Diamond Dust

I walked to Sandy’s this morning and could still see my footprints from Saturday. No more than three other people have walked this way in two days. Yet, Sandy’s has about fifteen customers, and most of them drove less than a mile from my direction. At noon, I went for the three-dollar lunch at the senior center, where a dozen people were chatting about how brave they are to be out in minus twenty degrees—brave meaning they went from house to car.

I thought I had a firm grip on the reality of extreme cold before yesterday. Forty-five days in the Icebox, outside for several hours on all of them, had hardened my body and taught my mind. My research felt complete; I was familiar with winter and with the people who live here. With only ten days remaining, I was feeling ready to come home. But suddenly, cold presented a new aspect of itself.

Yesterday I reported seeing tiny sparkles in the air as I looked in the general direction of the sun. They could not have been falling snowflakes or wind-raised snow, for wind was calm and the sky clear. I could not catch them or photograph them, but they sparkled with amazing clarity and beauty. Something unknown was doing I didn’t know what, but it was beautiful.

This morning, with the temperature at minus twenty-four on my deck and minus thirty-six at the airport, I see a strange fog, dense enough to blot out the sun, but only perhaps twenty feet thick. And on every horizontal surface, there is a white dusting, fine as flour, that blows away with the fanning of my glove. Someone said it is ice fog and that we don’t see it very often.

On searching the internet, I think that yesterday’s sparkles were called Diamond Dust—tiny crystals of ice which would be fog at higher temperature. These minute droplets of water do not freeze except at well below thirty-two degrees. They can exist as liquid water down to about minus twenty, super-cooled, having no dust particle to start the freezing process. But in extreme cold, the droplets turn to ice and glisten in sunlight. As the concentration of droplets increases, they can block the sun, as they did this morning, and then they cannot glisten. Now they are ice fog and can settle on things as fine white dust of ice crystals.

Now, I must ask myself how many things about cold are unknown to me and doing I don’t know what. I feel as much like a new wineskin as I did the day I arrived here, as much a vessel ready to be filled with intoxication as I was then, and this after all the awakenings I have been filled with. I feel almost like a tourist who steps off the bus, follows a sign-carrying guide for an hour, and says, “I have seen enough.” And inside she knows it’s only a show. There is not much support in our world for moments of revelation that come, like diamond dust, from the blue. I come in an era where a worldview of mechanical causality prevails, where insights are cast off for lack of evidence. In earlier times, stories of epiphany fared better. And for artists and poets they still do.




After the ice fog went away, everything was still and covered in white dust, like volcanic ash. When a breeze came up, it returned some of the fallen ice fog to the air—recycled.









A mountain of wood chips looks like the Rockies.