March 3: Dream About the Lions, Fell Asleep, 57 Degrees

Santiago wants to dream . . . 

I wish he'd sleep and I could sleep and dream about the lions, he thought. Why are the lions the main thing that is left? Don't think, old man, he said to himself. Rest gently now against the wood and think of nothing. He is working. Work as little as you can.

It was getting into the afternoon and the boat still moved slowly and steadily. But there was an added drag now from the easterly breeze and the old man rode gently with the small sea and the hurt of the cord across his back came to him easily and smoothly.

Once in the afternoon the line started to rise again. But the fish only continued to swim at a slightly higher level. The sun was on the old man's left arm and shoulder and on his back. So he knew the fish had turned east of north.

Now that he had seen him once, he could picture the fish swimming in the water with his purple pectoral fins set wide as wings and the great erect tail slicing through the dark. I wonder how much he sees at that depth, the old man thought. His eye is huge and a horse, with much less eye, can see in the dark. Once I could see quite well in the dark. Not in the absolute dark. But almost as a cat sees.

The sun and his steady movement of his fingers had uncramped his left hand now completely and he began to shift more of the strain to it and he shrugged the muscles of his back to shift the hurt of the cord a little.

Sometimes, falling asleep is a great escape from difficult circumstances.  Santiago knows he needs to rest and prepare for the coming battle with the fish.  Plus, the old man wants to be with the lions in his dreams.  The problem with dreams, especially really good ones, is that, when you wake up, there are those few moments of leftover euphoria followed by intense disappointment.

I fell asleep on my couch last night, and I had a dream.  A really good one.  I rarely remember my dreams, good or bad.  Upon waking, they hang in the air around me and then quickly evaporate into vague untethered emotions.  I don't keep dream journals.  I should, but the idea of sitting in my bed in the middle of the night, scribbling in my journal, is not attractive.  I don't think I'd ever get back to sleep.

When I woke on the couch from my good dream, I shuffled into my bedroom, crawled under the covers, and prepared to sleep again.  Then, I realized how cold it was in the house.  I lay there, waiting to hear the heat kick on.  I waited for five minutes.  Nothing.

So, I crawled out from under the covers, stumbled back into the living room to check the thermostat.  It was set at 70 degrees, and the temperature in the house was 65.  I cursed a little and dialed the temperature up a little more.  I got a "low battery" warning on the thermostat.  I scrounged up a couple AA batteries and put them in the thermostat.  I waited for the furnace to grind to life.  Nothing.

Long story short (too late for that), I spent almost three hours trying to get a furnace person to come out and get our heat going, watching the temperature in the house slowly plummet with each phone call I made.  All of the businesses that advertised 24-hour service weren't answering or had answering services that promised return phones calls within minutes.  Those callbacks never materialized.

Finally, over two hours into this adventure, at about 3 a.m. and 57 degrees, Charlie from Trudell Plumbing and Heating called me.  He sounded tired, asked a few questions, and then said he was on his way.  An hour later, he was in our little furnace crawlspace, tinkering, checking, mumbling to himself.  Twenty minutes after he arrived, our furnace roared back to life, like one of Santiago's dream lions.  Charlie was kind, helpful, and didn't tell me I needed to replace my furnace.

I went back to bed, got about an hour-and-a-half of sleep, and then hit the ground running.  Work and work.  Lunch with one of my best friends I haven't really seen since the beginning of the pandemic.  More work.  Bubble tea with my daughter and her boyfriend.  More work.  A beer with another wonderful friend.  Then, in the evening. I led a poetry workshop.

I am, to say the least, a little spent.  But, as I sit typing this post, my furnace is purring out heat, and I have a three-day weekend ahead.

Saint Marty couldn't dream of a better start to his mini vacation.

February 22: It Continues, No Heat, "The Whiteness of Water"

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.