You Gore Girl!

Women should always go with their instincts. That’s Ruth Saint’s motto from now on. When her daughter Lindsey announced this past spring that she’d be spending her summer studying and traveling in Spain, Ruth’s gut turned a somersault.

“I have a feeling something’s going to happen to you, and I won’t be able to get to you,” she told her daughter, who was just finishing her first year at the University of Kansas.

“Mom, nothing’s going to happen,” Lindsey replied. “Give me a break.”

There was more evidence to support Lindsey’s point of view than Ruth’s. The nineteen-year-old might as well have responsible tattooed on her forehead. Every year during high school, her name topped the honor roll at Blue Valley High School. She gained membership to the National Honor Society and the National Spanish Honor Society. She was a National Merit Scholar and co-valedictorian. She had nabbed a package of scholarships to attend KU. Plus, she’d worked a part-time job since she was fourteen, even socking away some of the money. During the school year in Lawrence, she serves meals to homeless people.

Though Lindsey is anything but a reckless, disaffected youth, Ruth couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen. Her mind zoomed back to almost a decade earlier, when Lindsey was in fourth grade and the family lived in Stillwell, Kansas, a few miles beyond Johnson County’s southernmost cul-de-sacs. It was Labor Day weekend. Ruth was shopping at a wallpaper store in nearby Stanley when a clerk tracked her down and said she had a phone call. A neighbor on the other end of the line said, “Lindsey’s been in an accident. We’ve already contacted the emergency team.”

That’s all the neighbor said. And as Ruth gunned her car south across the prairie, horrible images flashed across her mind. Severed limbs. A snapped neck. A busted skull.

She turned a corner and saw a bank of flashing lights. It seemed as though every emergency vehicle in rural Johnson County had been summoned. She slammed on the brakes and sprinted to the scene. Lindsey had been riding on the back of a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle when the driver took a turn a little too tight. Lindsey’s leg hit a mailbox, jolting her foot back into the thick treads of the tires, which clamped down on the rubber sole of her sneaker and pulled her knee-first into the craggy gravel. Lindsey lay crying and bleeding. Most of the skin over her knee had been torn off.

Lindsey still has a scar from that. So does Ruth: the memory of speeding across Kansas country roads and feeling utterly powerless as her daughter lay miles away, suffering a terrible injury.

Spain could only be worse. If something happened to Lindsey, half a continent, an entire ocean and a whole tangle of international red tape would stand between her and her daughter.

So when Lindsey burst into the house yelling, “Guess what! Guess what!” Ruth couldn’t help but be cold.

“I’m not paying for it,” she said.

Ruth knew her protests were futile. Lindsey thrives on opposition. Want to make her do something? Tell her she can’t. Ruth’s as much to blame for this as anyone. As a little girl, her daughter agonized over what she’d be when she grew up. “Honey, you can be whatever you want to be,” Ruth told her. “Shoot for the stars. And don’t let anyone tell you you can’t.”

Later, when Lindsey returned from a field trip distressed, unable to decide whether to be a doctor or an astronaut, Ruth said, “Be both.”

For years, Lindsey hoped to become the first doctor to perform surgery in space.

As she grew up, most of her friends were boys. Neighbor girls would call and ask her to come over to play house or watch a movie, but she preferred to romp around outside, riding bikes and skateboards and diving dizzily off the merry-go-round. On birthdays, she got Ninja Turtles instead of Barbies.

Her ruggedness thrived when the family moved from a labyrinthine subdivision in Olathe to the grassy plains of Stillwell. She and her brother, Austin, fished and hunted crawdads and toads. They once found a snake. Austin grabbed a stick and poked at the little beast, trying to coax it into a box, but it wouldn’t budge. After a few minutes, Lindsey, who was about eight years old, leaned over, grabbed the snake and tossed it in the box. Her mom watched in disbelief.

When she’d hang out with some boys down the road who had a trampoline in their back yard, they’d do flips and sometimes even dive off the roof of their playhouse to try bouncing as high as they could. When Lindsey tried to do the same, they’d warn her, saying, “You probably shouldn’t jump that high. You probably shouldn’t try to do flips because girls aren’t really that strong.”

“Screw that!” she’d bark. “Whatever. I’m gonna do it.”

That attitude carried over into academics. At school, Lindsey enrolled in every advanced-placement class available to her. Even in the math and science classes typically dominated by boys, she’d leap right into discussions, unafraid to ask questions and argue.

Lindsey and her friend Adrienne Banks, whom she’d known since fifth grade, both participated in a Johnson County gifted girls’ program, for which they would attend luncheons and listen to speeches by successful women such as KCTV Channel 5’s Anne Peterson. Banks recalls, “They’d be like, ‘I’m a woman, and I’m on TV. And you can be on TV, too.’ Or, ‘I play tennis, and you can play tennis, too.’ It was kind of a joke.”

A joke because it was obvious, at least to Lindsey. By college, the tomboy had transformed into a feminist, which she describes as “someone who sees men and women as equal and who fights to make sure that other women don’t see themselves as inferior in any way, that they can do whatever guys can do.”

“Every time someone has told me I can’t do it because I’m a girl,” Lindsey says, “I’ve just done it to spite them. Even if it’s a dumb idea.”

If Austin Saint didn’t want his older sister running with a bunch of 2,000-pound bulls halfway across the globe, he shouldn’t have told her women weren’t allowed.

Having taken four years of Spanish in high school, Lindsey was familiar with the running of the bulls in Pamplona. For one week each summer, revelers crowd the narrow stone streets of the ancient city near Spain’s northern coast to honor San Fermin, the patron saint of wineskin makers, wine merchants and bakers. The fiesta commences each morning at 8 with the Encierro, when six bulls burst from their pens and stampede through town to the bullring a half mile away. Since the late sixteenth century, men have run alongside the animals, tempting their murderous hooves and horns. In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway brought international attention to the festivities by making them the setting for his novel The Sun Also Rises. In Lindsey’s lifetime, Spike Lee filmed a Levi’s commercial there.

Ever since the first pretrip orientation meeting at KU, where she’d learned that one of her two free weekends in Spain would coincide with the famed event, Lindsey had been determined to go to Pamplona. She hopped on the Internet and printed out stacks of information on the spectacle.

Then the subject came up at the dinner table. By then the initial shock had worn off, and Ruth actually felt some excitement for her daughter’s plans. And maybe just a touch of envy. “It’s something I would have liked to do,” she says. It never even occurred to her that her daughter might actually try to run. Lindsay’s father had recently bought her a camera, which she carried with her everywhere. Ruth pictured Lindsey on a balcony, clicking away.

Austin mentioned that, coincidentally, he had written a report on the Encierro for his high-school Spanish class a month or so earlier. He recited a string of facts. Lindsey listened raptly. The logistics crystallized in her mind — six bulls, thousands of people, half a mile, three and a half minutes.

Then he said it. “Women aren’t allowed to run.”

What can I wear to not look like a girl? Lindsey thought. Loose shirt? No makeup? Hair tucked up under a baseball cap?

“I wouldn’t have been so committed to do it if it wasn’t for him,” she says.

Lindsey arrived in Madrid on a sweltering evening in late June. Her hotel offered no air conditioning, so she and a few of her classmates in her study-abroad program sprawled across the cool tile of her balcony, chatting late into the Mediterranean night. They felt sluggish with jetlag but electrified at the prospect of six weeks in this exotic world.

They sketched an itinerary of all the things they simply had to see and do — the magnificent cathedrals, romantic beaches and pulsating nightclubs. The one thing they all agreed on was a jaunt to Pamplona.

By then, Lindsey was dead set on running. She was even undeterred when her colleagues told her that her brother was wrong, that women had been allowed to run for the past five years. Most of the students in the program were like Lindsey — young women from KU, though a few hailed from Kansas State, Iowa and Chicago. Men were outnumbered 4-to-1.

Recruiting women for the run became a mission for Lindsey. She wanted to be surrounded by familiar faces when she dove into danger. “I knew it was, like, a really manly, masculine event,” she says. “People would try to talk them out of it. So I wanted to psych them out ahead of time.”

She told them, “If the guys are gonna run, you can run. You’re no different than them. You both have legs.”

Lindsey considers herself a leader. She’s loud. If she’s out with friends at a restaurant and somebody needs ketchup or a clean fork, they’ll say, “Lindsey, go get it.”

“I’m confrontational,” she says. “Sometimes it’s a blessing. Sometimes it’s not.”

For a while, it looked as if she had two girls convinced. As the group toured Spain’s northern cities, Lindsey made sure to rouse her companions for a morning jog. They tried to run thirty to forty minutes a day, treading cobblestone streets lined by sedate cafes.

But it was obvious their conviction wasn’t as strong as hers. After partying into the night, they were often slow to rise. Some days they skipped running altogether. “Come on,” she’d admonish them. “We have to stay in shape if we’re going to make it.”

She’d try to gauge their resolve. “I’m definitely going to do it,” one of her friends would say. “At least I think I’m going to do it.”

Midway through the tour, they stopped for part of a day in Pamplona. The festival of San Fermin was still a week or so away, and the streets were nearly deserted. Her group walked the half-mile course, starting at the bull pens and moving up the steep hill toward the plaza (the city’s central square) and around a 90-degree turn known as Death Corner, where the bulls tend to slide on the slick paving stones, sometimes crushing runners against the barricades. They proceeded down Baja de Javier, a narrow corridor of ancient stone walls and narrow doorways offering virtually no escape.

Lindsey pictured a streetscape packed with men wearing white shirts with red scarves tied around their necks, looking over their shoulders at charging bulls.

Festival posters hung all along the route. Some bore photos of past casualties, men with their arms flailing and bodies contorted, each one forever frozen in the moment when a bull’s horn pierced his side.

She played up her bravery to her friends. “Oh, that’s awesome!” she said. “I’m so gonna do it.”

But inside she was afraid. OK, she thought, these are real animals. They can do some real damage.

Lindsey wasn’t scared enough to abandon her plans, though. She stared at the gory images, analyzing them, asking herself, What are they doing wrong here?

She noticed that the victims appeared to have been caught alone on a wide, empty expanse of street. Stragglers, she figured, made easy targets for a bull. She surmised that safety would lie in numbers. If she made sure to stay close to a group, she’d be all right because the bulls appeared to be somehow confused or frightened by too many targets.

When Lindsey’s group arrived in Barcelona, locals shook their heads and told them they’d be hard pressed to find a ticket to Pamplona. They rushed to the train station. One of the men in the group slapped down his credit card and scored the last eight tickets out of town — not quite enough for the forty kids in the group.

They decided to draw names out of a hat. But even that didn’t seem fair. Lindsey and others argued that only those like herself, who were determined to run, should be allowed in the drawing. They were all yelling at each other. “It was a big scandal,” Lindsey says.

One by one, other people’s names were picked from the hat. Lindsey felt as though she would burst, she was so anxious. Then, on the next-to-last draw, someone fished out her name.

If there had been any doubt about whether she’d run, it was gone by then. This is a good omen, she thought. I have to do it now.

She goaded the other women some more, trying to guilt them into running.

They boarded their train early on July 6 and arrived in Pamplona by 1 p.m. People were already spilling out of the clubs and celebrating in the streets. Music echoed through the canyons of ancient stone buildings. The group didn’t even try to find a hotel room.

They took another tour of the course. People were already camped out on benches around the plaza, staking out a spot along the bull run that would commence at 8 the next morning.

As evening settled in, they wound up on the steps outside the bull arena, near the statue of Ernest Hemingway — the designated meeting place for all the KU students. Exhausted, they stretched out across the pavement, but they kept having to get up to let people pass through, so they moved to a nearby patch of grass.

The earth was damp, and the night temperature had dipped into the 50s. They huddled close to one another, trying to stay warm. Most of them had worn shorts and sneakers. A few were in flip flops. Lindsey, at least, had sensibly worn a pair of jeans, but she was still freezing. Plus, it was too noisy to get any sleep. All around them, people were guzzling booze and whooping up and down the streets.

Finally, one of Lindsey’s companions said, “Come on, let’s just go somewhere warm.”

They looked for a cozy restaurant but found only bars. They settled for a warm-looking nightclub thumping with techno music. They leaned against a far wall and closed their eyes, trying to conserve energy. But Spanish guys kept coming up and offering drinks and asking them to dance. “No, no, get away from us,” Lindsey remembers saying. “We’re too tired. Leave us alone.”

Just before sunrise, they ventured back on the street to stake out a spot. In the darkness, locals were busy setting up fences along the course, spraying garbage and spilled beer off the paving stones. The nonrunners in the group found a place near the end of the run. “Here’s where we’re going to be,” they said. “When you come by, make sure you smile so we can take pictures.”

Lindsey took off with a few guys. As she left, Adrienne stopped her and threw her arms around her. “If you’re in any danger,” she told her friend, “don’t try to be brave. Just jump out.”

“OK, I will. Don’t worry about it.”

The sky began to fill with morning light as they reached the bull pens. The beasts loomed behind thick, wooden doors, stomping and shuffling around. The barricades were quite a bit taller than Lindsey and her companions. When she saw the tips of their horns peeking up above the barricades, she grasped for the first time just how freaking huge bulls really are.

The men she was with couldn’t hide their fear. They watched a cat slip under the gate and disappear amid the stomping hooves. “Oh, my God!” one of them yelled. “That cat’s gonna get eaten.”

“They don’t eat cats,” Lindsey scoffed. “They eat grass. It’s OK.”

The guys were hardly pacified. Lindsey was scared, too, but she told them, “You guys, calm down. If anybody’s gonna get hurt, it’s me.” She reminded them that the running of the bulls was not so much a test of speed as a test of strength. The survivors were the ones who could push through a dense crowd of men.

They moved up the course, taking a spot a little beyond the plaza. As they stood waiting for the sound of the two rockets to announce the release of the bulls, one of her colleagues wrapped an arm around her and said, “You know what? I just want to tell you that I’m really proud of you.”

But no sooner could that sink in before a cop came along and kicked them off the street. They had lined up too far along the course.

They were crushed. A couple of the guys immediately gave up, but Lindsey and the rest decided to try to get back in.

They pushed their way through the crammed side streets, trying to find an opening to the course.

It was just minutes before eight. Feeling trapped in the side streets, one of the guys shouted “We’re gonna miss it!”

“I’m just gonna keep trying until I hear the rocket,” Lindsey yelled.

Finally, they made it to the plaza. They pushed their way to the barricades, pleading in Spanish for people to let them by.

“But you’re a girl,” a few replied. Lindsey ignored them.

The group had dwindled down to two — Lindsey and Brian, from Northwestern University. They made it to the front of the crowd. Lindsey found herself standing face to face with a Spanish cop.

“Can we run?” she asked in Spanish.

“No.”

She clasped her hands together and pleaded. “Por favor.”

She hurriedly explained that she was from the United States and couldn’t just come to Spain any time she wanted and that she’d probably never have another chance at the Encierro.

“You don’t understand, bonita,” he answered. “They’re not small,” he said, lowering his hand to the height of a German shepherd. “They’re big.”

It was 8 o’clock. She heard the screech of the first rocket taking off. Adrenaline surged through her body. Frustrated, she blurted out in English, “Once in a lifetime!”

The cop was unimpressed.

Again she clasped her hands. “Poooor favooooooooor!”

He studied her for a second and said, “Bueno. Vale.”

She and Brian jumped the fence. Runners were just standing there, waiting for the bulls to arrive. They carried rolled up newspapers to swat away the bulls that got too close.

But Lindsey and Brian wanted to get past the worst obstacles in the course, so they forced their way through the sluggish throng. Lindsey couldn’t believe no one else was running. She shouted, “Corre! Corre!“

“I was just scared,” she says. “I was just unbelievably scared.”

She was desperate to get past Death Corner, the sharpest turn in the course, before the bulls came tumbling through. She and Brian, still fighting against the inert crowd, rounded the turn. They had avoided peril number one.

Next she had to get past the narrow, no-escape canyon of Baja de Javier. Midway through the corridor, the crowd started to move. She knew the bulls had caught up.

It was strangely quiet. All she could hear was the stamping of feet and an occasional hoot from a fellow Yank. Then she heard on odd thumping of wood against metal.

What is that?

She looked over her shoulder and saw a bovine creature trotting just a few feet away from her, its cowbell clanging dully. It looked harmless. Oh, I can do this, she thought.

But it was just one of the steers that lead the bulls to the arena. The bulls followed a moment later.

“Oh, my God,” she gasped when she saw the animals. “They’re huge.”

On TV, their horns hadn’t seemed so menacing — maybe 6 inches long, a foot at most. Now, with a bull running beside her, perhaps 4 feet away, she could see that its horns were wider than her armspan and solid and sharp. Every detail of its muscles showed through its sleek, black hide.

Considering the circumstances, though, everything still seemed manageable. The bull, like the others Lindsey spotted, had its sights locked straight ahead. It was as though she and the bulls were running buddies for a moment. If I just stay to the side, she told herself, I’ll be alright.

She emerged from the feared no-escape tunnel into a broad intersection surrounded by fences. She figured she was safe. The Plaza de Torros — and the end of the run — was in sight.

But in fact, she had entered one of the most dangerous stretches of the course. By the time they reach this apparent oasis, the bulls are tired and disoriented. They tend to slow down and break free of their pack. Some turn back, catching runners off guard.

Through the dense crowd, Lindsey couldn’t see that happening. She only heard people yelling, “Torro! Torro!“

Suddenly the crowd stopped. All around her, people were leaping to reach the fences. But she couldn’t budge. Runners were scrambling all around her, trying to squeeze through the spectators who were sitting along the fence.

Then she looked down and saw a formless dark mass hovering down around her knees.

What is that?! she asked herself.

Then she was flying, crashing against a fence and falling to the ground.

OK, she thought. That was a bull.

She looked up and saw it only about 5 feet away. It snorted, pounding its heavy hooves against the street. She checked to see if it had its eyes trained on her, but the bull was looking at something else. She got up to run, hoping it wouldn’t spot her and give chase.

Lindsey managed two, maybe three strides toward the fence before she felt something flopping against her leg. She looked down and saw that her jeans were split all the way up to the hip.

In an instant, she dropped to the ground and pulled herself under the fence to safety. She looked down at her leg and saw that a chunk of it had disappeared. A steep little valley of exposed flesh spread across her calf toward her knee. She could see a narrow patch of bone at the bottom of it.

Oddly, though, she felt pain only in her hand, where she’d smacked the pavement. That made her afraid that she’d suffered severe nerve damage, that she might lose her leg.

She looked up and saw a cop standing above her. He gazed down at her and then casually turned his attention back to the crowd.

“I was just, like, ‘Hello!‘” she recalls.

She screamed every Spanish word for help and hurt she could think of.

Within minutes, the Red Cross was at her side and an ambulance was pushing through the crowd. Onlookers leaned over the medics and snapped pictures. She looked up at a TV camera and managed a smile.

The call came early on Sunday morning, just as the Saints were about to leave for church. It was the director of KU’s study-abroad program. “Have you heard from your daughter in the last six or seven hours?”

Oh my god, she’s missing, Ed Saint thought.

The last they had heard from Lindsey was an e-mail she’d sent on Friday telling them she was set to go to Pamplona. Their daughter had concluded her message with an assurance that she’d call them when she got back, unless she was “poked by a horn or trampled by the drunken masses.” Ed and Ruth had read that and laughed. They figured she’d spend the weekend snapping pictures.

“She’s been injured by a bull,” the woman said.

The university official warned them that their daughter was already the subject of international news. They flipped on CNN and saw her lying on foreign pavement with medics all around her. Then she seemed to look right at them and smile.

Ruth wondered how long it would be before the media figured out how to find them. She checked the Internet. Yahoo! had listed her daughter as “Elinzey Sain, from Kansas.”

For the next 48 hours, the Saints were besieged by calls from reporters chasing the story of the moment. First, a KSHB Channel 41 reporter called. A few minutes later, another call came, from KMBC Channel 9. Maria Antonia then managed to find Lindsey’s hospital and interview her by phone. Watching the news that night, Ruth was disturbed by her daughter’s vivid description of her wound.

The stories were quick and perfunctory. Armed with these morsels of information, the shock jocks on AM radio — and, doubtless, thousands of people across the country — had decided that Lindsey was just another dumb American kid. A family friend told the Saints she’d come close to calling the stations and saying, “I’ve known Lindsey since she was three; she’s not that way.”

But before any of the stories broke, the Saints finally got in touch with Lindsey at around noon, after she’d had surgery and had emerged from anesthesia.

“Mom, I’m so sorry,” Lindsey cried.

“If you’re crying because you’re hurting, that’s OK,” Ruth said. “But if you’re crying because of what happened, then stop it, because it’s over with.”

Lindsey cheered right up.

“Mom, did you know bones are gray?” she asked.

Half a world away, Ruth winced.