Winter Storm Warning

December 26, 2008 by Clair Button.

I left alone at quarter to nine, the road dusted with icy crystals over black frozen dew from the night before. Fog from the river filled the valley below low-hanging clouds, and black Angus cattle drifted through shrouded pastures, their backs striped with white, looking like giant skunks. The smell of sodden leaves, hay, and fresh manure hung in the valley like fog, to reassure me that it was just my imagination.

The sun, only a pale imitation of the moon, briefly tried to lift the clouds, before giving in to gravity and the weight of snow-laden masses descending from the mountains where I headed. Wet snow began to stick to the windshield. As the road lifted above the valley fog, every living thing wore a top-dressing of white, black alders dripping cones even before the snow could begin to melt, red dogwood, yellow willows, and conifers painted with shades of blue and green over stark black trunks, all limned in white as though the artist had first painted in oils, then cut through edges of white on scratchboard. Mysterious realm, where even the rocks could be seen to have form and life. And there above the fog, the sun tricked the wind into complicity, revealing more here, less over there, shadows and light, magic of artist’s skill.

Hissing splash of melting snow beneath my tires gave way to muted crunch and whisper of dry powder settling deeper. Alone on the road for so long, it was easy to let reality slip and imagine myself a pioneer tracking through wilderness, but the blowing white had not completely obscured the evidence of some other brave soul who had gone before me into the mountain stronghold. I longed to see his tracks turn off and leave me to my wilderness alone, and when a truck passed going the other way, fleeing down to the valley, I hoped it was him.

White curtains swept across the landscape, and pulling close, confused my path, forcing me to slow and guide the wheels only by the distance to the nearest obscure dark shapes that lined the trail. Deeper still, I floated in silence broken only by gusting winds that pushed me toward the edge of … I knew not what, perhaps a flight into the void where only white winds ruled.

Wind stopped and dark trees reappeared, marching back to the edge of the trail, looming and drooping over, forlornly observing my passage.  A gray ghost of an owl turned the round disk of its face toward me as though it resented my presence in her silent realm, as I had resented the fool driver who had gone before me earlier.

Sun emerged, and patches of bright blue sky, putting an end to the rule of monochrome. Revived, trees shook off clouds of snow that drifted gently in my passage.

Then over the crest, emerging into another universe, where the next range of mountains and forests can be seen swathed in white, lit in gold, and surrounded by wild platinum and silver clouds, and in between, golden valleys streaked with green and black rivers and dotted with white farmstead homes, whose chimneys hint of warmth and life within. Beauty to fill the darkest soul that revels in isolation. We are never truly alone, for the artist has been there before us.

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