by Rick Bass
Perhaps the feeling of accumulation comes because you are gaining space, and distance—shoveling your way out of winter's depths, shoveling your way toward spring.
You lose yourself in it. The sweat on your brow, and down your back, is a kind of currency—you are rich, in this kind of labor, and yet cannot afford to cease—and there is a unique quality to the sweat you evoke, shoveling snow so far above the ground, a different humidity about you and different heat reflecting off the vast white slope of the roof. Your mind rids itself of all images save the color white, and of all movement save for the one, the steady arc of the shovel, again and again.
The sweat, the salt, continues to bleed out of you. One of those NASA thermal-image-gathering satellites would pass the picture of a small red devil working slowly across the cool white slab of the roof: blazing, but very much at peace.
Lovely is the deftness of cut the blade makes—the machinelike demarcation, row by row and lane by lane of where your shovel has been. Great mounds of snow accumulate below you, from where you've tossed it over the edge: entire new mountain ranges being born, far below. You slice the snow from the roof as neatly and efficiently as if carving it with a giant knife. You become obsessed with both the beauty of the labor and the totality, the cleanliness, of the result. Something wonderful snaps within you, and you keep on shoveling, on past the red distant sunset through the tops of the trees and into electric blue dusk, and on then into the rising light of the moon.
The mountains beyond are visible in a way you do not usually see them from the top of the house. Sparks drift from the chimney as your family below settles in for the evening, warming themselves. Stars are all around you, and still you work on, scraping and shoveling, and loving the privilege of being able to do so.
The deer are everything: they anchor us, and they tell us when to sail. We notice everything about them until we notice nothing about them, until they have become a part of us, their rhythms and patterns as incorporated into the subconscious of our lives and the pulse of our own blood-rivers as the sighing of the wind high in the canopy of the old larch and pine forests beneath which we live, as incorporated into us as is the grind of each one and singular day, in the sometimes sinuous, other times restive, units of time with which we bide and mark our days, separating these living sections of shadow and light into months and seasons, as might a skilled butcher cleave and render in preparation for a great banquet the lean and exquisitely fibered muscles of a deer or elk.
Cut as neatly as if with a knife through the snow in the forest are the trails of the deer's passages. Their hoofs cut the ice as if with razors, so that all throughout the forest there are these startlingly clean and precise lanes, which, as the snow piles higher and higher, are cut ever deeper, in the manner of some grand river sawing its way down through the mountain itself.
These hoof-cut rivers will disappear soon enough (leaving only a strand line of the high concentration of deer pellets, and the shining silver hairs that were shed, and the occasional burnished mahogany antlers, each as magnificent as a candelabra)—but in January they are a dramatic part of the landscape, the only place that either you or the deer can walk without sinking up to your belly in snow. The deer use these constant compressed-ice thoroughfares of their own making to stay alive—to save their lives—with each few calories saved possessing some equivalent of time, measured in minutes or hours if not days, moving them that much closer to the end of winter, and survival.
The lanes, with the sharpness of their relief, look exactly like the straight-line cuts you made up on the mountain of the roof with your snow shovel. If, as it often seems up here, there is but one story, one pattern to all movements and paths and events, how then can the world be so infinitely mysterious and diverse—so wonderful—even in the silence, the almost maddening silence, of deepest sleeping winter?
I try to calculate how many tons of snow are shoveled from the roofs—estimate the weight of one shovel, estimate the number of shovel tosses per hour, count the hours. A hundred tons? Surely there's a flaw in my math. Call it even half of that and it's still an alarming amount. Working on into the night again, working by the moon. Working close enough to the edge sometimes to see the glistening columns of snow separate and stratify by weight, following each sifting toss over that edge.
Inside, then, drenched with sweat, in time to kiss the girls good night and read them a story. A quick hot bath first, two aspirin, a glass of cold water. What's it going to be like to get old, too old?
A phenomenon occurs, a great phenomenon. What I love most about the passage of the year is the tininess and slowness of its uncountable exquisite gears, each turning upon another to produce what seems to be the labored miracle of whatever it is you happen to be looking at, whatever it is you happen to notice. But it's good for me to remember that those tiny gears, the ones we notice and care for, are even more minute than we can imagine—their own whirrings, like ours, composed of a gear works of even more numerous, and smaller, practically invisible, cogs below. Though occasionally above us, above it all, there is a far greater and vaster conspiracy of truly immense miracles, universe-size—the birth of a star, the collapse of a galaxy, the death of a planet—some of which are observed or noticed by us, while others we surely never even glimpse.
Collisions of miracles, collisions and designs and meshings of gears so outlandishly large and powerful as to render us less than even the dust from their turnings: though still, occasionally, we look up and witness some of these vast movements.
Such as this: the world has scheduled a full lunar eclipse for late on the evening of the winter solstice, beginning in the first hours of darkness and increasing until cresting shortly before midnight. The rarity of it is more delicious to our minds than would be the most wonderful meal on our palate. We did not ask for this wonder, and again so vast is it that there exists even the question of whether our participation is deserved or not, marveling that we're even able to observe it.
The scientists—astronomers and physicists—have predicted it with a brilliancy and precision nearly as exacting as would have been the prophecy of any poet. For weeks beforehand, we have been anticipating it—there will not be another event like it in the lifetime of any but the very youngest of us: another eighty years to wait if this one is missed.
Like some wild and ostentatiously confident, even swaggering animal, the path, the column, of ancient light emanating from the sun—light that was born before any man or woman ever strode the earth—will be blocked by our presence, rerouted from its accustomed path toward the mirror of the moon, so that our existence, the bulk of our small blue planet, will be revealed against the shining face of the moon as a shadow, plunging the full moon into a total darkness that will last several minutes. In that darkness, that blindness, we will know that what we are seeing is both the physical evidence of our presence as well as the physical evidence of our invisibility, our vanishing.
In the rarity of the full lunar eclipse (if the weather holds) we will be able to witness what looks like our disappearance—our moon blinking out, as well, though our consciousness will remain, hanging suspended in space—but then we will emerge on the other side, with the gift of our moon and our shadowlessness—our world of floating light—being returned to us.
In the aftermath, as well as in the short time preceding the eclipse, the moon will glow an odd color—perhaps green, perhaps red—as the oblong rays of the sun strafe the membrane of our dusty atmosphere, illuminating the night air into a corona that bends and skitters the bands of light (mingling with the prisms of myriad sky-borne dust particles) to paint our silver moon its strange new, brief color on this one night unlike any other.
There was an extraordinarily dramatic full lunar eclipse in 1883. Rumor, folklore, or history—take your pick—has it that the beleaguered tribe of Sioux Indians used that eclipse to stage a counterraid on the U.S. cavalry.
The story sounds, to my Western-benumbed ears, apocryphal or, at best, coinci
dental, though again, who can say that the leaders of that deeply religious culture did not possess a depth of science and oral history as full as our own, aided further by the prophecy and nuances and sensitivities of their prophets and visionaries?
For this one, the scientists have it scoped down to the minute, even if the spirit side of the equation seems somewhat lacking.
For days beforehand, the newspapers have been running articles informing us about the miracle to come, and in any given paper you can find an updated weather forecast for that coming evening. It's touching and refreshing to see the hunger and—how to express this?—the cleanliness with which many in the world prepare for this event like no other. It's also refreshing to see an event in which nothing is for sale; no money awaits to be "made," and the influences or opinions or reputations of one person or another will not be altered or strengthened or weakened by the moon's momentary disappearance.
It is a coming act of absolutely no ego. For a moment, we will all be hanging equal, breathless, pure, floating.
The world is not all any one way, is not all our way. You can forget that, and forget it easily, as an artist; you can become accustomed to bending imaginary iron bars, like a circus strongman, and pounding your chest and making the tides roll in and draw back out, reuniting (and again rending asunder) lost lovers, revealing fortunes made, kings and princes riding to war, entire worlds being born, mountain ranges disintegrating, and skies filled with thunder and lightning.
As an artist—unlike an astronomer—you forget that it's not all real. You forget that you control nothing and that almost everything you do, as either an artist or a human being, is as shadow, if even that.
With three days left before the winter solstice, and the eclipse, luck seems to turn away from us. The week's forecast calls for clouds, clouds, and more clouds. The valley labors beneath that dismal, beautiful, socked-in panoply of boiling gunmetal clouds, an eternity and infinity of purple and gray reefs and shoals. Let the rest of the world have its sun, one thinks. There is something noble about our lightless winters— even if they do, over the long course of the silent season, hammer your spirit deeper and deeper into submission and then, later, despair.
The weather forecasters are calling for more snow and clouds on the solstice. Other places around the state, and around the world, will have clear skies—each day, we look at the weather map and covet, for the day at least, the clearness of sky they'll experience, and which they doubtless take for granted, or even believe (as all are wont to do with good fortune) is their due. With regard to the coming miracle, the scheduled miracle, the best we are going to be able to do is hope for a lucky break—a momentary and perfectly timed break in the clouds through which we might be able to view it.
Which is precisely what happens.
With only minutes to spare before the eclipse is to occur, a warming south wind begins shoving the several days' accumulation, layers and strata of cloud-scud, quickly past, revealing to us, in glimpses, the great moon, so perfectly round and waiting, and seeming to me surprisingly low in the sky—barely above the mountaintops, barely above the top of the forest. As if it is in the design of the moment to be sure that the seeing world can observe this strange brilliance, strange phenomenon, and yet as if that same plan or design or pattern too possesses or desires an equal part of secrecy, or privacy.
We stand at the upstairs window looking east and watch, through the gapped shutterings of fast-moving cloud streams, the silver moon begin to glow dull red; and we watch as the moon merges slowly with our shadow.
It's alarmingly like a feeling of responsibility—knowing that it is we, or rather, the mass of the place we live, that are blacking out the sight of the ever-present, ever-loyal moon. (And it is a panicky feeling, also, to realize that of course the moon is still present, still astronomically loyal—that it is only our vision of the moon that has disappeared, that nothing else in the world has changed. Though still, you can also feel the brief suck or lag or lull in some unknown pull of energy, a disorienting feeling of free-floatingness, as if some part of the mind or body or spirit is suddenly bereft of a connection, a relationship or association, it never knew it had.)
We are afforded no long, unfettered views of the vanishing moon, but it doesn't matter; each time we catch the new glimpse of it, further swallowed, we're grateful. That the clouds seem to be moving faster and faster only adds to the drama, and there is further disorientation when, as the moon becomes almost completely obscured by our shadow, we can't tell if its disappearance is due to the final and ultimate height of the eclipse or just another shoal of dense clouds. Several times we'll relax (not having realized we'd been holding our breath), thinking the eclipse had peaked, only to be almost startled by one more fleeting revelation, like an encore: a summoning, and then a resummoning, that seemed somehow heroic—as if the moon is resisting even this brief vanquishing, as if it is not merely a reflector of light but possesses its own and seeks in some urgent fashion, like a living thing yearning for breath, to keep that light from being extinguished for even a few moments, even for once in a century, or once in a millennium.
The four of us stand at our upstairs window, watching the darkness, hanging in the darkness of blind faith—waiting for another gap in the clouds to reveal the moon coming back out on the other side.
The thought occurs to me that what we've just witnessed is like something one might have seen in a movie, in some Hollywood sleight-of-hand spectacle—that it's all been but an illusion—and yet there remains to the event some residue of realness, an authenticity that goes beyond what our visual senses tell us we have just witnessed. Standing there at the window with my family, I can see that there is a finite distance between the sublime and the representation of the sublime, and the four of us stand there in the shadow, in the darkness, knowing firmly and fully the space between the two, and residing comfortably between them: our back turned toward the one and facing the other.
Soon enough—in perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, though it seems like only some tiny fraction of that time—the moon reappears, emerging from the other side of its shy darkness, and when it does, we experience a feeling very much like warmth. I'm surprised at how good it feels to have the moon back in our sight again, if only through the ragtag portal: clouds hurtling past, so that it seems we are all moving at great speed, as if summoned perhaps to some challenging or noble or simply necessary endeavor.
The curtains close once more.
An hour later, a new storm system moves in, dropping more snow, and the moon and stars are hidden from us again for three more days, blanketing the world in whiteness and silence. We saw it though, and will remember it, for as long as we are in this world, and—who knows?—perhaps longer.
The girls and I wander out onto the marsh to go for a ski not too many evenings later, while the moon is still fullish; and because the clouds are gone, the night is cold. Due to some inexplicable and doubtlessly entirely random sequence of the frost-thaw cycles—warming snow, followed by repeated nights of intense cold and perhaps even influenced by the solstice, the eclipse, and other rare phenomena—the snow out on the marsh has rearranged itself into a flat skiff of broad plates, each snowflake recrystallizing into a perfectly planar structure so that the entire snowscape before us appears to have been converted to a land of fish scales, three feet deep of fish scales, and each of them silver-blue in the light of the big and aching moon.
The re-formed flakes are tilted in all directions, brittle in the cold, leached of all moisture—dry as fossil fish scales—and though most of them are lying one micron thick, parallel to the ground and the pull of gravity, enough of them have tilted upward too, as if in strange geological yearning, so that they sparkle and glint like huge sequins in that blue light. The entire world, or rather, our world, is ablaze and asparkle with the strange shimmering coronas and prisms cast by these new fish-scale flakes.
As we ski and skate through them, they make a delightful, musical tinkling. They
are as loose as dry sand. Our skis cut them, these fish scales, making a music that sounds like glass wind chimes.
We ski into and through the blue light. I hold my breath, hoping that the girls will remember the strange sight—though, perhaps better still, the conscious part of them might forget it, might take it for granted, assuming such wonder to be a daily occurrence in the landscape up here. That would be all right: would be more than all right. Nonchalance and wonder, right next to each other.
On the way home, Mary Katherine stoops and picks up a handful of that strange micro-flaked snow and tosses it up at the moon, and we watch as the large metallic-looking flakes come sifting back down in sprinkling silver shining columns, flashing and fluttering, swirling like shafts and beams of blue electricity, thrown by our hands, by our hearts. Yes, I think. Take it for granted, please.
Such is the silence of January, on later into the month, that we grow excited, several nights afterward, at the sound of the neighbor's snowplow truck coming down our driveway, audible long before it's visible, coming with a thundering that sets the dogs to howling even before we humans can hear it, or know it consciously: the ice-skimming blade drumming and skittering across the frozen earth, with sparks flying through the night, rooster tails of bright cinders and ingots flying up from either side of the blade, and our deep pleasure in knowing that in the morning when we drive out to school we'll have a crisp new-cut path through the snow, that we will not have to earn ours, step by labored step, red muscle by muscle, as do the deer and other forest creatures, but waking instead to a simple, silent grace. Sometimes amid such beauty you can't help but wonder who gave each of this life, and perhaps more important, why?
