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An Easy Winter
- University of Minnesota Press
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An Easy Winter To which I make my way eating the silence of animals Offering snow to the darkness Today belongs to few and tomorrow to no one. W. S. MERWIN It was a mild winter with little snow—an easy one—but I felt lucky to see the spring. Some didn't make it. We drove into that winter on December ist, winding down the Stingy Lake Forest Road with the headlights off. A misting of snow had painted the gravel white and left the forest black. The snowfallvanished into the woods, settling delicately on leaf litter and needle duff, invisible from the car, and the road was like a milky stream twisting through 133 the trees. The halogen beams glared off the crystals, so I killed the lights and slowed down. As our eyes adjusted to darkness, the white road/river was simple to navigate, and on a Thursday night other human traffic on the Stingy route was improbable. A few miles south of our cabin, where the BlandinPaper Company manufactured a huge clearcut, the northern horizon briefly opened and we glimpsed an arc of the aurora borealis . We were headed that way on a river of snow. The ride was a seasonal baptism, with each mile along the Stingy seeming to immerse us deeper into the challenge of winter, acclimating us to the long nights, the lovely and treacherous snow, the necessary evil of hibernal driving. This, I told Pam, was a fair measure of our quality of life: how far can we safely drive without headlights? The question addresses population density and the color of the dirt road, and both parameters are linked to winter. To live in a territory lacking the hard focus of a serious cold season seems to me an almost crippling disadvantage. A northern winter is a clean, worthy adversary, and an honest friend. It's the whetstone of a keen-edgedlife, and a paladin of solitude. Constant warmth and dependable sunshine generate suburbs and freeways as surely as feces in a petri dish produce colonies of E. coli. Even our hard winters are a charm compared to urban sprawl and congestion, where enemies only subvert and solitude has no champion. But this winter flaunted the charms of a trickster, the crooked grin of Coyote. It was mellow, yes—but only in the weather reports. Weclucked our amazement at the afternoon highs, but such was not the true heart of that season. All December I gambled, and blessed the end of the wretched Christmas shopping spree. I was on a booksigning tour, crisscrossing Minnesota in my light, twowheel -drive pickup, vainly hoping that the concrete blocks I'd laid in the box would provide an extra edge of traction 134 The Snow Lotus [52.87.200.112] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:33 GMT) and security when the highways and shopping mall parking lots turned ugly. I don't know many writers who relish the histrionics ofa book tour; the mandatory dispensing of smiles and autographs when you'd much rather be writing a new book, or perhaps be thinking about writing while watching the woodstove glow. But publishers love the hell out of book tours, and it pays—at least theoretically—to keep their publicists happy. So on December 15th I steered for Bemidji—about no miles away—peering through blowing sleet on notorious U.S. Highway 2, a deadly artery of commerce where the tractor-trailers are as thick as flies on roadkill. The semis were unaffected by the smear of slush on the asphalt, but my little Toyota, buffeted by northwest wind, was yearning to cross the centerline or careen into the ditch. After the first fishtail of my rear wheels I slowed to 45 mph. The big trucks blew by in both directions, splattering my windshield with salty crud. I hoped I had a full reservoir of washer fluid, and that all the truck drivers had had enough caffeine. I arrived at the designated bookstore with my vehicle intact , but my mood befouled—not that it was terribly effervescent in the first place. Even though it was only a silent complaint in my head, I ordered myself to stop whining: there are probably thousands of would-be authors out in the wide moonscape of American literary lust who would kill to have a book-signing gig. Still, it seemed silly that in two hours I would be back out on Highway 2, with whitened knuckles glued to...