SNOWMAN

A Short Story

© Jane Piirto. All Rights Reserved

            Breaking trail into the woods, through snow calf to knee deep, on twelve-year-old cross-country skis, I puffed as I ascended, the hill steep even in summer. I had to rent these boots because in my eagerness to get here, I forgot mine in Ohio, along with my gaiters and most of my wax. I only had warm snow wax in my ski bag, and this was cold snow, zero to ten degrees. I should have been using white or blue wax, but I only brought green and red.

            Most skis were waxless these days, but I bought these because they were sturdy and wide, and I could break trail with them, as we used to do on those skis we used as children, with the leather binders and stub-nosed boots with ankle straps. These had a Finnish name—Laasanen—and were varnished, two-tone hickory and maple, beautiful to look at, not plastic. I made crude gaiters from old, too-long, wool socks of my father, even though he quit skiing years ago.  

           “Brittle bones,” he sayd. “Creaks and cranks.”  I cut out a heel and a toe hole and slipped them over the ski boots and up on my jeans. I needed them today, with this deep snow.

            This neighborhood, like all neighborhoods in town, used to have a ski jump hill back here in the woods, and we boys used to build the bump from discarded Christmas trees. We all wanted to be like Joe Paul Perrault, who, when he came back from the Tenth Division ski troops in World War II, became the number one ski jumper in the country.

     I remember the scared thrill of soaring off the bump and onto the landing, trying to get my clumsy skis to land, hands like wings, one foot in front of the other, with only a few inches between the skis. The guys who got the most respect were the ski jumpers. I couldn’t jump now if my life depended on it. Brittle bones. Creaks and cranks.

    As I tramped up the back yard hill, the backs of the skis stick under the snow, and flop, wobble, so I had to raise my feet high and plant them firmly with each side step I take. We used to call this step “panking,” and I guess they still use the word to describe the smoothing of landing slopes on jumping hills, as well as any sidestepping. I looked the word up in the dictionary, and it doesn’t exist there, though I had heard the word used the other day, by an old friend from the neighborhood, who was skiing with his wife on Christmas Eve afternoon. I met them as I took the ungroomed trail in the neighborhood woods.

    Dave and Frieda were taking the trail in reverse. We stopped to talk. Dave and I exchanged memories of how these woods used to be only used by us, the neighborhood kids. I asked him whether he’d gone to the class reunion. “We all look old,” he said. “It wasn’t as much fun as the twenty-fifth and twentieth reunions.” He said, “I panked some of the hills we came up, so you’ll find them easier for you to go down. Lots of holes from people falling. Once one person falls, another one does, when the trails aren’t groomed.”

    I began to get cold as fine sweat formed while I tramped the 6 kilometer, mostly uphill trail behind me. It soaked into my sweaty cotton underwear, so I said goodbye, nice to see you, and left. A person is never cold for long when he crosscountry skis, because when he gets cold he just starts moving again. I read about a couple in Colorado last year who had gone out on a 6 k. course and a blizzard hit. They kept skiing—it must have been awful, all that stabbing snow and the keening wind, and the disorientation one feels in winter woods where trails get covered up during blizzards—but they were found alive two days later, little the worse except for exhaustion, because they had kept moving the entire time. It is when one stops moving that one freezes.    

    That is why downhill skiing is so much colder than crosscountry, and the clothes are so much more insulated, padded. When I go downhill skiing out west every winter with the Toledo Ski Club, the wind perforates me while I dangle with my skis hanging down, on the lifts going up and up the mountain. My fingers have old childhood frostbite in them, and this frostbite was exacerbated fishing for salmon one fall on Lake Huron with my friend, and so I cannot wear gloves downhill skiing, but have to wear huge padded mittens. I clutch my fingers into fists inside the palms of the mittens as I ride up chair lifts. When the tips of my fingers begin to freeze, the cold moves down the fingers and they turn white.

     I have to ski to the lodge and run my hands under lukewarm water until the color comes back into them. That is the price I pay for speed and fear and elation, pointing my metal downhill skis with my ankles encased in a plastic boot, molded into a forward position, my shoulders faced toward the bottom of the hill, down a mountain. Ski jumping, downhill, crosscountry. If I were younger I’d take up snowboarding and telemarking.     

    I like to crosscountry-ski alone these days, my middle-aged winter meditation time, though I do ski with a few friends, all of them natives of the Upper Peninsula, all of them at home on skis. As I crested the first high hill where the trail is so narrow I can neither pank nor herringbone, I took my skis off. At the top I put my skis back on and begin to tramp. My skis slipped backwards on the narrow grade. Wrong wax. Blood began to pound in my ears. The aerobic rush began. Endorphins kicking in. As always, here in the winter woods, I am at peace with the world thinking great thoughts.

    Each year as I do this, I feel the inadequacy of whatever exercise I have been doing. This year I swam a half-mile several times a week, and walked quite often also. That was not enough to keep my pulse from heating as I climb and climb. Lift, plant, glide. My poles guide me and I strike a rhythm. As I settle onto the snowed-over trail that is a wooded road during the summer, and get into the rhythm of the forward movement of skis and poles and body in snow, my mind and body begin the snow meditation. When I ski I feel as I do at the symphony, mind wandering, yet held by the music. I pity music professionals whose critical training prevents them enjoying meditations during the concerts.

    This day the sky was whitish grey, and a small, soft, not-grainy snow fell straight down, steady. There was no wind. This snow seemed as if it wouldn’t build up much, but this had been the type of snow for the past few days, and the trail I made here was barely seeable. A few rounded pock-marks. A mini-drift over the edge of a pole mark. Eskimos have a hundred different names for snow. I noticed the regularity of my pole plants, the memories of rhythms established when my growing muscles were making memories. I can skate, ride a bicycle, swim, climb rocks because of my childhood play in these woods.

    It seems a shame to mark this chaste landscape with my body’s weight on skis. The few animal tracks are of beasts that weigh a few ounces, and not a monster of over a hundred pounds, though my weight is distributed on the boards and I only sank six inches, and not to the ground.

     Someone had been snowshoeing on one of the trails crossing, and the shallow tracks looked like wings of butterflies, overlapping. I don’t like to snowshoe, though snowshoes are more efficient in deep snow. When I snowshoe, I feel like a baby with something in its pants. Someone has been snowmobiling, too. That is the only earthly good for snowmobiles—they leave good trails for crosscountry skiers.

    Snow is my element. I remember when this realization came to me, about eight years ago, in Black Swamp. I and two friends were out after an Ohio blizzard, skiing on the golf course at the university. There is one hill in Black Swamp, called Phil’s Hill, an artificial hill next to the freeway, made from displaced fill when the interstate was built, after the then-president of the university. As we climbed this short mound and faced west, ready to go down, to break trail, I felt unsullied elation even as my friends were expressing fear, as the phrase, “The wind in my teeth,” came to mind. The speed, the freedom, the automatic way my knees bent, my hands just the right balancing geometry, on skis on snow, restored me.

     Snow still does that–opens my wounds and then cauterizes my wounds. I feel a deep sob in my throat and I put my head back and it comes out, silently. Was that my wife leaving me again? My heart is rattling around in its cage. Grown men don’t sob.         

    My father placed me in the snowbank outside when I was an infant, for my afternoon nap, to make me tough. There is a photograph somewhere in an album of my tiny, sleeping face, swaddled in blankets and snowsuit and bonnet, in a wicker buggy placed in the snow. My father had read somewhere in some Finnish homeopathic health book, that placing a child for his nap in a winter snowbank made the child develop a resistance to disease. That book might be right. I never even had the flu. Though I do have the family disease.   

    In winter, the roads look like brown sugar. Depending on the amount of traffic on the street, the brown sugar snow is packed or loose. Snow banks get sheered by giant snow-go machines whose screws chew up and spew chunks into trucks that ride like baby whales next to their mothers, or like sidecars, and the geology of the winters can be traced in the cut banks, much like tracing the rings of a tree or the ages of a mountain range from a canyon. At corners, car hoods peep hesitantly out from behind the sheered banks, at corners, and by March, if there had been no January thaw, antennas will have flags or flowers tied on them to warn people around the corner.

     In spring, though, during melting season, the past comes to haunt, as layer after layer peels off, and the litter of the winter is revealed. I don’t like this filthy time at the end of winter and before the tulips. They call it mud season in Maine. Cans, cardboard, plastic garbage, reminders of human carelessness and incompetence, revealed by the sun paring the snow, like old secrets surfacing when trusting lovers talk softly after lovemaking.

    In winter, everywhere we go, during days when this small snow is falling, we have to brush the car off after going into a store. If we have ten stops to make, we have to brush the windows off ten times. Brushing the car becomes as automatic as igniting it. Watching people’s styles of brushing snow, I notice three distinct types. Those who open the door, get the brush out, and circle the car, cleaning each window, are the detail people. Those who give a quick swipe to the front and side window with their mittens, cuffs, or bare hands, are the idea people. Those who get in and use their windshield wipers and hope the snow will blow off before they turn the first corner, are the risk-takers.

     My daughter is the third type, as is her grandmother, my mother. My daughter’s mother was cowardly, a detail person making sure she could see in all directions. I vacillate between being the second and the third, depending on the depth of the snow.        

     Snow on roofs in the north is like charming clay tile in the south. Instead of red, white. The white slips over the edges of roofs, and gives even the most drab or shabby houses an elegance. The small bird feeder, hung by two strings, dangles in front of the window, with snow piled on its feeding perches. No birds find it. Our neighbor has three giant feeders, and all the birds who haven’t migrated must visit his. The forlorn feeder filled with grains whips around and twirls in a sort of harmonic pendulum, its movement hypnotizing and entrancing. Perhaps the birds don’t visit because they get dizzy. Perhaps such incantatory oscillation makes them drunk. 

    At St. Vincent De Paul’s, the Goodwill Industries of the area, I shop for bargains. “Boots half-price. Still some wear in them.” Crepe soles, rubber soles, hiking soles, corrugated soles, fur collars, fur-lined, Sorrels, swampers, shit-kickers. Thick laces, sturdy laces, leather laces, wide zippers, quilted ankles. Walking through town I count the different styles of boots I see, from floppy galoshes with clasps on them to high-heeled, elegant, knee-high gaucho boots with hard rubber soles. All good for walking in snow.

     The style on my students this year is defiant as ever. When I was a teenager, the style was white bucks with white socks pulled half way up the calves. The girls wore white polished tennis shoes with white socks. My sister’s legs, when cold, still burst out in white dots of frostbite from that style. This year the teenagers are barefoot in loafers or ballerina shoes.

    I watched two small children, one about seven, the other four, enter the yard in their snowsuits. They were bundled so much their arms couldn’t lie naturally–they were artificially fat, the children in snowsuits, stuffed like peppers, their little faces like flower buds peeping, rolling as they bounced on a mound of branches left by a tree trimmer late last fall. The older pulled the younger one up and they waddled off, sliding on their boots down the bank, the smaller behind the bigger. The young one in a red snowsuit with yellow piping, had to pick his feet up high to plant them in the tracks of the older boy. Why was he following the tracks at all? Why doesn’t he just shuffle in the soft snow and make his own path? He wouldn’t have to work so hard.

     The children ran cumbersomely across the street to the newly plowed snow, and they amused themselves by picking up fragile chunks hardened to the size of large boulders, as big as their chests, smashing them on the road. The snow chunks shattered. They jumped on them, crushing them with their boots. I wonder when the neighborhood kids stopped making ski jumps.

    On another day, coming back down into the back yard hill, I am struck that I, like the children, followed my own path, that this path I broke yesterday lies along the easiest fall line of the hill, the easiest way to go up. I made a path like a switchback road. It is a good path for ascending, but it is also a good path for descending.

     Any other way would make me slip, fall, crash, get snowy. I do not like to fall when I ski. That makes me angry. Part of it is pride, and when I fell once, skiing with my daughter, my daughter was gleeful. “Dad fell! Dad actually fell!” But my daughter didn’t understand that part of it was also too many youthful falls that had injured my coccyx, twisted my knee so I wear a brace downhill skiing, wet my face, froze my back where my waistband met my t-shirt, chapped my wrists, reddened my ankles climbing up the ski jump with my heavy skis over my shoulder, splayed me flat on the icy steps, grabbed my skis unevenly on  the rope tow with my leather-palmed mitts.

    Now I don’t take any trail that will make me fall. Of course I am always surprised at how well I can make it down the high, hard hills on crosscountry trails, even with fear in my chest and fright in my eyes; by the time I get to the bottom I know I will stand it. We call it “standing the hill.”

     Thinking back, I thrive on the rush of it. I am surprised at how well my childhood play has formed my skiing stance, how quickly I can regain balance when I hit a hole in the trail where someone else has fallen.

    As I follow my own trail, I am aware that I have now marred the view, spoiling the immaculate back yard that can be viewed out the kitchen’s back window while stirring food on the kitchen stove. Formerly untouched and pastoral, the yard covered with snow lights the house, even on dark days. The light is what is good about winter. Real winter, northern winter.

     It is lighter here than in Florida, where all the greenery absorbs light, doing photosynthesis. The worst month here in the north is bleak November, before the snow. In summer, without the snow, the yard is a tangle, with gout weed thriving, its murderous and tenacious roots undercutting and killing grass, the vegetables in the garden, the flowers in the planter.   Wild maple suckers in the upper part of the back yard send shoots out all over, making a grove of saplings.The short growing season miraculously creates a jungle in just a few months.

    My father spends much of the summer hacking the weeds away, but the scrap maple and the gout weed insist, preventing all but their own landscaping. Hardwoods can reproduce by shoots, where conifers can’t. That is why the woods are overgrown with hardwoods, and there are fewer evergreens here than when I was younger. In summer the gout weed gets calf high, and garter snakes dwell beneath its cool canopy.

     With snow, the back yard seems at peace, the rampant wilding of the dominant vegetative marauders hidden, hibernating. I loosen the old swing, its chained seat caught beneath the depth, and thus I force it to mar the snow under the apple tree. As I ski down the last few yards, the metal clothesline, invisible in this flat light, almost garrotes me. “Science Teacher Slits Throat With Clothesline,” the headline will read.

    The despoiled landscape behind me, I push my pole into the hole that loosens my toe bindings, lift the skis up and clap them together, scraping the snow stuck on them with my mittens, leaning them against the wall of the patio, along with my poles. Inside, I peel my outer clothes down to my sweaty underwear, and then take off my longjohns, hanging them on the clothes rack, and, still cold and tingling, I stand, head back, under the soft warm spray of the shower in the basement in the sauna, feeling the cold release itself from my thighs and buttocks and face.

    The mail has arrived. A note from Katherine on a funny, sexy card that compares a carrot to a penis. Katherine and I have been friends and sometime lovers for two years, but I wish she wouldn’t send me notes at my father’s. I don’t want to be reminded of my normal world 600 miles away. My father asks, “What did Katherine have to say?” I answer, “She said her son wrecked her car and her ex-husband canceled the insurance.” Katherine plays well on the courtly battlefield of all of us divorced who vowed to love and cherish.

    A cup of warm cider and a cinnamon roll. A book, a chair, and it is only eleven A.M. A full day ahead. I feel good, pure, whole. Back when I was drinking, I’d wake up with the clouded head and fuzzed mouth of a smoker, sometimes even having to lean over the rim of the toilet to deposit the last of my stomach’s heaving detritus. Hours later, I’d still be wandering in my sweats, still fuzzed, still clouded, lying around on the couch, calling in sick to my school, the lying drinker.

     I used the excuse of my wife running off with a fancy lawyer from the Gold Coast, but I was screwing around as much as she was. Back in the seventies, we called it “open marriage.” What a joke. I would have used any excuse to drink, though. A classic case. Now my daughter doesn’t have to worry about calling me after ten P.M.

    Or even worse, I’d wake up in somebody’s bed, some sad or wild woman I’d picked up at Max’s Bar, where local professional singles hang out, and I would have to mutter my “I’ll call you’s” before getting home to throw up. One of them told me I made her feel ashamed, after my not calling. Well, I felt shame too, I wanted to tell her.

     And then I’d ignore them when I’d see one of them again–they numbered about thirty-five. I listed as many of them as I could remember one afternoon during my month in the hospital, trying to give them the dignity of having names–Sarah, Heather, Regina, Molly, Jackie-—a regular potpourri of lovely women whose loveliness I couldn’t see for my own exploitative pain.

    All night the slow small flakes had been falling and yesterday’s ski marks on the back yard were almost erased, leaving wrinkles with soft sides like rubber Halloween masks. This day the flakes fell bigger and slower but just as steady, and the white-gray sky brightened in the places where sun lurked. Streaks of blue appeared. This gave a view of cloud movement, a slow swirl beyond the steady snow.

     Yesterday the clouds had been moving, I guess. Clouds are always moving. But the light had been such that they seemed still. The world seems timeless between ten and three when no winds blowing clouds are visible. Perhaps the world is timeless between those hours, the safe hours of midday.

    Each day on my journey, my breathing got better, and the pounding in my temples, as I reached the trail on top of the ridge above the lake, subsided faster. I still got my meditation high, though.

   The snow spreads itself on the branches, differently on different species of trees. On the crabapple, the deepest snow is on the thickest trunk and in the crevices near the trunk. On the tall white spruce—the Latin name comes to me from college dendrology class, Picea glauca—the snow is deepest and thickest near the centers of the branches, fanning out. On the trunks of the maples and oaks, the snow’s compass shows me north and west. I will never lose my sense of direction in these woods.

    Now, back, showered, cidered, I lie on my stomach on my old teenaged bed, gazing out the small windows just beneath the eaves through the icicles. They say if a house has icicles on it, it is not energy-efficient. None of us—my father, me, my sister—can afford to put a new roof on the house. Ridges on the icicles lie horizontal, and the pointed daggers vary in length, the longest about three feet long, the shortest a few inches. I bought a crystal glass candlestick that looks just like an icicle, made by a glass sculptor from Iitala as a wedding gift for my nephew one afternoon at the Finnish shop. All my crystal glass candlesticks are with my wife and her new husband.

    The other day I pushed snow off the roof so the icicles wouldn’t form. During warm spells when we were children, we were cautioned not to walk next to buildings with pitched roofs, because the snow would avalanche down and break the icicles off and the falling ice would hurt us, clunk us on the head and knock us out. This actually had happened to someone, people said. Of course, people also said that kids got polio from playing in leaf piles. The icicles drip, the water running through, to freeze at the bead of the last drop, the tip of the icicle.

    I watched my father’s neighbor, Frederick, whom I grew up with, still a bachelor working in the mine, living alone in the old, ramshackle house.  He drinks, the rumor goes. Frederick was a few years younger than I, so I’d only play with him when I couldn’t find his brother, Clarence. The whole family has funny names like that. Clarence got in trouble with alcohol and lost his job at the mine. He’s now downstate working maintenance at a shopping center, Frederick told my father. Today Frederick is holding on to his roaring snow blower, chook cap covered with flown snow. His long beard is caked, too. He wears a black leather jacket and baggy black work pants, like the guys at the gas station, with a chain and keys at his belt, and black leather gloves. I watch his fingers pull the lever forward and reverse, forward and reverse. The machine grinds the snow into fine, fine, misty white particles, flying in a plume cloud that sprays up and to the side.

    The orange machine gives a sharp sound, not as loud as a snowmobile but louder than a truck without a muffler. Frederick trades plowing out the driveway for the baked goods my father gives him every time he bakes. Leaning against his caved-in porch is the omnipresent manual snow scoop, aluminum, with a u-shaped handle, used for pushing snow. On my father’s roof is another snow-removing implement, with a handle about eight-feet long. For most of the winter, when I am not here, my father climbs a stepladder after the frequent snowstorms, to push the snow with this wobbly pusher, off the flat roof, pushing the snow over the edge, where it falls with an audible plop. I want to hire help for him and call an ad in the Miner’s Gazette, the local newspaper, but he tells me not to rescue him; he can still do it, so why shouldn’t he? We have a fight about it. My wife always let me rescue her; my father never does.

    If the residents of the Upper Peninsula don’t remove the snow from their roofs, leaks develop, and melted snow comes into the houses. A neighbor fell off a sloped roof last year and killed himself. He was seventy-five. My father is seventy-three, and still insists that this procedure is safe, because the roof is flat and he stays near the groove where it meets the slanted roof. The youth group at the church volunteered to do it for him, but he refused.

    My father uses another snow shoveling procedure, as well, to shovel the heavy snowplow snow left at the end of the driveway, if Frederick doesn’t get to it in time. My father takes a regular shovel, good for scooping poop in dog kennels, and with its edge, loosens the snowplow snow into his large aluminum push shovel, until the push shovel is almost filled. Then he pushes the shovel filled with snow, his hands on its U-shaped handles, across the street, lifting the handles to dump the snow on the opposite bank. No one lives across the street, so this works well.

    Last Sunday morning in the church basement, during the coffee hour, where my father was showing me off to his friends—”See, my Jim from far away comes to visit me; I’m not alone all winter!”—I compared my father with my father’s friends, who don’t shovel snow off roofs, nor push snowplow snow. I noticed how young my father looked. Scarcely a wrinkle. Smooth skin.

     Today, we shovel together; I help my father move the snowplow snow in old Finnish boots brought over as a gift by some relative twenty years ago, with their pointed Lapland toes. He is wearing old gabardine pants, two wool sweaters with a turtleneck underneath, an old blue nylon padded jacket with elastic in back of the waist and a clasp belt, and a bumpy wool cap over his white-as-snow short hair.   

     “I can do it myself,” is what my father says and we get into arguments. My father’s mortality saddens me, so I avoid the confrontations. When he comes in, his cheeks are rosy and nose red. Naturally so. My father has never drunk nor smoked. The child of a raging alcoholic who used to come back in the middle of the night during a drunk, to steal and sell the chickens from the chicken coop for a bottle, he himself has never drunk much more than a sip of wine.

     So I had genes from both sides. That was a reason, but no excuse. Do I want to find my mother in the women I infrequently date and never go to bed with, now? Even Katherine. We haven’t had sex for months. I am her escort at her office parties. What I liked about Katherine was she didn’t call me up, but waited until I called her up. I’m still old fashioned that way. Am I becoming that archetypal bachelor, the old fart? My father is stubborn, crotchety, and independent as one. Will I have a belly, smelly breath, and my dead mother in my dreams?

    Blue jays on the snow-covered picnic table in the back yard hop and peck. The three of them seem to be playing, bounding up to the maple tree, then to the table, and then to the black spruce. Perky heads turning in quick motions, their breasts are darker white than the snow, though in summer, their breasts look whiter.

     At my uncle Eino’s farm where we went for sauna last week, the chickadees flew right onto our outstretched hands, perched on our mitts, eating feed. Those chickadees are my uncle’s pets. He’s never remarried after being widowed about the time of my divorce, though all the women at the senior citizen’s center are after him. The world has many silent men watching birds. Frederick, me, my father, and Eino.

    In the woods I stopped for a long time at the top, looking at the white lake far below over the cliffs, listening to my breath diminish, listening to my woods’ winds. This lake had been drained to make a mine at the end of the nineteenth century, and then it had been allowed to fill up again, and the water level rose a few inches a year. Was it rising even now, beneath sinister ice?

    Then I heard a thrashing, a beating of wings on the ground, behind a snowy stump, and thought I had flushed a partridge or a grouse. I heard a rasping sound as if someone were catching up to me on skis on the track I just made. The sound surrounded me so it was difficult to tell where it came from, yet it was as clear as at the theater at Epidaurus where once I heard a woman standing in the center of the stage floor whisper in German while I was seated in the top row. Then, above me, the logical conclusion. A downy woodpecker, Picoides pubescens, at the top of a spindly dead tree. I bent my head back to watch his rhythmic pecking, opening my mouth to speak to him, my lost and fouled-up young adulthood pecking with its hard bill eating insects out of holes in trees.

      Then I squinted and followed his silent, gulping flight out of sight, and heard in his absence the steady fall of globs of snow from the trees, and the small pummeling of small snowflakes on my jacket and the rattle of dead oak leaves. I returned home.

    Ten years ago, before my major drinking began, my wife and daughter back at my parents’ with the rest of the family, I and my oldest friend Billy Boy came here to ski on Christmas day. It had been a warm, sunny day. Dry brown maple and oak leaves rattled on branches; saplings creaked as if to make merry. Our skis clinked happily as we flung our bodies over crusted snow, whirred as we bent to hills. That day, the sky was colorado blue, and the light ended on gray rocks. Mountain ash berries on their branches looked like Christmas decorations through bare trees near the dark green cedar swamps. The squirrels that glanced across the track crossed trail with snowshoe rabbits, as we passed by the hats of acorns on the path.            

    That sunny day, we skied in sweater arms, bare-headed, and the snow sounded like wire tinsel, grainy, with slices of ice. We used red wax. We went fast, we crabwalked up the hills, the shadows of the twigs crisscrossing, a black and white oriental rug beneath us. The shadows of the sides of the ski trail grooves looked like mountain ridges from a distant plain. We felt no rejection there, in these woods of our place in the world. The ground received the snow in lumps, soft and sculpted mounds, a casual overlay. Logs looked like friendly puffy benches. Grass near rocks and trees insisted spring would come.

    We passed some young boys who gleamed sweat on their lips and brows, but I and my old friend Bill had been very fit in those days. When we were kids back here, we used to pretend we were ski troops marching in line, the white-winged warriors of Finland during the Winter War with the Soviet Union. Or we used to imitate the Bietila brothers, men in our neighborhood, ski jumpers called The Flying Finns, who tramped every day in fast, efficient marching lines.

     That day we didn’t pretend out loud, but as we trudged I know I thought it, and he probably did too.  We leaned on our poles resting at the top of a particularly long hill climb, and we faced the sun on the slope, talking about our lives. Both of our marriages were in trouble. I told him I wanted to close up our modern open marriage. He said he wanted to have some experiences so he wouldn’t be eighty-five rocking on the porch with only his wife in his memory.

    Today, those times long gone, I miss my friend Billy, who moved to California just before his divorce was final. Rash infidelity had done its job on both of us. He and I skied last winter, with Lenny, another of the neighborhood boys. Lenny can’t ski this year; he got prostate cancer. Not one of us, nor our wives, has escaped disease, booze, drugs, cigarettes, job disappointments, sex with strangers, separations, messed-up kids living lives in childhood as confused as ours have been in adulthood.

     We used to think we were invulnerable, world class ski-jumpers from the frozen north. All of us, we were so hot after we walked on the moon and invented the birth control pill. Not one of my friends has escaped the consequences of the meltdown of the seventies.

            Skiing can heal. As I push myself off down the highest hill on the trail, I feel my calves loosen to take the clack of the iced-up ruts, and my knees bend in reply. I release my poles from the tuck and use them to balance, balance me as I hurtle into the dark spruce and tamarack swamp at the bottom. I know I look good, that I am not blindly flailing, but that my old habits, childhood-formed, will save me.

     I clatter over a big hole where someone fell down. I tip sideways, and sideways again, and I right myself, the high bent tips of the skinny skis going straight and true. Where the ruts break out into the flat tramped space where the ruts end, where the next hill begins, I splay my skis out in the cross hatched climb. Fast. I ascend Fast. My breath moist, my torso sweating, I ascend, my animal body responding. I am doing it. I am breathing hard, but not too hard.  

     I step off the ruts and break trail into the woods, knowing the way, these trees fifty years older, as I am, than when I was a boy, but the rises and valleys as familiar. My body knows. It is such a cliché but today I see why on the surface we call clichés true. The snow in these woods is crusted with ice about six inches down and then it is soft, dry and flaky. My skis sink into it up to my knees but I press on. After awhile I arrive safely home.

    Snow obscures pain with magnificent light and fragile sound. Snow numbs and freezes and paralyzes until it is thawed. Then it becomes water, the giver of life. At night, inside the house, the moonlight on the snow is so bright that I don’t need a light to see the sweep and swell of earth near the window with the icicles creaking and the snow with its own crystal noise, eternally falling down, ever falling down, obscuring and covering and renewing.

END