Solstice

This is my day off and cripes, you guys, it's 8 degrees below zero. The wind is blowing about 25 miles per hour. The 12 inches of snow that fell in the last 36 hours is drifting over driveways, sidewalks, roads, yards, and woodpiles. The landscape is a whirling white haze with a howling soundtrack that resembles an endless BN&SF freight train except that there is no train. And when there is one you can't hear it for the noise of the gale. Birds are losing their grip on the feeders and blowing off their perches before they get enough to eat.


The foot of snow I cleared yesterday afternoon somehow made its way back into the driveway overnight and about six inches of new snow landed on top of that. The guy who drives the snowplow for our village came by and added another foot or so that he scraped off the street in a speeding, frosty explosion as exciting as any special effect in a Hollywood blockbuster.

My first two waking hours (excludes dressing time) of this day are spent shoveling snow from the porch with a scoop shovel, making my way to the garage door in 6-inch increments to get to the snow blower.

For the sake of our friends in warmer climes it should be noted that snow blower is a misnomer; it doesn't really blow snow. Something of a cross between a steamboat and a lawnmower, it is a contraption in which an internal combustion engine takes the place of boilers and pitman arms to turn an auger-like paddle wheel amidships at a dizzying speed. The wheel in turn forces snow up and out of a smokestack on the main deck in a stream that resembles that of a high pressure fire hose. The smokestack--old-time rivermen prefer the term chimney--can be cranked so as to expel the snow in the direction of the pilot's choosing.

But it does not blow snow. The wind blows snow. And when you are navigating a snow blower no matter where you aim the chimney the wind blows the snow right back into your face and encrusts both the starboard and port sides of it into a snotty frozen mass that clings to your whiskers for the rest of your voyage.

With the offending snow again relocated from porch, sidewalk, driveway, and decks, it's time to haul the wood. Shuffling back and forth to the woodpile burrows a path that improves with the hauling of each armload. By the time the rick is full you are pretty well warmed up. Only a moron would remove sweaty hands from his gloves and grab onto the brass doorknob on his way back inside to enjoy coffee and the latest issue of The New Yorker while sitting in the warmth of the wood stove.

Today is the first day of winter. We're off to a good start.

Getting Purchase on the Moment

'Tis the season here along the upper stretches of The Big River when something in the earth's clutch slips and our beloved blue orb yaws a little off kilter and it's easy to see it's going to take some considerable time to readjust itself. This geo-mechanical contretemps, in turn, has decidedly-marked celestial consequences.

The sun's boiler is temporarily cooled and it can barely build up enough steam to navigate itself upstream. As the pressure diminishes, the ball of fire that had us on a steady bake just a couple months ago becomes so sluggish that it takes it until almost eight o'clock in the morning to achieve the summit of the bluffs to the east. After that it never does get very far up in the air and is sure to be pretty well spent before suppertime, even if you eat early. If all that isn't pitiable enough, the whole chore of just getting up and around rarely leaves Old Sol with enough spunk to punch through the cloud cover.

The upshot of this whole affair is that we don't get much light, one of the key ingredients of life. And in the absence of light just about every living thing that hasn't crept in through the cracks, flown south, or gone to sleep has surrendered its color and settled for a gray or brown as drab as the sparrows puffed with cold and huddled in the leafless bittersweet. Even the cedars and spruce that we call evergreen can't summon up enough luminescence to exceed the complexion of their own shadows.

This is the time of year when it takes a long time to get dressed to go outside. And the longer it takes to get dressed, the longer it takes to get undressed. So once you go outside it makes sense to do everything you want or need to do before you come back inside. Having established above that there isn't that much time to begin with, this is a season that demands considerably more efficiency.

So now when I come home from work I don't come inside right away. I am more likely to make a stop at the garage just long enough to pull on my quilted bib overalls and head to the poor man's woodshed, a snow-covered tarpaulin tent. On all fours I crawl underneath and, contorting myself, I toss split elm and oak logs into a wheelbarrow with which I will lumber across the yard to the basement door. From there, armloads are muscled up the stairs and into a 4' X 4' rick on the deck. (This is the last stop before said fuel makes its way indoors and onto a smaller rick where it will, within 24 hours, heat me for the umpteenth and final time.) Whenever an armload is dropped a brief rest has been earned.

It feels good to sweat in single-digit temperatures.

It was during one of those short breathers, with less than an hour of daylight remaining, when the sun mustered up some gumption and made its play. An orange-yellow beam reflected across the smooth ice for the full width of the river, perhaps a mile across from my vantage point. It broke into a rippling dance in the small strip of open water that still forms a narrow channel between shores of ice mottled with splotches of snow constantly being rearranged by a steady, bitter wind.

A cardinal landed three feet away from me in the filigreed remains of the bittersweet, eyeing the surviving berries as flaming red as he. As the sun lowered, the yellow beam on the ice climbed up the Minnesota bluffs and painted the bottom edge of the sky with orange, icy fire. An eagle stood at the edge of the open water, staring intently into the mystery below.

Some winter moments are momentous.