It was the powder that did it, the miles of machine-groomed trail that wove through the lonely town and the vast Alberta parkland beyond. He’d never thought of himself as someone who’d become addicted to exercise, thinking this was reserved for those lithe specimens who lectured about runner’s highs and tried to convince you that the stabbing huff of intense cardio was anything other than vanity-fuelled masochism. Booze, coke, Christ, even cheeseburgers, now those were things a guy could get addicted to. Funnily enough, it was a fear of becoming an alcoholic that’d pushed him into cross-country skiing to begin with. Getting into the sport was all but inevitable when he first moved to Camrose from Kingston, Ontario. Even in the summertime, there was little to do in his new town other than sip a flavourless mojito at one of the chain restaurants that skirted the heavily trafficked Highway 13. The historic downtown area offered nothing to a person of his age and interests, save for maybe the Alice Hotel, which had cheap beer and video lottery terminals, and which he feared would become his self-destructive oasis once the temperatures dipped below -30C.

It was at a mixer for newly arrived university faculty that he first became aware of how seriously the people of Camrose took their endurance sports. Staying close to Melanie’s side, he toured the room and met faculty members of all genders who were rakishly thin and more often than not of Norwegian descent. Later that same evening, when a group of these faculty invited Melanie and him to the Alice Hotel, they quickly descended into a conversation about the finer points of cycling, running, cross-country skiing, and of the various nationwide competitions they’d participated in over recent years. They also drank heavily, and between these counterbalancing extremes of drinking and intense exercise, he detected a space in which he might be happy. He learned that the faculty were all members of the local ski club, which was staffed on a volunteer basis and which maintained over 15k of perfectly groomed trails that were made available for free to the townsfolk. In their Norwegian ancestry and commitment to fitness, he saw the beginnings of an identity for Camrose, a sense of place that he’d found painfully absent in the chain restaurants and box stores that occupied most of the town’s acreage. The summer was nearly over and he was grateful for it, because he was much less enthused by the thought of joining the faculty’s running club. Jogging had always been a painful chore for him. His five-foot-ten, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame was too much for his knees, which at the age of 34 became sore enough to stop him dead at the 5k mark. But cross-country skiing?

“I think that’s something I could get into,” he said to Melanie, who turned to him with a smile and put her hand over his on the bar table. It was an act of encouragement that communicated her appreciation of his willingness to uproot his life and move across the country with her. For a humanities professor seeking a tenure-track job, you needed to go wherever you were lucky enough to find a position, and if you wanted your marriage to remain intact, you needed a partner who’d go with you. His own passions had never been place-specific, as they were solitary pursuits like writing and music, and for that same reason mobile. Still, he hadn’t anticipated how strongly that first drive into town would depress him, and he knew Melanie could feel it from the passenger seat beside him.

Now, the trick would be getting a handle on the basics of cross-country skiing without humiliating himself in front of his sinewy Nordic neighbours.

When he walked into the Edmonton ski shop a week later, the first thing he noticed were the antique snowshoes that hung from the wood-panelled walls, their darkened grains and crusty leather bindings exuding an authenticity that was lacking in the fibreglass skis that leaned against the sales rack. Nonetheless, he approached the rack and picked up a pair of skis, glancing about the store in search of help. Idling behind a distant sales counter was a sandy-haired kid of university age with a thin, muscular build that was accentuated by his long and equine face. The boy met his searching eyes with an enthusiastic nod and crossed the store with a loping stride.

“Hey man. Think you want to have a look at those?”

He glanced at the skis in his arms, which he hugged as though he were gathering sticks for a life-saving bonfire. He handed them over to the kid, who led him to a rectangular wooden box at the end of the rack and laid the skis across its surface.

“‘Kay, so if I could just get you to hop up here and try to balance on the skis, we’ll see if they work for you.”

He placed his chunky Blundstones atop the two skis and felt the muscles in his feet straining to stay balanced on the narrow bindings. “So with thin skis like this,” he said, “am I supposed to stay in those two slots that run along the side of the path?”

“Those are called the track,” said the kid, who cleared his bangs from his eyes with a flick of his head. “And yeah, that’s for classic skis, which these are. The other kind are skate skis. Most beginners start with classic.”

He felt a prick of shame in the base of his neck. “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to move forward.”

“Right. No worries.” The kid bent down and slid a slip of paper under one of the skis, moving it back and forth beneath the part that was directly beneath the boot. “See here? This middle section under your foot isn’t touching down because each ski is a little bit bowed. When you put all your weight on this leg, though…”

He followed the kid’s instructions and shifted fully to his right. The kid tried to slide the paper again, and this time tore it. “So yeah, when you put all your weight on one foot, this middle part of the ski presses against the snow. That curve in the ski is called the camber. If we apply a sticky wax to that middle part and a glide wax to the front and back of each ski, they’ll press down and grip the snow when you push off each foot.”

 A dim light flickered behind his grey eyes. For months, he’d felt that the world around him had lost its definition, as though he were sitting in some distant room and viewing life through an old television screen. But this felt real, like he was learning something new and valuable, and he was surprised at how closely he was able to follow the kid’s ensuing explanation of different grip waxes – Red, Blue, Green – which were designed for temperatures of increasing coldness.

“I’ll take them,” he said.

He’d moved twice before in his life, once to Nova Scotia for his undergraduate years and again to Ontario for graduate school. On both occasions, his above-average comedic timing and love for weekday drinking had quickly made him all the friends he needed. On any given day, it wasn’t hard to find a fellow scholar who’d go five rounds at the nearest bar. Better still, it’d only take one pint before these friends would dispense their views on nearly every aspect of human experience, be it personal or philosophical. He hadn’t been able to recreate this success a third time, though. All social events were tied to the university, and Melanie had asked him not to get too drunk or candid with her colleagues, whose opinions would matter when she came up for tenure in five years. Working from home as a remote marketing consultant had made the move painless from a professional standpoint, but had narrowed even further his chances of meeting anybody independently of Melanie. When he wasn’t sitting in the basement of their vinyl-sided bungalow, playing guitar or writing short stories, he’d visit the local Canadian Brewhouse to watch Edmonton Oilers games, chatting with the fresh-faced staff who smiled politely but never asked him anything about himself. Some of Melanie’s young colleagues would occasionally ask him to meet for a coffee on a Saturday afternoon, but he found them just too cerebral about everything. Yes, he had a PhD himself, but there was a difference between the people who attended grad school and the ones who went on to secure a tenure-track job.

When they’d first met in their Master’s English program at Queen’s, he and Melanie had bonded over their mutual love of critical theory, still reeling from the thrill of having their skulls exploded by the writings of Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Franz Fanon during their undergrad years. Hours after their peers had left the grad club, they’d still be there, tilting back their sixth or seventh pints, riffing off one another’s observations. Every moment between them seemed to bring about a new epiphany. Melanie’s spirited commitment to social justice made him feel like he was becoming a better person through sheer proximity to her.

Not long after writing his comprehensive exams, though, he’d become fed up with the self-congratulatory way his professors described the competitiveness of the academic job market, and decided to finish his degree as economically as possible and enter the private sector, where after three years of part-time, commission-based straggling, he landed a full-time job with a marketing consulting firm. Melanie had used these same years to continue with her thesis work. She’d emerge from her home office in those days and ask him to attend on-campus talks about Treaty lands and the plight of LGBTQ++ students on campus. He followed her to all of them and would nod with vigour at the points being made. But the fatigue was always there, the desire to go home and rest instead of sitting in an uncomfortable auditorium chair. He knew that he was indulging his privilege as a cishet white man, that he couldn’t possibly imagine the threats and indignities that marginalized peoples faced on a daily basis. But he didn’t care and didn’t know how to make himself care.

It was around this time that he realized how often he cried. He’d always been one to indulge a good cathartic discharge three or four times a year, but these became more common after Melanie announced with glittering eyes that she’d landed a tenure-track job in rural Alberta. When he was alone again, he found that the objects in his TV room seemed as distant as the moon in the evening sky. He tried to articulate his feelings to himself aloud, but only managed a loud, stupid “Uhhhhhh” that filled the apartment, as though he were a bat trying to test whether the walls were truly there.

It wasn’t long after their move to Alberta that he began complaining to Melanie more often about his work. She’d come home from campus, and he’d list off every stupid annoyance he’d had to endure that day: executives who debated one another for hours before realizing that they were arguing the same point, colleagues who’d rather “bounce their ideas” off him than perform the hard work of articulating things for themselves, all of it done without any regard for his plummeting blood sugar. Melanie would stare at him with the silence of a psychoanalyst, never so much as nodding at one of his points. He tried to be more specific, complaining about a much younger co-worker named Jessica who seemed hellbent on correcting him at every opportunity. In one instance, he’d asked her to start making her edits directly in his documents without sending them back with her trademark tracked changes. Jessica had replied that if he didn’t see what she was fixing, he’d never learn from her.

“I mean, who the hell says that?” he demanded.  

“She’s pricking your male fragility,” Melanie answered.

“Damn right she is! I mean seriously. You don’t find a comment like that a little bit rude? What if I’d said the same thing to her?”

“It wouldn’t mean the same thing.”

“Jesus, why can’t you indulge me from time to time?”

“I do that all the time. You just don’t know it.”

The world kept nudging him forward, but he couldn’t tell if it was pushing him toward a better life or the edge of a cliff.

On his first trek onto the ski trail, he kept his eyes directly on the grooves in front of him to keep from falling. He tried to remember what the kid at the ski shop had told him, placing all his weight on one ski and pushing off of it, then doing the same with the other. He only lifted his gaze when he sensed that he was being watched. On a hill to his right, three young snowboarders in orange and camo-coloured jackets were taking turns on a homemade jump, but they’d stopped to watch him pass. He lowered his head again and pumped his legs as hard as he could to reach the nearest patch of birch. Once he was out of the kids’ sight, he noticed strange clumps of brown hair littering the trail. He glanced farther up the path and spied two crimson patches on the snow that were roughly the size of living room rugs. A sensation of dread passed like a ghost through the walls of his stomach. He’d been eager all day to finish work and go for his first ski, and didn’t want to turn back so early in his journey. It was another fifty feet from the scattered tufts that he found the deer’s mutilated carcass. It lay just off the side of the trail, half-concealed by ruby strands of young birch. Four coal-black hooves had the remnants of forelegs clinging to them. No body, no head. A spinal cord remained, picked so clean that it looked as though it’d been stolen from one of the biology labs at the university. The ghost passed through his gut again. His hands tightened around his poles, fuelled by the fear that he might need to use them as spears at any moment. He turned and headed for home, glancing back over his shoulder every few seconds. When he emerged from the birch, he came across the three young snowboarders again. He thought about warning them, but was embarrassed to show his ignorance of local predators and the things they were capable of.

The next day, he returned to the trail and found no trace of the deer’s carcass. It’d snowed heavily the night before. The trail was freshly groomed. He hesitated over the creature’s absence, unsure of how many coyotes or cougars might be lying in wait for him in the surrounding trees. But however horrible, he knew that this fear was preferable to the lobotomized fog that would envelop him if he returned to the couch in his basement. He put all his weight onto the camber of his ski and propelled himself forward, pumping his legs and arms. He saw no one else on the trail, and kept going. When the path finally looped back toward the town, he stopped and stared out over a farmer’s field made completely white by winter. He blinked hard and felt a crunch at the corners of his eyes, where his tears had frozen. As he stood staring over the field, he realized that the tears weren’t the product of a cold headwind. He was crying.

It didn’t make sense. Wasn’t exercise supposed to be an antidote to depression? Here he was, working out as vigorously as he’d done in years, and he was crying? He sniffed a shard of frozen snot down his palate and left the trail, setting off into the farmer’s field, ploughing through powder that was so dry and deep that snowshoeing would’ve been faster. He only turned around when darkness had fully descended. The temperature had dipped so low that he couldn’t produce enough heat to overcome it. It was eleven-thirty in the evening by the time he made it home. He collapsed through the front door of his house, and crawled away from Melanie, who was crying and demanding to know where he’d been. He called in sick to work the next day.

It took him three days for his muscles to recover, and when they did, he put his skis back on and repeated the same route, staying out again until deep into the night. There was no thinking behind it; the sheer absence of anything better to do left the activity unrivalled for his attention. He was proud of himself for exercising so much, feeling like he’d finally broken through the wall of discomfort and avoidance that’d made his thirties the flabbiest decade of his life. On his fifth trip, he stayed out so long that he came home with the tip of his nose gone black from frostbite. Melanie dropped her glass of water when she saw his face and drove him to the hospital, where the dead flesh was removed and his nose bandaged. Melanie insisted on sitting with him when the diminutive doctor with a tightly tied bun of black hair sat down across from them and asked whether he wouldn’t mind answer a few questions. He told her about moving to Camrose with Melanie, about his newly discovered love for skiing, and even about how much he cried when he was alone.  The woman held him with steady eyes for a few moments, then tore a page out of her book.

“I’m going to write you a referral to a psychiatrist here in town,” she said, “and I really think you should follow up on it.”

Melanie pressed her hand tightly over his as he received the piece of paper. He turned to her and smiled, and continued to hold her hand as she drove the two of them home. When they got back, she went to her office to check whether she’d received any emails from students complaining about their midterm grades. He walked into the kitchen to clean up the water and broken glass Melanie had left on the floor when she’d rushed him to hospital. He tossed the rag in the sink, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and walked into to the bungalow’s small living room. On the coffee table, his laptop lay closed. Beside it sat his cell phone, which he picked up to find that there were no messages or missed calls.

He glanced back to the unopened can of beer in his hand, which was very cold, and set both it and the cell down on the table. Tears returned to the corners of his eyes as he glanced toward the house’s front entryway, where he’d left his ski boots.

Philip Glennie is originally from Saint John, New Brunswick. He is the author of two novels, Ill Humour (2013) and Lune (2016). He currently lives in London, Ontario.