Finding The Edge

Flat-earth and science class, a personal essay

A first draft, maybe even less than that. But I like to share, so enjoy <3

When I was a high school sophomore, I fell for a flat-earth mockumentary.

It featured the story of a woman hellbent on proving that the earth was top-shaped by seeking out The Edge.

“On December the 3rd, 1961, a 63-year-old woman by the name of Andrea Barnes set off single-handedly across this barrier of ice,” began the British narrator over eerie music. “On December the 18th, the weather turned against her. A week later, on Christmas Day, all radio contact was lost. Miss Barnes was never seen again.”

The 90s grain obscured the journey into sinister shadow. It ended simply with a note found in Andrea’s abandoned snowmobile, found some 30 years later by a researcher:

“I have been there, the debate finally comes to an end,” - Andrea B, it read.

I didn’t believe the earth was flat, but I was captivated by the idea of The Edge and disturbed to my bones by the note and its finality. I imagined myself as an unruly scientist, trekking into the elements. Suddenly and without warning, I would be confronted with a precipice, a black hole of something I’d always known and something I’d been trying to avoid: the truth, the nothingness.

When the lights flicked on in Ms. Kirk’s biology class, a student raised his hand. Dr. Leo Ferrari? He asked about one of the quoted sources.

Exactly, Ms. Kirk chuckled, do we think Dr. Ferrari is a reputable source? The bell rang.

In the years since, I felt like I had stumbled toward The Edge several times.

Before I knew anybody in the city, I used to walk around Seattle alone and admire the sun glistening off the buildings on autumn afternoons. Sometimes, I would be overcome by a rush of gratitude. How lucky was I to be in a city? Alone in a crowd of people? Feeling so small and so free and so untethered?

On the last day of my freshman year of college, I ate sandwiches with two of my then-best friends in Cal Anderson Park. We sat on a rock like seals and reminisced about late nights and lost loves (or the lack thereof). As my mom’s Honda Civic pulled up to take me home for the summer, my life split in two: what had happened so far and the dreadful nothing of what was to come.

Maybe I could foresee that both of these friendships would dissolve into memory: one would fade away, the other would burn. I’ve moved to larger and more glamorous cities than Seattle, but haven’t felt that same sense of gratitude or smallness since. The buildings have never quite glittered in the sun the same way.

Before I moved away from the city for good, I cut ties with my best friend. It followed a three-hour whispered conversation about her transgressions on the carpeted floor of another friend’s apartment. As criminal justice students, they compiled a list of evidence: a suspicious termination from her retail job, her obsession with sharing and tracking our locations.

The friendship ended without ceremony. She called me at the tail end of a road trip as I sat between packed boxes in a friend’s East Coast townhouse, a few day siesta before I jetted of.f to Miami for the year. She was upset: why wasn’t she invited on the trip? She asked. I answered cagily and felt justified. We had determined that she was toxic, unworthy of a clean split.

I was my same, old self who didn’t have the words to tell her I chose my other friends and that her rage was too intense for me. Or even that I just couldn’t bear the idea of multi-hour Facetimes while I was trying to start my new life at the beach.

I decided on a desolate Virginia highway that my new life had begun, and she would not be a part of it. John Denver played mournfully over the truck’s speakers. For the first week in Miami, I was completely alone. Nobody called me, and I rarely went out. I imagined Ms. Andrea Barnes, so staunch in her convictions, that she wandered off the edge of the earth. I dangled my feet above a swimming pool and looked at my reflection. The cool, deep blue water mirrored my distorted features.

I thought about Andrea in the snow, how it must have been so white, the world just seemed to go blank. How The Edge might have been comforting after miles and miles of oppressive sameness. Maybe I had found the other side of The Edge.

I rewatched the documentary for old time’s sake. I wanted to feel the familiar dread, a horror film wrapped in an educational flick from the 1990s. The truth is, it was melodramatic and unsubtle. The experts talked in platitudes, and Andrea Barnes’ (obviously fictional) story occupied less than 4 minutes of the runtime. It was cheesy, designed to teach kids about misinformation.

So maybe The Edge isn’t real. Maybe I’m supposed to take that step into the dark and know the earth is round and something will be waiting for me on the other side. But I can’t help thinking. “I have been there.”