It was just one of those things that happen that you've got to shrug off and carry on. Everything carries risks, all the more so when conditions change and you go about doing what you've become accustomed to, while knowing that additional care must be exercised. We know those trails well, the flat portions that nonetheless offer little traps like exposed and raised tree roots that can easily trip up those who are inexperienced in walking in such terrain. But it's the slopes, some of them elongated, some steep in the process, all somewhat different in geology and the terrain they offer, whose differences lodge in your mind to be retrieved with an additional caution when conditions warrant.

Like yesterday, for example, when heavy, constant rainfall the day before combined with freeze-and-thaw situations made for a forest floor that had changed from firm traction to slithery, muck absent traction but for the foliage that had gathered on them, fallen from trees no longer in summer mode. That foliage itself had been pleasant to walk on in dry conditions but with that combination now in play it masked the clay-mud beneath which the slightest wrong move served to shove the drenched foliage aside, revealing a rank, movable trail.

Not only was the inundated clay and sand now itself agreeable to moving if encouraged by boots to do so, but it was more than prepared to move the boots as well so slithering and sliding became inevitable on certain gradients. Even those slopes where at other times when the forest floor was wet, but not so drenched that its composition turned it semi-liquid in character, where tree roots were a help, stopping slides from occurring, acting as brakes. This time the brakes failed.

You know the feeling when it instantly dawns on you that you're no longer in control of your body, that some agency detrimental to your normal progress has suddenly assumed control and your body is being propelled swiftly -- although it seems to be happening in slow motion in your mind as you desperately attempt remedial responses that just don't work -- downward and there's little you can do to stop your trajectory. You can hope to be flexible enough to just suffer the fall and there will be no injuries accompanying it. Physical injuries, that is.

One guaranteed outcome is that everything you're wearing will be smothered in thick layers of muck that adheres in great gobs to anything it touches, and it certainly touches your backside, back, legs, arms below the elbows. In the cold of autumn and the prevailing winds the wet clay becomes a burden and through your garments you can feel its clammy presence, a most uncomfortable compromise of your state of well being.