I love the snow. Even with more than five feet on the ground and a Nor’Easter gathering force tonight over the Atlantic, I have no complaints about the weather. I do daydream of summer sometimes, but that has more to do with the utter freedom of three months off teaching than with the temperature. In the rank, humid days of summer, I sometimes go to the cool basement, get out my cross-country skis, and pantomime the motions. Traveling around these snow-laden days, there are the comical scenes: a geyser of snow launches straight up from someplace where a person, obscured entirely by snowbanks, must be with a snowblower; a Volkswagen, its contours matched to a pile of snow anyway, is slowly buried until the only sign of it is a sideview mirror protruding like the flipper of a beached whale; icicles fuse into a broad tongue a full two stories long on an old house; a sled track runs down from the peak of a barn’s roof, over a ten foot snow pile and onto the porch of the house next door.
From my office window.
Still, in conversations with many of my fellow New Englanders, besieged by snow, I find many of us are jangle-nerved, breathlessly anxious, and often sleepless at 2 or 3 am, sometimes listening for some sign of roof collapse, or the trickle of water backing up behind ice dams, but mostly for no cause. I have been getting outside most days, and am proud of the crop of freckles across my nose and cheeks, but even when I am tired out with exertions, I too find myself tensed up and wound tight many days. Trying to sort it out, it seems like much is due to the grayness of the days. When we are almost perpetually either pre-, mid-, or post-storm, the sky clears only rarely, and briefly. While out skiing through an unbroken snow field the other day, I had to focus so strenuously on where I was placing my feet that my scope of vision narrowed to my immediate surroundings. The white field stretching in all horizontal directions, and the white-gray sky meeting it seemed to invert for a moment and I had a sensation of falling upward. Reeling, I stopped and stared at a row of black trees for a moment before pressing on.
The deprivation of light is part of the trouble, I am certain, because on blue sky days, even when the temperature is near zero and the winds gusting, I feel boosted up. Still, there is another layer that seems to be anxious-making. Something beyond cabin fever or weariness. I think it’s the vigilance required to navigate the terrain in these conditions. Though I haven’t had to drive during any of the worst weather (teachers of chemistry and biology being decidedly non-essential personnel), even after the storms abate, the narrowed roads are harrowing, hemmed in by snowbanks seven or eight feet high, curtailed lines of sight leading us to inch most of the way into intersections before deciding to floor it and hope for the best. Traction, taken for granted at other times of the year, is nearly nonexistent now; our cars drift around turns, and we make dry-mouthed, balletic slides toward hapless pedestrians or heedless plows, willing the brakes to engage. Even walking, we shuffle step, bodies pitched forward, making tiny twists with each footstep to check the friction. The short walk between campus buildings takes all my focus and energy. It’s not that physics governs us any less in the warmer seasons, it’s just that it recedes from the foremost of our thoughts.
All this glissading around is precisely what I love about this season too–when I finally get into something of a rhythm in my amateurish skiing, the smooth forward glide, foot to foot, is an exhilaration not to be matched in the summer time. Having found the right wax for the conditions, I can slip down a slope and across the frozen river on a continuous ribbon, knowing that somewhere, four feet below my skis, an eroded stream bank is studded with vicious rocks. Everything is smoothed over. Even falls are pleasant in the woods–slow-motion, with a soft whoomp into the enveloping snow. Back on the pavement, the vigilance will return again, and in the car, even more so. I confess to being quite sick of scraping ice off the windshield of my car. Aside from that, though my brethren here may call damnation down on my head, I love this. The woods have filled up with snow, and continue to fill until it seems they may overbrim. They are the cure.
thestagecoachroad 