Itasca

The boy glides through the north woods surrounding Lake Itasca, his cross-country skis slicing the snow. He glances back and rolls his eyes. In the far distance, his parents trudge along as if they are skiing through cement. He stops. When they finally reach him, the family of three moves quietly off the grooves of the trail to allow for passersby, though they have not seen another skier all day. A heavy mound of snow slides off the bough of a tamarack and drops to the base of its trunk. The boy and his parents turn their heads. Nothing else moves. 

The boy is an odd teenager, quiet and reflective. He has always felt that his best, most reliable friend is his own inner voice, which has long kept him company in the solitary world of an only child. He misses this friend on family vacations, when there are so few opportunities to escape his parents and their constant pleas to participate in conversation. 

The boy asks to ski ahead and wait for them some distance down the trail. His parents barely get a chance to nod and wheeze out be careful before he gleefully rockets away, leaving wisps of snow hanging and sparkling in the air. For the next two miles, the woods and the stillness belong to him. 

Now there is a faint trickling sound where he has stopped to wait. At the end of his skis, a shy creek sneaks away from the frozen expanse of Lake Itasca, flowing around snow, pebbles, and a sign that reads, 

Here 1475 ft above the ocean the mighty Mississippi begins to flow on its winding way 2552 miles to the Gulf of Mexico 

The boy closes his eyes. He tries to picture this exact location pinpointed on the blue and brown surface of the Earth, as if he were viewing it from space. There are so many minute places on the planet, he thinks, that hold his future—some corner of the physical plane bears, perhaps, the weight of a woman who is fated to be his wife, the weight of a house which is fated to shelter his children, the weight of the soil which will cover the graves of his parents. But it would be impossible to pinpoint these exact locations from space or on a globe, even if he knew what city they were in. They would all be hidden, not just by the inscrutability of the future, but by their smallness as one zoomed out and took in grander and grander views of all that exists. 

The present moment holds him as the shallow water trickles, the dead leaves rustle, the wind sings a hollow note to no one but him. He takes comfort that, for a few solitary units of time, he does not feel lost and small in the universe. If anyone is looking for him, he can be found at the very top of the thin blue line on planet Earth known as the mighty Mississippi, a place the sign calls Here. 

Matthew Trumbull is a writer and actor who lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children. His flash nonfiction writing has appeared in slips slips and Hippocampus Magazine, and his solo play, The Zebra Shirt of Lonely Children, is a winner of fringe festival awards in New York and Minnesota. He has been a main stage storyteller at The Moth. Instagram: @matthewtrumbull.

This essay first appeared in slips slips (Spring 2025).