autumn fall

When a man falls in the forest, does he make a sound?

Me, not usually. A few groans, but I generally get back up again, shake it off, and keep going.

But when recently I took the Kid down into the local river valley to run some autumn trails…well, I tripped. The irony of the situation was, of course, that I wasn’t looking where I was going because I had cranked my head back to tell my daughter to watch her footing because of all the tree roots and… thwaaap! A second later I’m rolling along the ground with all the elegant momentum of a giraffe falling down a waterslide.

My watch started buzzing alerts. It had detected the fall and was getting ready to call in the calvary. The Kid was patiently panicking, and was already dialling her mother—my wife—on the phone to alert her. I was cursing my inelegance.

I was also trying to figure out what hurt and by how much, but I was flat on my back in the middle of some freshly fallen autumn foliage and half sprawled across a lonely trail far enough from where we’d parked that it was going to be trouble if I couldn’t get myself out of there.

I lay there taking a few deep breaths as all the sounds swirled around me. Nature. A dialing phone. A buzzing watch.

Evaluation: a bruised ego, some scratches on the palms of my hands, a bumped knee, and I think I pulled a muscle in my torso. 

We limped along for a couple hundred meters, but I rallied and we finished another five klicks (getting out of the trails and onto smoother, safer asphalt) and a little slower than planned.

I made a few sounds along the way, too, but most of them are not appropriate for print.