The Canals of Mars: A Memoir

Plummeting

I n every one of my childhood comic books, the drop-fromheightsvictimsalwaysdidmorethanmerelyfall .Theyneeded to have an expression of absolute terror as their arms spread wide in panic, and they were always looking up at whoever was still standing at the edge of a cliff or the roof of a skyscraper or the doorway of a helicopter in flight. They plummeted. For two or three panels, they screamed aieeeeee! or yaaaahhhh! as they vanished into a speck I knew was blood and guts and shattered bones. Those falls were more frightening to me than being devoured byarmyantsorbeingattackedbyalienswhoalwayshadmorethan twoarmsinvariousshadesofgreenorblue.Ididn’tcowerundermy blanketwhencreakingsoundsslippedintoafriend’shouseduringa sleepover, but I began to feel unsteady when I had to climb into the treehousehisfatherhadconstructed lessthantenfeetupamongthelimbs of an oak tree. I didn’t worry about being alone outside after dark, but I hugged the inside wall as I climbed to the second deck of Forbes Field to watch the Pirates. Myfatherproducesaphotographofmeinhisarmsoverlooking the abyss below Niagara Falls when I was four. “See?” he says. “You weren’t the way you are when you were small.” I look happy with mylegstuckedaroundhiswaist,highenoughoffthegroundthatif he opened his arms, I would have fallen into the spray. I remember enough about my childhood to know that by the time I was five, I was terrified of heights. Nothing terrible happened in those twelve months. As far as I can tell, I simply arrived at the age of reason. At the Spang-Chalfant playground, built by the steel company that employed most of the residents of Etna, there were two sizes of slides. The baby slide had six steps and a high nest of metal at the top so even a three year-old could manage to sit down without tumbling into space. The “real” slide had a dozen steps, making it nearly twice as high, but the problem for me was the platform at the top—there was nothing on the sides but a low railing. Taking Plummeting 192 ■ w e a k n e s s on that slide meant you were graduating from security to risk, and though there were no confirmed falls from that platform, I froze at the top the summer before first grade, both hands on the end of the staircase railing, unable to make myself let go and throw one leg, and then the other, onto the ledge. I knelt. I held onto the rims of the slide, and the boy behind me, believing I was a daredevil, shouted “Whoa!” just as I half rolled to the side and let go, sliding like a fetus until my feet caught the sides and I barely moved. The boy who’d been impressed enough to shout kicked me from behind as I neared the bottom. I had to crawl off and walk away as if I had some inexplicable injury. The swings were no better. I’d reach somewhere around a forty-five degree angle, and I’d begin to lose my nerve. I’d learned to “pump” a swing just like my friends, but as they soared to near horizontal, I’d act disinterested, like swings were for babies, something I’d already grown out of because I’d just celebrated my sixth birthday. Evenseesawswereproblematic.Thesuddenrise,thesenseoffloppingforward andup.Isoughtoutthecheckertables.Iplayeddodgeball,wherethefarthestmy feet got off the ground was when I jumped over a bouncing, hollow rubber ball. It got worse. In a played-out strip mine that was left over from the soft coal decades that had ended before I was born, my father led me and a dozen other eleven- and twelve-year-olds up a trail that peaked along a narrow crest of whatever had been left behind as worthless. Suddenly, each step in the dark felt so uncertain, I allowed all the other Boy Scouts to pass me and finally knelt to grip the ground with my hands, convinced I was about to tumble into the acid pool below. Peer pressure sometimes fails. Every boy who watched me whimper said nothing, even when my humiliated father had to lead me down like a suicide withsecondthoughts,takingthelengthylowroutethroughthescrubtreesuntil we met the troop where the scars ended. Afterwards, none of the boys made fun of me, not even the ones who taunted anyone who dropped a football pass or failed a swimming test, but once, when we were driving past that old strip mine, my father observed, “There’s where you acted like a baby.” It’s one of many such panics I bring to hearing about how...