And so it it continues . . .
After an unheard of warm Saturday of 40-degree temperatures, I was feeling a little better about my circumstances. I went to my financial institution this morning with my list of fraudulent charges on my debit card. The debit card was immediately deactivated, and my money will be refunded by Monday. (By the way, this morning, someone tried to purchase $350 of Staples supplies. Thank God that I'm flat broke.)
So, I was feeling pretty good about my life. Things were looking up.
Then, tonight, after I was done cleaning my house, I went to the thermostat and cranked up the heat a little because there was a chill in the air. I turned it up to 67 degrees. The furnace did not kick on. 70 degrees. No furnace. 75 degrees. No furnace. 85 degrees. No furnace. 90 degrees. Nothing again.
It is now almost midnight, and I have no heat in the middle of an Upper Peninsula winter night.
So, I have space heaters going, and my brother (who is a plumber and furnace guy) is driving up tomorrow morning to see if he can fix things.
I feel as though I'm living under a curse.
Pray for Saint Marty tonight. If he doesn't freeze to death, he may commit ritual seppuku.
For your reading pleasure, a little winter essay . . .
The Whiteness of Water
by: Martin Achatz
“
. . . is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of
meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless all-color of atheism from
which we shrink?”
----Herman
Melville
I sit down to write these
lines the morning following the first snowstorm of winter. One week after All Souls Day, a comma of
arctic air swooped across Lake Superior, gathered shrapnel of wave crash and
foam, baptized my little portion of the Upper Peninsula with dunes of white.
It happens every year,
and yet I still stand on my front porch, stunned by those first blind crests
and tidals, a Winslow Homer seascape of ice and snow.
*****
In the 1880s, anthropologist Franz Boas, traveling
through the tundra of northern Canada, noted an ocean of terms used by
indigenous people to describe the whiteness.
Researchers have debated his claim ever since, but recent studies of Inuit,
Yupik, and Icelandic dialects have identified some 163 terms for snow and ice,
made up of root words and suffixes.
Linguist Willem LeReuse says, “These people need to
know whether ice is fit to walk on or whether you will sink through.” This language is “a matter of life and
death.”
*****
A frozen lake is not frozen. Beneath the white lid of winter, it continues
to breathe and groan, strain and stretch.
I sat in a friend’s shanty on Lake Independence one
January night. Cold stars Swiss-cheesed
the heavens, and a fuse of wind sizzled across the whiteness, driving pellets
of snow against the shanty walls. Slush
skimmed the fishing hole, shrugged over the lip of ice. Below, my hook dangled in the black Jell-O of
lake as I listened.
The snow and ice and water were singing. Otherworldly music—blue whales dueting in the
Atlantic, meteors whistling through atmospheres, penguins or aliens or angels
giving thanks under green fingers of aurora.
It was a conversation of states, solid talking to liquid talking to
solid, in a language older than Inuit or Yupik.
A glacial language of endings and beginnings.
*****
Abridged list of English snow terms from the Farmer’s Almanac: barchan, corn snow, cornice, dendrite, finger
drift, firn, graupel, ground blizzard, hominy snow, penitents, pillow drift,
rimed snow, snirt, snowburst, sun cups, whiteout.
*****
Drive to Lake Superior just before sunrise in
February. Make sure the sky is empty of
everything but stars and moon. Park near
Little Presque, just as a rib of light crowns the horizon. Get out of your car. Stand.
Listen.
You will hear a distant rushing sound, like a herd of
sleeping mammoths, breathing thunder in unison.
In. Out. In.
Out. Follow that sound.
It won’t be easygoing.
You’ll encounter boulders of ice, five-foot drifts of snow sheathed in
thick rime, polar faults that trap feet and legs. If you aren’t careful, you may end up
slogging through thigh-deep planes of not-quite-snow and not-quite-ice. Keep moving toward the sound.
Light will crawl into the heavens as you walk, and
you’ll be tempted to pause, watch.
Don’t. You’ll miss the main
attraction because of the opening act.
Forward. Go forward.
Judge for yourself when you’re close enough to the Big
Waters. You should be able to see the
lake fully, without distraction of trees or piled snows. Be careful not to go too far out. Waves and currents are still moving beneath
the ice. You may sink through. This is life and death.
Once you have found this spot, stand there. Breathe with the water. In.
Out. In. Out.
Don’t take out your phone to mediate the moment. No video.
No pictures. Just watch.
*****
Mix light with water, and the result is Monet—purples,
greens, pinks smeared together like sidewalk chalk after rain. Mix light with water and snow and ice, and
the result is clearer, harder. A
Byzantine landscape of glass shards.
Whites, greens, blues, reds pieced together into the geometric face of
something divine. Jonah swallowed by the
Leviathan. Christ strolling across the
Sea of Galilee. Thoreau chopping wood by
Walden Pond.
Whiteness gives way to meaning.
*****
In April, I stand by my kitchen window, watch the
world melt. A fang of ice hangs from the
eave of the roof. As the sun strikes it,
it begins to sweat, drops steady as a clock’s second hand. Soon there will be slush, then mud, then
green.
The dumb blankness of December and January flows with
this promise of becoming. It is the
language of water.
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