More Snow

Five cars stand idle in the cleared and frozen parking lot at Sandy’s. Three of them puff white breath from their exhaust pipes. I never considered leaving the engine running while I go shopping or read a book with a morning omelet, but here the risk of car theft apparently underweighs the discomfort of a cold car. Larry turns his engine off at Sandy’s, but about ten minutes before he is ready to go, he presses a button in his pocket and assures me that his car has started. He offers me a ride, but it’s only four blocks back to my room, and this time I decline. He honks as he passes; I wave, and feel just like a native.

Jerry is busy with the plumbing again today. My room is on the second floor, and a deck runs along all the upper rooms with a stairway at one end. My room is nearest the stairway, and I use a broom to clear the deck near my door and stairway of snow. The rest of the deck has a foot of snow and no footprints. For several weeks, I have been the only person up here. Jerry, who owns the place, discovered a leak during the night before last, which he traced to the baseboard hot water heating system in the second floor. He keeps the heat turned on in the unrented rooms, but still, a pipe froze during the extreme cold we have been having. When it thawed, some of the first floor rooms had minor rainstorms, including the one Jerry, himself, lives in. My room was not affected. Any room left unheated can have frozen pipes within an hour at thirty below zero. In this case, it was a heating pipe in one of the vacant rooms that froze where it passes close to an outside wall, and once it froze, the heat stopped. Jerry would have had a major flood if he had not noticed the problem early. He went about with a hair dryer, blowing warm air on cold pipes. Today a plumber came to repair the break. “We have these problems every winter,” Jerry says.


Today it is snowing, and that makes it a little warmer, minus five and remaining about the same all day. This is the first snow, other than flurries, in about two weeks. The old snow has settled and crusted somewhat, so that walking on it, I usually remain on top where it sounds like walking on an empty oil drum. But sometimes the crust breaks and down I go, two feet to the bottom, or farther if the snow has drifted up. These holes are where I fell through while following a snowmobile track, which had packed the snow and made the going easier.









These deer tracks show that the deer are falling through too. Their small hoofs put more pressure on the snow than my boots do. They cannot run very fast in this kind of snow. Wolves, with their broader paws and lighter weight, can usually run on top of the crusted surface. It must be a nervous time for deer. Maybe that’s why these tracks lead into town where wolves seldom go.

Walking Thoughts to Ranier

ice and tree will hold
a skater like me
no shadow of doubt







cushions ready
footstool set
relax enjoy the show









arrows set
bows drawn
winter’s ready










dumped and pushed aside
graveyard for city dead
they keep on falling

Beauty

Beauty creeps from a snow-bank where it was deposited after being scraped, pushed, compacted and left to remain until spring finally melts it. It resides in solid water, and after all these days, continues to amaze me. Today it defies the snowplow and the encroachment of a town and paper mill into its domain. Beauty does not accept its sentence and creeps out from cloistered piles. It wakes in the night and grows intricate appendages, adorning itself for the opening reception of another show.

This is not the real world, I thought to myself on the way to Sandy’s this morning. After just a few strides from my door and my heated room, I landed, like an alien in ethereal animation, inhabited by fantastic creatures. And they don’t know it. Maybe they used to know, before the great forgetting, and they ceased to be senescent, retaining the art of a bygone culture.





Beauty stands erect beside the source, the sun, today, as if made, like it, to nurture new life. Bits of diamond dust pass from a column of light to me, imparting their sparkles. My camera sees them as white spots, but it does not know them as I do.











When piled up high in disposal heaps and left to die, beauty doesn’t pout, does not form dark and twisted poetry. Instead, it gathers strength and rises from the grime, forms shapes for the sun to see and reflect to me.








On the surface of its piled-up fate
no angry image does beauty paint
but grows from what it has within
and what it finds without
fronds and winged seeds and forest trees
likenesses in miniature
Or is there something else it wants to show?








Beauty doesn’t shun
the dead the plow scraped up
and threw with it to die
but builds a little monument
above a fallen twist of grass
to hope and life anew









We make for our enjoyment, replicas of beauty, Styrofoam and frosted glass, but seldom do we place ourselves in such a cold and hostile place to see it real at Sandy’s, inside a single pane.









When beauty encounters, in its descent, a pile of machine-ground woodchips for the mill, not a tree or child it surely prefers, it doesn’t gather there in ugly form, no patterns of contempt, but acts as beauty calls.




Isn’t life really more like stories we tell ourselves about our daily experiences, rather than hard science. Life seems more like magic or alchemy or something I don’t know how to theorize about. This solid beauteous water.

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.

Record Cold

On this cold morning, I see tiny sparkles in the air as I look in the general direction of the sun. I don’t see them in other directions. They could not be falling snowflakes or wind-raised snow, for the wind is calm and the sky clear. They are too small to catch or photograph, and they refuse to land on my glove. They glisten for flashing moments, turning their shiny sides, reflecting the sun like small fishes in a great ocean.

The tops of bare trees are whiter this morning, as if they have caught some elusive stardust. They sparkle in quiet sunlight with varying patterns that seem to depend on where I stand to look at them.

“It was minus forty-one when I left the house,” says a man in town. My deck thermometer read minus twenty-nine. The airport reports a low of minus thirty-six last night, one degree below the previous record for this date. The all-time record low still stands at minus fifty-five on January 6, 1909.



Ice is creeping under my door where a small leak in the seal allows outside air in. The small advancing glacier is a measure of cooling outside. Right now my inside thermometer reads 72, and the baseboard heating water is keeping my air 101 degrees warmer than outside.

Bitter Cold

Last night’s forecast summarized today as “Bitter Cold.” It said that arctic air would pour down from Canada in the night, dropping the temperature to minus thirty-six before morning. The thermometer on my deck read minus twenty-four at eight AM, the lowest so far by eight degrees. But there was no wind, so the day should feel no colder than prior days. The airport was reporting minus thirty-six, but that is two miles south of my home, and does not get as much of the moderating affect of Rainy River and Rainy Lake.

I walked to Sandy’s where a new waitress said she has a wood stove in the garage. This made no sense to me and I asked her to explain. “I don’t worry about carbon monoxide and my allergies like I did when it was in the house,” she said. It only made sense when she explained that the stove heats water, which runs through a pipe to the baseboards in her house. She makes several trips to the garage every evening and night to stoke the fire.

As I write this, I see that the temperature in Pasadena is seventy degrees, eighty-seven degrees warmer than it is here.

Cold and Clear

Minus sixteen this morning when I started a walk on New Year’s Day. A big bronze moon was about to set at 8:30 dawn. Last night, the same big moon had a circle around it, and the night was clear, which accounts for this morning’s low temperature.

I walked a mile or two toward the airport and stopped for coffee. “You look cold,” said the waitress at the Chocolate Moose Restaurant. But I didn’t feel cold. “Here’s a napkin to wipe your nose,” she said. I stood in the vestibule and peeled off layers—first the thick gloves, then the under-gloves, pulled back the hood of my coat, the sweat band which serves as a nose warmer, the elastic face mask from Sharon Rizk (Where is she anyway?), knitted bogan off my head, shake out my matted hair, now unzip the coat. I walk to a table, carrying all this, take off the backpack, take off the coat, remove the under-vest. Finally, I sit.



I took a shortcut through a field and left knee-deep holes in the powder. It’s been a week since any significant snow fell, but thawing temperatures have not happened, and the powder stays just as it falls, unless wind comes to disturb it. But in this field surrounded by forest it looks as if the snow fell last night.

Chocolate Mousse means the same here as it does in California, except that almost everyone but me has seen a moose around here, and they really are the color of chocolate. It’s best not to see their lanky legs and big antlers coming at you on the highway. Not that they are aggressive, they just don’t know what to make of a car.







Standing under icicles like these can lead to a very bad poetic experience, as shown by a man who died from a falling icicle in Devon, England. They put this on his stone:

Bless my eyes
Here he lies
In a sad pickle
Killed by an icicle