The gravity and wonder of near-falls

Falling…

It was the ice. On Notre Dame at the foot of McPhillips.

I had just crossed the six or seven lanes — how do you count turning lanes in calculating the width of a street? — of Notre Dame Avenue, navigating a short stretch of dirty snow and traffic misery until I reached southwards Dominion Street.

My mind was wandering while my feet did the steady, plodding work of getting me home. It can be a marvellous process, allowing relatively unconnected thoughts to swirl into each other in a way that oddly connects them all, and I sometimes discover I’m unexpectedly almost home without having taken in the whole walk.

But just before Dominion, my left foot slid on ice, and, in a move so completely random, yet seeming almost choreographed, my slipping left boot knocked my right foot out from under me as well. My left hand swung up and out towards the wall of the acupuncture place, but never got there.

I’m fascinated by the way our minds work — but more than that, I’m fascinated by the question of why our minds even work the way they do. I’d like to believe there’s some sort of order and purpose for things like dreams, that they serve to sort out our thoughts and process the scattered impressions we collect constantly through our senses but don’t have the time or inclination to deal with as they arrive.

But why do they end up in the patterns they arrive at?

For example, on Notre Dame, pre-ice, I had been thinking about trees.

Sometimes you go out late, late at night and before your eyes adjust to the darkness, you’re overtaken by the fact you can hear the sound of the trees. The brush of branch tips. Then, the way you see the soft sway of the constant line of their tops against the dark blue-black sky, the unison of their motion, the unconnected, yet constant, connection.

The poplars lean in to talk to each other. The birches stand proud. The alders conspire. Firs, convivial; spruce, haughty.

I kept thinking, improbably, about trees in the scattered milliseconds or so when I was between either walking or meeting the ground. So much packed into the unexpected event.

I also thought about damn winter. About how this wouldn’t have happened if it was summer. About how there’s something to like in all four seasons, except more in the other three than in the one we’re stuck in now.

About the coefficient of friction under boot soles, and the relative over-and-under slickness of ice versus a skim of snow at -19 C. (I’m lying — I actually thought about that part later.)

And about how I’ve managed to fall in summer plenty of times anyway.

Afterwards, I kept walking, and I thought, all at once, that it wouldn’t be so bad to be falling in the summer woods right now.

The truth is, I probably actually fall more in summer, especially in the woods.

Usually, it’s been while I was making my way through brush and small trees to reach the edge of some small new brook I want to try for trout — I get eager for the promise of testing novel water, especially a spot I’ve found on my own on the map, and tend to rush over uneven footing.

There’s the first part, where you do the injury calculus to figure out if you’ve hurt anything. Then, if you’re me, you worry about whether you’ve broken the fly rod you’ve had for 40 years on your way to the ground.

But after that, I thought it would be wonderful to just to lie in the warm softness of the boughs and moss on my back, looking up at the bright of the sky, with nowhere to go and no need to rush back to my feet. To smell the crushed juniper and spruce needles, the sun-warmed rhodera and bog peat.

To just lie there and take it all in, near motionless until the little woods juncos and the boreal chickadees came flitting over with their quick darts to sharp-stopped perches and their head-tilted curiosity about just what exactly my problem was.

To hear the nearby thin trickle of the brook stumbling over its rills and stone-and-boulder impediments, the gravity of small waterfalls.

And I was, of course, on Dominion walking by then, not lying on my back in the bower of crushed plants and warm sun my imagination had conjured out of nowhere, apparently for no particular reason other than that it can.

Maybe some of it is your brain seeking order amidst the impending chaos of life. Or maybe you’re just unconsciously dovetailing yourself into some special forgotten comfort.

I’ll take it, any chance I get.

Oh, and I didn’t fall on Notre Dame, in the end.

Just struck an odd akimbo pose for a fleeting moment, a peculiar angular display for a roundish older man. And probably pulled a muscle my body will remind me of in the coming days.

I won’t mind that twinge, if it comes. It will just remind me of almost falling.

And of a mental meandering. And trees.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca.