Good Riddance: Giving in to the Slide

Winter wisdom from Amy Poehler, conquering the ice, and rethinking the brakes.

Tread, don’t fail me now!

Welcome back to Good Riddance, the weekly series where we get together to let something go from the week (Year? Century?) before.

I grew up in the desert warmth of Southern California with little to no proximity to snow apart from the trips I’d take with my parents to June Lake in the High Sierra, which rarely took place in the winter. When I moved to New York almost two decades ago, it was partly the snow that drew me here—snow, and falling in love, of course. I wanted to know the cold, to be able to brave it like the cool New England girls could, however unfamiliar its relenting chill was to my sun-soaked body.

During my first winter in New York as an official resident, I met up with my friend, the actress Amy Poehler, for lunch. I wore the most “downtown cool girl” winter-looking coat I owned. I was trying to play the part: A (new) New Yorker that could hang with the effortlessness and toughness of this city and its frigid temperatures. I entered her house with snot dripping down my nose, my face frozen red, and my whole body shaking with cold. Amy took one look at the impracticality of my winter gear and laughed, “Oh, Mommy,” she said. (“Mommy,” being the affectionate name we have called each other for decades for reasons I do not remember.) “That coat will not do. We need to get you to a Patagonia store ASAP.”

Since that first winter in New York, I’ve developed a thicker skin for the harsh weather, though my resilience to the cold, wet months is still nothing compared to my husband, David, who lived in Boston for many years. Still, I like to think I’ve come to understand the snow and its mercurial ways more than I did back then in my twenties, except for one aspect: Driving in it.

This past week we saw huge snowfall in Upstate New York where David and I own a modest home we like to call “The Cabbage” (a sort of cabin-cottage hybrid, obviously). But the snow pretty quickly gave way to lots of rain, then single-digit temperatures, and then suddenly everything everywhere turned to hard, thick ice, including the roads. On Thursday night I had plans to meet up with some girlfriends at a local restaurant. I had been looking forward to it all week but was now dreading it, as the thought of driving down the steep dirt road from our house—now covered in glassy ice—kept flashing in my mind.

It was already dark outside when I pulled away from the house, thinking about my husband’s advice, which I’ve heard for seventeen years now: Drive slow. If you start to slide out of control, don’t hit the brakes and don’t try to fight it. You need to gently steer into where the slide is taking you, however scary it might feel, until your wheels regain traction. As I began to go down the hill, I kept his words close, white-knuckling the steering wheel.

About a quarter of the way down, it started. The tires gave way to the ice, and the car began to slide.

Just before the slide.

I let out an audible gasp and my heart began to pound as the gates guarding my adrenaline broke wide open. It’s happening, I thought. The thing I have feared for all these years is happening. As the car slid, I found myself saying out loud, like a child with a cry crawling out of her throat, “I don’t want this.” All my fear came bubbling to the surface—and not just about sliding in my car on ice in the dark of night down a hill, but of everything that has been feeling so completely out of my control these days.

Suddenly, the phrase turned into refrain. I don’t want this: my country sliding, seemingly uncontrollably, toward greater peril while we all hold on for dear life. I don’t want this: another four years of Putin’s pawn of a president, Donald Trump, and the chaos, death, and destruction that follow him everywhere he goes. I don’t want this: the capitulation of legacy media; the destruction of our standing on the world stage. I don’t want this: Elon Musk’s dirty fingers all over our private information; the obliteration of support systems and benefits for veterans; the unjust terminations and forced resignations of those who run some of the nation’s most important institutions.

I don’t want this: the resurgence of deadly diseases that were once considered eradicated in the U.S.; a bought and paid for judicial system; the endless horrific attacks on the most vulnerable who are just trying to make ends meet and keep their families safe. I don’t want any of this, the words screamed in my head as my car slid. I don’t want to hit a tree or go off the side of the road into a ravine or spin out. I don’t want to think about the insidious cruelty of astroturfing, or the evil behind the phrase “The Riviera of the Middle East,” of how right-wing extremism is rising globally, and the planet is heating up faster than anyone knows how to deal with. I don’t want this: to be constantly trying to make sense of what feels like a crumbling world.

As my mind spiraled out thinking that the car would soon do the same, I heard David’s voice telling me to breathe and to not hit the brakes, even though that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to slam my foot so fucking hard on the brake and scream “ENOUGH!” I wanted, I want, to stop all of this from happening.

But I heard him saying not to pull away from what scares me the most, and in fact, do the scariest thing of all: go toward where the slide is sending me, because as Jack Hirschman would say, you’re helpless, really, to do otherwise. Let the car—and this country—end up where it’s going to, however terrifying or wrong it feels right now. This is life. This is the hardest part about living.

What I had to do in that car is what I think we all need to do right now: fight the slide by giving in to it a little bit, by staying as calm and present as we can in the face of our worst fears, by being strategic about how we choose to course correct. No slamming on the brakes, no closing our eyes. We keep our hands on the wheel and find a way through to safety. We keep going.

Seconds later (which felt like hours), my car’s tires caught a little traction on the ice just as I came to the side of the road, and I regained control of the car. My whole body trembled as I took a moment to collect myself. As I continued the drive to meet my friends, still rattled by the slide, I felt a kind of bewilderment—a sense of pride that I had done it, the hard thing I had worried about for years. I had not only slid on ice, but I survived it. We’ll survive it.

This week I’m letting go of all that’s sliding out of our control, all that feels so terrifying in the world, like driving down an ice-covered road in the dark. But I’m still holding on to the steering wheel, eyes focused on what’s ahead, gaining stronger traction and more forward motion every day.

What are you letting go of from this week, friends? Let me know in the comments.

For your calendars: Our next edition of The Short and Sweet, our monthly creative and cathartic gathering live over Zoom for paid subscribers will take place on Thursday, March 20th from 12pm-1pm ET. We’ll be joined by my ethically-minded and brilliant friend, the journalist, founder of the newsletter The.Ink, and NYT bestselling author of The Persuaders, Anand Giridharadas. We’ll talk politics, fighting fascism in America, and what we need to do next. The Zoom link will be emailed to paid subscribers about thirty minutes before the start of the Zoom.