Falling Meters

My iPhone doesn't do the snow-capped White Mountains justice, especially Mount Washington's peak—the highest in the northeast—at which Lu gazes from the summit of Mt. Rosebrook at Bretton Woods. Even with its upper black diamond and double black diamond runs, designed by Olympian Bode Miller, Bretton Woods seems a gentle mountain, with the sort of terrain that can be easily negotiated by experienced skiers. And I'm thankful for what it offers: a peaceful coast on which to contemplate the beauty of the surrounding mountain range, its glacial cirques and ravines.

Bretton's forgiving terrain is a balm after skiing Cannon Mountain's (where Miller traversed the slopes with his junior ski team) cold and severely pitched trails. Wind gusts at Cannon's summit reached thirty miles per hour muddling visibility in the afternoon. Its long runs became icy turns and twists that were not easily negotiated. But Cannon's steep, lower Front Five, where thighs burned hot on Avalanche, and Paulie's Extension above that, and Zoomer, and the glades—the exhilarating skip through the trees—all of which plunge down to Echo Lake, were, alone, worth the price of the ticket and the freeze that settled into the outer extremities of my body.

And then there was the snow. The glorious snow.

Falling softly and silently.

We are back home now, where the ground is shorn and sepia-steeped, and where I've had the chance to leaf through everything under the Sun, including the Moon, in this year's Old Farmer's Almanac. What I found in the Almanac is that today, this 27th day of February, is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's birthday, a birth date that is shared with sister Backwoods Betty. And I wonder now if what Betty remembers most of Longfellow mirrors my recollection: Father's animated reading of Longfellow's graceful and melodically metered epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, especially the first few lines of its final canto:

By the shore of Gitche Gumee / By the shining Big-Sea-Water / At the doorway of his wigwam / In the pleasant Summer morning / Hiawatha stood and waited...

This past week, before snaking down the sleeted helix of the mountain, I stood and waited, heard the rhythm of the white mountains and the meters of falling snow, the sound of the crystal drifts across the north woods, the soft crunch of fresh flurries that had gathered beneath my boots.

And Longfellow, from Snow-Flakes, spoke then, too:

Out of the bosom of the Air,

        Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,

Over the woodlands brown and bare,

        Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

                      Silent, and soft, and slow

                      Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take

        Suddenly shape in some divine expression,

Even as the troubled heart doth make

        In the white countenance confession,

                      The troubled sky reveals

                      The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,

        Slowly in silent syllables recorded;

This is the secret of despair,

        Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,

                      Now whispered and revealed

                      To wood and field.

And then more: A deep breath. The deepest. 

It was all right to go home.

Gone Skiing

Sierra ski racing in the mining days. New England Ski Museum.

“Hans Castorp found that one quickly gets readiness in an art where strong desire

comes in play. He was not ambitious for expert skill, and all he needed he

acquired in a few days, without undue strain on wind or muscles. He learned to

keep his feet tidily together and make parallel tracks; to avail himself of his stick

in getting off; he learned how to take obstacles, such as small elevations of the

ground, with a slight soaring motion, arms outspread, rising and falling like a

ship on a billowy sea; learned, after the twentieth trial, not to trip and roll over

when he braked at full speed, with the right Telemark turn, one leg forward, the

other bent at the knee. Gradually he widened the sphere of his activities.

.     .     . 

He rejoiced in his new resource, before which all difficulties and hindrances to

movement fell away. It gave him the utter solitude he craved, and filled his soul

with impressions of the wild inhumanity, the precariousness of this region into

which he had ventured. On his one hand he might have a precipitous, pine-clad

declivity, falling away into the mists; on the other sheer rock might rise, with

masses of snow, in monstrous, Cyclopean forms, all domed and vaulted, swelling

or cavernous. He would halt for a moment, to quench the sound of his own

movement, when the silence about him would be absolute, complete, a wadded

soundlessness, as it were, elsewhere all unknown. There was no stir of air, not so

much as might even lightly sway the treeboughs; there was not a rustle, nor the

voice of a bird. It was primeval silence to which Hans Castorp hearkened, when

he leaned thus on his staff, his head on one side, his mouth open. And always it

snowed, snowed without pause, endlessly, gently, soundlessly falling.

~ Thomas Mann, excerpt from Chapter 6, The Magic Mountain, 1929

Such is the call of the wintry mountain. And so it happens this week is winter break--that time of year the Suburban Soliloquist unplugs and leaves the mortal flatlands for the higher, hiemal call of the Great White North, where she revels on the gleaming slopes of powdery snow, and the surrounding territory's majestic views. (With skis much shorter and lighter than the twelve foot wooden slats of the nineteenth century.)

At last.

Next week, after she's halted to hearken the echo of her own skis scraping the snow-wrapped summits and long, winding trails of the White Mountains, she'll  be back to the muddy, mortal flatlands and the hypertextual webs of ether. 

Aren't you all looking forward to this year's extra day of winter? Perhaps it might even bring snow to suburban streets, parks and fields. One can only wish...

Friday Night Frolic - Winterlust

I was born in a cloud... 

Now I am falling. I want you to catch me.

Look up and you'll see me.You know you can hear me.

The world is so loud. Keep falling. I'll find you.

~Kate Bush, Snowflake

It is probably never wise to start a post off with at the risk of..., but, while we're talking about authenticity and, to some degree, baring soul (and as a follow up to this post), I'll risk baring this: I finally—this week, in good ole Beantown—took part in one of the dreaded "oscopies." Not fishing for congratulatory remarks, I'm a big girl (oh, am I?), yes, I am, but sometimes it takes me a while to get around to things. Especially those things I don't like. And fear. Such as balancing my checkbook, cleaning out the refrigerator, and, well, getting poked and prodded.

Wednesday, in Boston, it was a grey morning and a balmy 52 degrees. Dr. Bliss dropped by the holding area to say hello, review my records and recite a litany of complications. I read the paperwork! I wanted to tell him. But I didn't. I let him go on. After all, he is Dr. Bliss. Oh, Dr. Bliss, you're so very kind and attentive. (She thinks, and he is) I'm sure this procedure will be like having a cupcake for breakfast. What, shouldn't everyone start their day with a cupcake? There are certainly no complications with cupcakes. Cupcakes are not complicated. They are sweet and harmless (like you, Dr. Bliss). Lest one chokes on one, of course. But really, how would one choke on a cupcake?

There was a moment, a look between us, I felt for sure he'd read my mind. Look, how could I not be thinking about food? And choking? I hadn't eaten in days (alright, hours), and I was about to be wheeled into the tricked out room for an endoscopy.

After Dr. Bliss fluttered away the nurse returned to check my IV and seize my book. A book, you brought a book to your endoscopic procedure? (She said, in not so many words, after I had refused her magazine offering.) She smiled smugly, and I knew that she had heard my meditation on cupcakes. Moments later I was trundled toward the surgical room, where the hard stuff was administered and where all my worries fell away...

Yesterday, yet another mild day in New England, I spent the better (or worse) part of the day in bed, and then, late afternoon at my desk trying to compose a Frolic. But in my still loopy and confused state, not having altogether shaken off the previous day's midazolam and fentanyl cocktail, all I managed to do was watch video loops of snow falling and winterscape screen savers on YouTube while shaking my daughter's snow globe. Something was wrong.

Maybe it was the narcotics.

Or an obscure compulsion (fueled by narcotics?) to expunge all thoughts of Wednesday's stressful scoping by way of alternate, yet still dreamy, optics.

We have no snow. And in the winter months, it is not the waning sunlight that disturbs my circadian rhythm. It is snow deficiency. This winter, in this bend of Rhode Island, we've seen a total accumulation of a mere half foot of snow, which came to us in a weekend whirl and remained only long enough for my daughter and I to leave a pair of skinny ski tracks along our whitened streets during one afternoon. But it was a glorious afternoon. Outside, everything sang. The snow-covered woodpile, the twisting brittle grape vine (which, no matter how invasive, I will not cut—its summer canopy is simply gorgeous), the birdhouse, the stream beyond, and the shallow woods beyond the stream. It was an avalanche of song, it was shimmerglisten harmony, stellatundra chorus, a sorbet deluge of melody, terrablizza, spangladasha!*  The next day, as temperatures rose and the dang sun blistered, frost began to pool and trickle down storm drains.

How does one find oneself in the wintertime without a snowy foil shading earth's face? (This is not how New England works!) The starkness of undressed trees and woodland and field, at times, seems unbearable. Where are the tracks laid?  There is a crevasse in my soul that longs to be filled, as it rightly should this time of year, with the song of snow.

So what I did, at day's end, at wits end, at the edge of pharmaceutical fuliginousness, was what any decent New England girl would do, I sought the highest counsel: I went to mystical royalty. I went to Kate.

Her eminence, Kate Bush. With her 2011 concept album, 50 Words for Snow—which has been described as "elegantly loony"—she proffers an opulent and moody compilation that conjures what, this season, has become a winter phantom.

From the L.A. Times:

[...] Bush grounds her songs in the permafrost of winter, with her piano work sounding like the first stirrings after a cold snap. “Among Angels” could be the soundtrack for plants stretching toward the new spring sun, but as much as it’s connected to the natural world, the song twinkles with something more ethereal. “I can see angels standing around you,” Bush sings in her windblown soprano, “they shimmer like mirrors in summer.”

Bush's inspiration for the album is rooted in Eskimo lexicon myth: Eskimos have fifty words for snow. But they don't. Bush, nevertheless, brilliantly bangs out her own neologisms de neige in the same seductive voice of yesteryear—her misty highs and lows blanketing the soul with icy wonder dust. 

From NPR:

The opening and closing cuts invoke a chill as they dwell on the ephemeral nature of the life cycle. "Snowflake," which features the choirboy pipes of Bush's 12-year-old son Bertie, gives voice to the melting consciousness of the natural world itself; "Among Angels" reads like the sweetest kind of suicide note. In between there are imagined couplings – with a gender-bending snowman in "Misty," and with a lover found and lost through many reincarnations (and played with brio by Elton John) in "Snowed In At Wheeler Street." The bounding "Wild Man" chases a yeti.

50 Words is an enchanting (if, at times, creepy) collection where each song builds on the other. It contains seven songs only, but their depth and breadth (the longest song is 11:08 minutes, the shortest, 6:48) are stunning. Listen. Worries fall away...

And then, there will be cupcakes, iced, this evening. And tomorrow, for breakfast—should there be any leftovers.

___________________________________________________

* Italicized modifiers courtesy Kate Bush, 50 Words for  Snow.

Friday Night Frolic — The Low Anthems of a Dysfunctional Winter

A Scene on the Ice -  Hendrick Avercamp 

No ice
not even snow
on this island
that sits low
by the sea

Ponds long
to be cut
with silver blades
a fishing hut
or a puck

No such luck.

Where has winter gone?

Suburban soliloquists
take trains
stare out windows
at city's winter rains
dreaming of frost

Skis of copious length
on which to mount
a field of firn
to linger, scout
a winterland struck

But fuck.

Where has winter gone?

To the Dutch
they've it all
ice, skates, kolf
snow wonder they stand tall
on glacial ivory

The brilliance
of a Vermeer
Jan Davidsz de Heem's
flowers, oh dear!
Steen's palette instructs

Winter's not amuck!

As it should be:

Swirling, whirling crystal
fleecy drifts severe
white-out hypnotics!
The island's absent pearlescent smear
and Khione's heart despairs

So to Avercamp
the scenes he'd deliver
lustful heads turn
toward his frozen river
away from this muck

What's known as winter yuck.

A dysfunctional winter.

* * *

The north wind blows and brittle branches scratch against the clapboards, yet I don't hear the siren calls of winter. Temperatures have dipped (somewhat), but the blizzards of last year seem merely a dream. How can that be? The last time we Rhode Islanders saw snow around here it was cavorting with fall, just before Halloween. That was the trick. The treat has yet to follow, and I fear my friend snow may not remain as it should: a going concern. 

In a corner of the garage, my cross-country skis sit lonely, and I almost want to curse our pulsating sun that fights the brume for attention. This is not as winter should be. Not here. Not in Lil Rhody!

What we do have, though—even during abnormal winters—throughout the year, is a vibrant music scene, and a history of serving as a launching pad, or at the very least, sowing seeds, for several remarkable bands. Members of the Talking Heads met at RISD. Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lisa Loeb, Duncan Sheik, Jesse Sykes (Jesse Sykes and The Sweet Hereafter), and Chris Keating (of Yeasayer) graduated from Brown University. And let's not forget one of my very favorites (especially when he's with his partner, Gillian Welch), David Rawlings, who grew up in the very next town from where I was born and raised.

In Providence, the local music scene includes, among others, The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones, Deer Tick, and The Low Anthem:

Ghost Women Blues—as well as other songs from The Low Anthem's most recent release, Smart Flesh—was recorded in an abandoned pasta sauce factory located in Central Falls, RI (home to Stanley's famous burgers), which is, like most places in R.I., barely a stone's throw away from my home. 

Oh My God, Charlie Darwin (2009) was recorded on Block Island—in the midst of its deep-freeze winter months. TLA is known for using locally found materials as percussion instruments, as well as its album sleeves and art. (Ah—a dumpster's treasures.) And I wonder what charms they dug up along the bluffs of one of the Last Great Places.

On My Space, TLA describes its music as minimalist, psychedelic and comedy. I think it's beautiful. (Or, wicked awesome, as the locals like to say.) And hope for more treats from them, as a going concern.

Now, please, Khione, bring on the snow!

Zen in the Art of Life

I don't remember the infraction, but she did follow the directive and wrote the sentence 110 times—the extra ten for good measure. Sometimes you have to do a thing that many times for it to sink in. (If you're really lucky, you don't.) It was an effective consequence. For a while. But as it is, my little muse will be who she will be. And it's alright. As we all do, the girl sometimes forgets.

I've been told that I'm forgetting my children. This by my children, of course. They seem to think they've been lost to my laptop. I don't think it's true. The culprit is my mind, and its incessant swoosh of words and phrases that pull me inward and freeze me in time. I need to rectify it, obviously. And though the kids are secure in my love for them, they also need to know that they have my respect.

And I'd like to show them this without writing it out longhand 110 times.

So this being school vacation week, I'm going to be taking a little hiatus, take my kids to the movies, cook some real meals for them, play some board games, and head up north, to the mountains, where we can shoot down the trails to our hearts' desire.

It was Ray Bradbury who said that one of the most important items in a writers makeup, what shapes his material and rushes him along the road, is to look to his zest, see to his gusto.*

Time to look to, and create, some of that zest and gusto with my babes.

I'll be back, though, for the Frolic on Friday. Until then, with much zest and gusto: So long and be well!



*Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

Cruising With Khione

I don't know why, but I have a distinct feeling something is coded in the snow's weekly plummet to earth. It may be global warming, the shift in climate, or just my wild imagination, but the downfall occurs with such regularity of late that I sense there's more to it. So I got out in it, in search of it's meaning.

The heavy fall began near rush hour this morning, but no school delay was called. Rather than have to make up yet another day lost to snow, school officials opted for an early dismissal. Thus, I had a porthole in which to voyage solo aloft the glistening, fleecy ground cover.

There is something about getting out on my cross country skis, alone, scraping through fresh snow, cutting a trail, that awakens me. There is an immediate peace, an instant sense of becoming one with nature. And even though my trek was along suburban streets, it was still for some time quiet but for the Song Sparrows' trills from across the partly iced-over brook. I wondered if this were not the message—the snow, and the birds, warbling in harmony just for me (skiing the flats has this effect, delusions surface, and I can see crystal clear beyond the horizon)—a dawning of a virginal earth, unstained by human nature.

Until the snow plow hammered past, leaving noxious fume in its path, returning me to Earth present.

(When I return home nearly two hours later, I am to find via research that people have been cross country skiing since prehistoric times—meaning since human beings first appeared on Earth—along the Baltic Shield. That's right, snow has never immobilized Scandinavians. And the repetitive motion of my skis are the same as earliest man's. This makes me feel even more like a snow goddess. Khione. I am she.)

* * *

Presently, I make my way along Rawson, down a small decline, and onto a flat with a certain cadence: a slightly bent leg out front,  the back one in a deeper bend at the knee, dragging behind. I let it linger there until I can glide no more, and then thrust the back leg forward, and the other falls behind. The arms—poles in hand—do what the leg does opposite, and the method is repeated until I reach a soft coast.

I glide past homes where large icicles cling precariously to rooflines, azalia bushes are buried in white fluff, the rims of basketball hoops are salted like margaritas, and a small trampoline looks like a snow cone. I see a "land clearing" sign, and I feel a wisp of sadness.

No one, except for a few cars passing slowly, is on the road but me. I am alone, keeping my own pace, no one to catch up to, no one to wait for. I've got a rhythm going, and it feels good. I feel it's all I really need. But then I see the hill ahead, and my heart rushes. I hurry up the incline, suddenly aware that I want to get to the top. I am in full stretch because I need to get to the top.

Because I need to go down.

And so I reach the crest and circle round, adjusting myself at the top, peering down to the bridge, where I know my downhill coast will come to a halt. I dig my poles into the snow under me, and push off. A joyful scream erupts (I am not even conscious of this) as I careen down the small slope, pass over a stream and arrive atop the bridge, where my stride is broken.

I do this three more times. It is like a drug. A selective-serotonin reuptake inhibitor. 

On my final descent, a car passes and I notice it's a neighbor bringing her daughter home from school. They smile and wave. Another car passes, and it's also a mother and child. I begin to feel guilty for not picking my kids up at school. I begin to wonder if I don't live for my kids. But I don't live for my kids, I realize. Is this a horrible thing to discover? Is this the message? Wait, maybe I'm not thinking straight. I live with my kids. I feed them and clothe them, and give them everything they need. Is this not enough?! Why, I do live for my kids, don't I? I am confused. I begin to think that I mustn't love my kids amply, for if I did, I'd be fetching them at school. I begin to feel less like a goddess, and—gripping my poles—more like something that is horned, tailed, and wields a pitchfork. This is the message, I decide. I need to get off my drugs and return to the real earth. Or perhaps I need a different drug. Something more like Xanax.

I leave the mountain and head toward the flats again. I turn down a side street in Arnold Mills and ski past the pond. More cars drive by. It's odd, but I think that one can tell a lot about a person simply by observing his or her reaction—especially to that of witnessing one skiing on a snow covered street. There is snow. Lots of it. I’m not on blacktop for Heaven's sake. So I can’t help but wonder why some people seem so puzzled. Or annoyed. Or doubtful. While others grin gaily.

And then there is the snow plow and its driver, whom doesn't care much for me. Not at all. Nor I for him. Not at all.

Alas, my son is soon to be jettisoned from a big yellow clunker, so I slide back toward home and wait by the the street corner's snowbank—my journey complete, though no portent had been decoded. Or had it?

At the corner, I greet the little man, who seems no worse for the wear. He doesn't mention the extended ride, or the fact that other children were picked up at school. I wonder if my daughter will feel the same way.

I wonder if I'll be going out for another winter hike when she returns home. I wonder when we shall see the next snowfall.