had died in 1969, and this meant that Uncle Peter was perhaps the central male figure at the ranch in my childhood. At Easters and Thanksgivings and Christmas gatherings throughout the 1970s, Peter was one of the two senior men on the premises. (The other vitally important man in my growing up years was my great-uncle, Stanley Williams Moore, the late philosopher.) Uncle Peter was the first Santa Claus I can remember, and for years, he ran our small “safe and sane” ranch Independence Day fireworks show to the great delight of his children and nephews and nieces.

I don’t think I would have become an endurance athlete if it wasn’t for Peter Butler. He started running the first of his 81 marathons in the mid-1970s (I’ve run 13 to date, and have a long way to go to catch him). In the summer of 1978, he and my aunt came to visit us in Carmel; they decided to stay at a little inn out in the valley, about eleven miles from our home by the sea. One weekend morning Peter, always eager for a run, sent my aunt Marianna ahead to our house. He wanted to make the journey to our place on foot, but was worried about getting lost. My mother sent me, aged 11, out on a bike to meet him; I would accompany him the final miles to our place.

I knew the drive from our house out to Carmel Valley Village well. I remember bicycling about five miles up the valley to our agreed-upon meeting point, amazed that anyone could run as far as my uncle was running that day. I had heard of marathons, but I didn’t know how long they were; running eleven miles (when I had a hard time biking that far) seemed absurd. It seemed impossibly heroic. And on that summer day in 1978, I waited for my uncle at the top of a little hill in the valley. After a few minutes, I saw him. It was a warm day, and he ran in a sweat-soaked singlet and red shorts. He was a tall man — about 6′2″, well over 200 pounds, with a frame that was never ideal for running. (I’m an inch and a half shorter and of somewhat slimmer build — it makes endurance work much easier). To little eleven year-old me, Peter was a great big bear of a man, all power and muscle and will. I was awed as I watched him ascend towards me. I handed him the bottle of water I had brought, and slowing only slightly, he drank most of it down. “Hugo”, he said, “take me to the ocean!”

I brought him the rest of the way, riding far enough ahead not to bother him, constantly looking over my shoulder as I did so. His strength and his purpose amazed me; at that age, I was fascinated by mythology, and I remember thinking he looked like a drawing I had seen of Woden, the great father god of the Norse. I took him to Carmel Beach, and watched him plunge into the water, bellowing like a delighted moose. I was utterly transfixed. The next day we drove out to Carmel Valley to see Peter and Marianna, and I remember staring out the window in amazement as the miles rolled by, scarcely able to conceive what it would be like to run all that way.

It would be nearly two decades before I ran my first marathon, at Los Angeles in 1998. It would be 25 years before I would run my first ultra, here in our local mountains in 2003. As soon as I started training, however, I sought out advice from my uncle. He urged me to do as many miles as possible on dirt rather than asphalt; in his later years, he had both knees and a hip replaced as a result of having logged too many hard road miles in too short a time on too big a body. My own father, whom I loved with all my heart, did not share my growing fascination with endurance sports. Peter was a role model and a mentor for me; I bought my Trek 5000 bicycle because it was what he had. He and I had our last long talk about running last August. He couldn’t run in his later years, but still biked and swam. I heard the wistfulness in his voice as we talked of my latest workouts, and I remember his gentle admonition to continue to “take it easy” so that I would still have my knees in my old age.

My Uncle Peter took me to my first college football game (at Cal, of course); he was the first person to explain the rules of that sport to me. (And by God, he could spot a holding penalty faster than anyone!) My Austrian-born, English-raised father had no interest in American sports –Peter did, and it was with him that I watched countless hours of football, baseball, and other sports on television. With my mother and father separated (however amicably), I needed and craved grown men in my life: Peter Butler was one of a very small number who was there for me through what was, truth be told, a difficult and often unhappy childhood. I am grateful beyond words for that.

Peter became a family activist. There’s a park in Fresno, Roeding Park, named for my great-great grandparents. In 2004, our family fought an unsuccessful legal battle to keep an expanded zoo out of the park. My ancestors gave that land to Fresno for quiet contemplation and recreation, not the exploitation of animals. The voters of Fresno didn’t see it that way, alas, but my Uncle Peter was the leader of a large family coalition that fought to keep the park’s future use consistent with the intent of the original bequest.

He was justifiably proud of his nickname of “Ironman”, earned when he finished an early edition of the famed Hawaii Ironman Triathlon (at 50). Though I followed him into endurance sports, I never thought of him as “ironman.” The great ultramarathoners I train with don’t think of themselves as made of iron. We are, in the end, ordinary men and women who push our bodies to do extraordinary things. Iron rusts. Iron can’t bend, can’t expand, can’t grow any stronger than it already is. My uncle grew more tender and more loving with age. At times he could be hard and inflexible, like many of us. But his heart, his generosity, his genuine vulnerability, always seemed to trump that hardness, that iron aspect of his identity. He was my uncle and my cousin, a role model throughout my life. In his later years, he was also my friend, and I will miss him.

All true endurance athletes are happiest going uphill, I think. Whether on a bike or on foot, we love to climb and climb. Next to being in the arms of my wife, I am most at peace when I am alone, running up a mountain on switchback after switchback, the longed-for summit growing slowly closer. The downhill that follows is usually less relief than it is anti-climax. In a short documentary made for the family by his son Dean, my uncle Peter spoke last year about this longing to ascend endlessly, the sense that life itself is a long, often difficult but also joy-filled climb. Not much more than six months before his death my uncle remarked, “I’m not at the summit yet, but it’s in sight.” When I saw the DVD (produced for his 75th birthday last fall) and heard those words, I gasped aloud and began to weep. On a visceral level, I got what he meant instantly. His life was filled with joy, but also with an endless sense of struggle. And I have so much of that in me, more perhaps than most of the rest of his family.

I am no poet, though I love verse. Years ago, I wrote a haiku about running up, up, up. I’ve modified it a few times, but here’s the original:

Climbing the mountain
Blazing summit in my sight
There is no descent

There is no descent, Peter. You can stay on top of the mountain now.

I’m running the San Francisco Marathon on July 29; I’m dedicating that race — and the training season until then — to him.