Snow. Half my (long) life was spent in snow, anticipating it, playing in it, driving in it, digging myself out of it, surrounded by it.
But nothing like what I’ve recently experienced – vicariously, it’s true—yet nonetheless snow surrounded me relentlessly, gorgeously, terrifyingly. First, it’s been Jon Fosse’s strange book Septology, where the main character, created or maybe personified by the Nobel writer, lives in the snows of Norway. It’s snowing all the time in the book. The character drives in the snow, he walks in the snow, he peers at the snow from his window, his dog pees in the snow. He never seems to shovel it, but snow is there, like the whiteness of his canvas, an eternal landscape of snow. The character’s mind –he’s an artist—in a way is a field of snow—and mine, seemingly, as I follow him.
This I am reading as I watch a series on HBO that I’m chagrined to admit to, although at least naming Jodie Foster elevates it a little. It’s True Detectives and these detectives (the diminutive Foster unconvincingly a tough captain) are in Alaska, surrounded by snow, made whiter and more glaring by electric lights since it’s eternal night there for – what? – I think seven or eight days into the series. Always night, always snow. They drive into fields of whiteness, a road undiscernible, they tramp through it, they gather in snowy conferences, parkas with fur-rimmed hoods partially covering their faces. Surely all that snow, that glaring snow highlighted by highbeams, affects their minds.
Well, I am detached from those experiences, aren’t I? I sit in my chair with the book, or the TV in front of me, watching, absorbing, that snow.
Then I visit my downstairs neighbors, two intrepid women I’ll call Sharon and Kara. They invite me to wine and so on and to tell me of their holiday adventure in the Yukon, where the two of them, in their early 50’s maybe, slim, fit, always adventurers, went dog-sledding for ten days. Their experiences, their photos, left me gasping. How did they do it? Each had her own “sled,” that is, a sort of small platform that she stood on, attached to her “team of dogs”—I guess four dogs per team? The two women and their dogs were one behind the other, with only one other traveler and his team plus the leader and her team making up the caravan of dogs and sleds as they sped over all the ice and snow day after day at high speed in the Yukon. They were covered with frost; the dogs were covered with frost; they had to hack with axes through ice to get water, chop wood to build a fire to heat a cabin that they all shared, surrounded by snow, to rest for the next day’s onslaught. The word is mine. I just could not imagine enduring such a thing. Sharon showed me a photo where her long hair peeked from her thick wool cap and parka hood into a large frozen curl, an ice sculpture of itself. Kara, somehow pressing a cell phone button as she was careening along, showed photo after photo of the snow, the snowy mountains, a snow-draped little cabin they spent a night in.
To me it looked like constant suffering, and yet–. Yes, there’s a big “and yet.” These women stumbled home into their everyday lives working at computers, wondering, I think, what had happened and who they were. Sharing what they’d done was the closest they could come to perhaps questioning what had happened to them as they endured day after day of dogs and sleds and ice and snow and frozen landscapes to return to warm rooms and computers. There was pride. There was confusion in this new, thawed setting.
Their minds had become fields of snow.