When I was younger it would snow like this—layer on top of layer—and you could buoy yourself up on it with snowshoes, or cross-country skis (that wax, those boots, those locks). I am thrilled to be alive today in all of this (6 inches plus, everyone in the world complaining about it but me with four-wheel drive and sliding through the everything). Shoveling is even a recurrent pleasure: I was cold in the morning when I got up, every step a gasping against the hardwood floors, but when I went outside after coffee to huff it off of my driveway I came in flush and hot and ready for the day. It is my routine.
Others in the house make sport of watching cars try to make it up the hill (30 degree grade in my estimation), as they skid and their tires whine and all they can do is make it happen laterally, nothing in their dream of forward motion. The more interesting thing is when they don't give up: their minds are set, they have this goal of driving up this street. This is their world. Their wildly skidding, snowdrifted world. So we watch their taillights disappear back down the street, sliding into the banks or the cars parked at the bottom of the street in the danger zone, where descending cars cannot make the stop and turn and in turn hammer them, more often then not driving away without a note or admission of their guilt.
The engines rev all night. Some few do make it up when the road is plowed, or those that came in weighted four by fours. We see lights: plowlight, policelight usually without sirens, towtrucklight, brakelight, headlight, the light that descends on us from stars, from windows, from the few streetlights that illuminate the night. NintendoWiilight cascading from the top floor studio where the college kids clearly room together. You can see them manipulating the controller in front of their televisions. Ambulancelight when our neighbor has his weekly health scare and the authorities are called to try again to haul him off, even though they should know by now that he will not go with them.
I will not go with you. I will not go with anyone if lights come to vanish me back into darkness.
We even witness airlinelight blinking fast across the sky, far too close to qualify as actual astronomical occurrence. Rare thunderlight against the snow: you can't see it like you do in rainstorms, but it occurs. Lightninglight technically I suppose, not the result of thunder but concurrent with it.
Snow and light are everything in the world on nights like this, on days like this.
1 comment:
It seems like snow is just another player in the never ending war of man vs. nature. I am amused just like the people who watch the futile efforts of the cars begging to reach the top of the icy hill. I find interest in the ambition humanity has to rise above the Earth and defy what they know they can't control. I wish I weren't one of these people. I wish I could embrace nature. However, I'm far too selfish and worldly for that. But I'm tired of fighting the battle. Perhaps I'll move to a more accommodating climate, like the west coast.
Post a Comment