Slip and Slide — By Monica Anderson
artwork by Ciara Duffy
My first time up Top of the World, I end up sliding right back down. It’s April, the end-ish of winter, and I’m hardly aware of the fact that we are running up the third of the 4Peaks. I won’t complete the full ten-mile loop for another month. Back home in Oregon today, it’s rainy with buds and blooms popping and screaming in neon colors. Here, in Marquette, it’s snowy, packed hard in places and in others, a devilish trap, soft layers buried under a hard film, awaiting a foot to punch through and snag.
Feet sinking every few steps into the weak patches creates a sensation of running in slow motion, the inertia of winter still begging me down into the abyss, where I’ve been living most of the time anyway. Though these days I’m barely hanging on to my sanity—completing every assignment and showing up to every single class, even when what I really need is to scream at the top of my lungs for an hour, cry for three days straight, or somehow cease to exist—not forever, just for a little while—in this all-but-intolerable world. Still, every Wednesday, I park my parents’ old CRV at a trailhead and betray nothing of my true state.
I trot behind everyone else like I always do on these casual runs—speed means nothing when the terrain is an obstacle course, and hanging back turns off my innate competitive drive. Someone’s dog is probably here with us; maybe one of Susie’s Rhodesian Ridgebacks, a dog bred to hunt lions in South Africa who now shivers, tail tucked between legs with sliver-like fur, in the icy parking area before we start moving in earnest.
We reach the top and I fail to take in the view. All I see is snow in all directions, a white hellscape as far as I’m concerned, nothing worth noting. People stop and chatter in muted tones, facial muscles half-frozen in the cold. Then we crest it and face the descent: a smooth, rounded downhill slope. No tracks, no trail, no security save the hope that this time, the snow will soften and catch our legs, hold us gently hostage.
We resume moving, and I watch Sam and Susie dart straight down, slipping a little but confident in their feet to make the right choices. Hesitant, as I always am on the snow, I take a trepid step down, then another, and then—I lose the grip, slip, and I slide from the Top of the World. For a few seconds I am suspended in motion, my feet giving way to the rest of me on the icy layer, and all I know is that I’m falling. The sensation is familiar. I am falling as my car loses traction on the ice, as I try to correct the turn and head straight for the snowbank, as I roll over and gravity now works from the wrong direction until I stop, seat belt a hammock for my right side, tethering me in the air. I am falling as my brain gets worse and worse, certain that this place is trying to kill me, that everything and everyone—especially myself—is a threat, falling as I appear just fine to the rest of the world, left alone in a kind of darkness I have forgotten how to find my way out of, falling as my body clenches in defense, in protection, in constant, total fear.
Then I reach out a gloved hand, resigned to my fate but still with some instinct to fight, and I catch a stray branch poking out from the snow. My grip tightens and the rest of me whiplashes to a halt, supine on the snow. In the past months, the pathways between my impulses and consciousness have slowed. It takes me a minute to catch up to myself, to bridge the gap to reality. I know that I was in danger, and now I might be safe, but I am still on the slope, still vulnerable to falling as soon as I let go. Grace, also a cautious, self-aware outdoorswoman, inches down behind me. Maybe she calls out and asks if I’m okay. Maybe they all just wait, unconcerned. I scrape my other hand into the snow, digging a hand-hold, and claw until the next tree branch, this one bigger. Heart thumping, I want to cry, to find a small, safe hole to curl up in until my three years here are over, until I'm back in Oregon. But I can’t and I don’t. I keep crawling down, and when we’ve all made it to solid ground again, we do what we always do: we run.
A few remarks are made about the incident, but nobody is fazed. This kind of thing comes with the territory. What matters is that I am uninjured. What matters is that no physical damage is done. I’ve grown accustomed to this response to all the things that have happened this winter, things that have ripped me apart on the inside, an invisible, merciless illness, but things that from the outside, could be worse. My car was totaled, but I was not hurt. I have forgotten what joy feels like, but I am not failing at anything.
This fall, really, is nothing, just another flirtation with disaster to remind me of what I already know: I am not okay here. I am not safe. I will remain, always, on alert, ready to fight the world, even when it’s my insides that rot.
Monica Anderson (she/her) is a writer, runner, educator, and Oregonian who currently lives in the Upper Peninsula, where she is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University. Her work has appeared in Terrain.org’s “Climate Stories in Action” series, Buckman Journal, Panorama Journal, and elsewhere.