The Sudden Weight of Snow

by Laisha Rosnau

  Roads cut through fields around Sawmill Creek like a child’s drawing of a staircase, right angle after right angle. They would straighten out in narrow valleys or come up against hills and switch back until they met logging roads and ascended into the forest. The volume of back roads spider-webbing the valleys astounded me. They seemed to have little purpose beyond meeting with other back roads. Roads as fences, locking our small towns into valleys. The highway passing us by.

  Krista and I came down from the air we had caught over the tracks and everything seemed weighted and quiet with the recent snowfall. Cows plodded single file through fields, smoke rose in straight, lazy lines from chimneys then settled around houses and joined the smog from the mill. Fences were piled with snow in columns on each post. “God, this place is tragic,” Krista lamented. “Try to roll us some more smokes.”

  In the valley around town, the land was barely flat and wide enough to graze animals. Farms were small and were called hobbies. People grew and raised odd things in the valley – ostriches and llamas, edible flowers, ginseng under taut black tarps that collected heat by summer and were taken down in winter leaving fields as canvases for snow. A hybrid of cows and buffalo called beefalo grazed at a farm, their free-range, steroid-free lifestyle attested to by large signs at the side of the road – We are free range and drug free! – as though they were the poster herd of bovines. The mill was the only thing that made money around Sawmill Creek and that just barely. As though resigned to this, people grew things out of curiosity, yet always with the hope of hitting a jackpot fuelled by the quirky desires of other people, far away. These people were rumoured to have insatiable appetites for large delicate fungi, healing herbs, the most organically derived meat. We’d all heard the stories of people going into the bush around Sawmill, living in camps and spreading out into slash-burned areas to collect mushrooms. Mushrooms that were sent to Vancouver, later even Japan, and returned as gold.

  No one had ever met anyone to whom this had happened but we believed the stories; they made our valley seem exotic. We wouldn’t have been able to tell a mushroom picker from the pickers who arrived each summer to pluck fruit from vines and branches, or the tree planters who arrived each spring looking as soft and grey as the last year’s windfalls. During the summer, the planters came in from the bush every ten days or so, dreadlocked and mac-jacketed, smelling of dirt, pine, and garlic, and went to the same bars the guys from the mill went to. We knew from the stories that sometimes the planters and the mill workers got along, found camaraderie in the commonality of livelihoods based on forms of tree and wood. Other times they didn’t, knocked blood out of each other in the parking lot until the cops broke them up. By the end of the summer, the planters would be tanned and muscular, lingering longer in town, trying to get away with more at the end of the season. Most of the girls in Sawmill would admit to a love of these late summer planters, all muscle and dirt. Admit to wanting to leave with them at the end of the season, climb in the back of four-by-fours with shovels and dogs and go wherever they went back to. But unlike the planters, who returned with the next season, we wouldn’t want to come back.

  Pilgrims was sandwiched between hobby farms and a forest of trees perpetually ready to be cut down and planted up again, like thick gnarled lawns to logging companies. It started to snow again. “Keep your eyes out for the sign, okay?” Krista said, leaning into the steering wheel, eyes on the windshield like it was going to reveal some kind of message. The wipers cleared the glass, the snow stuck to it again. There was no wind and even the sounds coming through the radio were slow, melancholic folk songs. “Do you feel like we’re time-warping, right now?” Krista asked.

  “Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel. If I could save time in a freakin’ bottle you know the first thing I’d like to do? – break the thing open. Maybe we should just turn around and forget it.”

  “Nah. What use would that be?”

  I paused, tried to think of a use. Like we could distill our actions into something utilitarian, something we could hold, the grip of a shovel. “Yeah, okay. So, have you ever heard of anyone ever going to one of these? I mean, who goes to these things, anyways?”

  “What do I look like, a Farmer’s Almanac? No one we know, but then, no one we know goes anywhere besides hockey games and lame parties. I don’t know – growers, people who hang out at the health food store. I think people from Kelowna and shit. Maybe even Vancouver. They’re into this kind of artsy stuff down there.”

  Led by a sign to the Pilgrims Art Farm Solstice Fair, we turned off a back road onto two dirt depressions made by tires. They led into the bush, then opened to a field covered in tire tracks, where cars and trucks sat, parked like resting animals. When we got out of the truck, the field clicked and dripped with the sound of recently warm vehicles shedding snow.

  We had no idea what we would find at the farm, but once we walked through the gates and closer to some buildings, we could see small wooden signs nailed to things – trees, fences, posts that appeared to be erected for the sole purpose of displaying small wooden signs – as though put there just for people like us. We peered at them, hoping they would be some kind of directions – and some of them seemed to be. A couple of signs said Outhouse and Cookshack and pointed, seemingly randomly, into a cluster of buildings, a glow coming from the other side of them. Others were more cryptic and announced, we discovered with lighters held up, Carpe diem and I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked. “Ah, shit,” Krista started. “Who wants to go to the bank naked?”

  “Hi, uh, I’d like to withdraw a couple bucks. Need to get me some of them there clothes you all got on.”

  We walked around a building, hoping we wouldn’t be late for whatever event was happening. We ended up in what appeared to be the centre of the farmyard where there was a large bonfire surrounded by bales of hay. Some people sat on these, others had gathered on the porch of one of the buildings. We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and walked past this group and into the building, looking at our feet until we got inside. It was clear that whatever craft fair had taken place earlier was over now. Long tables, like the ones in the basement of our church, were pushed up against the walls. At church, once a potluck was over, women would wash all the Corning and Tupperware before we could come down from all the Kool-Aid we had drunk. We’d go to the bathroom, almost expecting to pee lime green or cherry red, and would return to find the tables pushed aside, all the bowls and casserole dishes displayed across the taut plastic tablecloths, ready to be picked up and taken home by whoever had filled them with potato and jellied salads. God helps those who help themselves, cleanliness a virtue, idle hands and something about the devil. At Pilgrims, food still clung to dishes and platters, crumbs and whole morsels all over the table, and there were things like candlesticks, small painted boxes, coarsely woven bags amongst the food, obviously left over from the craft fair.

  Like anthropologists, we examined the items on the tables, looking first, then picking through the remains as though hoping to discover something. We dipped the crumbs of chips into the remnants of different sauces – red, yellow, green dips, all with a brownish hue – turning to each other for assessment.

  “What do you think that was?”

  We were interrupted by a balding man with a grey ponytail and beads around his neck. “Hey, you two been on the sleigh ride yet?” he asked. Despite his appearance, or possibly because of it, we knew he was one of the worst kind: the hippie version of the sportswriter at the arena.

  We looked back at him as though we couldn’t have been more bored. “No, we haven’t.”

  “Oh, you have to go on a ride. They’re just about to take another one out. The moon is almost full, it’s solstice, the air is clear. Oh man, I’m telling you, it’s the most beautiful thing.” He said all this in a slow, drawn-out way, like pulling gum out of his mouth, seeing how far it would stretch.

  “Are you sure it’s the most beautiful thing?” Krista asked
, narrowing her eyes and looking pointedly at him. I suppressed a laugh. For one moment, he looked as though someone had given his ponytail a quick jerk, then he was back to a slow blinking, rhythmic nod.

  “Well, if it’s the most beautiful thing, we’d better go then.” I pulled Krista past the man and we made a path to the door through a gauntlet of large sweaters, musky smells, hair. On the porch, people talked and smoked with the urgency that cold brought, hauled on joints then funnelled laughter out of their throats in tight bursts. We smoked anything anyone passed to us, bare hands stinging when we took off one glove to accommodate the tiny ends of joints. By the time the sleigh pulled up to the porch, the huge horses snorting out steam clouds of warm air and jingling with bells, I felt delighted with the entire evening. I even started thinking in clichés about being my mother’s daughter. Vera must have stood bundled on porches waiting for horse-drawn sleighs to pull her through fields of snow. She may have even sneaked a drag off someone’s cigarette, imagined the flame would warm her, unsubstantiated beliefs like that existing as they did back then.

  The “sleigh” was a flatbed covered with hay, no ornately curved sides, no furs, no burly men with bodies like bears, teasing pipes to light and then dim with their lips. The group of us on the porch piled on, jousted our limbs against one another until we could find some place to sit still without being cramped. My foot met with an ankle and someone cried out. The man up front, reins in hand, turned and directed us to all sit with our backs toward the middle, feet drawn in so they wouldn’t catch when we went through gates. Told us to hold on, the ride would be bumpy. Nothing to hold on to but each other. Nothing keeping us on but our mass, our bodies a cohesive unit. We were pulled along snowy, moon-lit fields as we sang Christmas carols and drank hot, spiced alcohol from the wine skins that were being passed around. I was high on both alcohol and marijuana by the end of the ride, cheeks flushed with fresh air. Happier in that moment than I was sure I’d ever been in my entire life.

  We got off the sleigh much as we had got on, not as individual bodies but as some multilimbed and awkward thing, tripping over itself. I found myself on my ass in the snow, laughing. “Oh, Lord,” Krista announced. “You’re loaded.” I just laughed and fell back, started flailing my arms and legs into a snow angel. We were back in front of the building and I was lying on a skiff of snow on a gravel lot, my snow angel grinding pebbles into my back. Nick and I used to dare each other to fall into a snow angel without bending a limb, an experiment that had knocked the wind out of us both more than once. Krista tried to pull me up but I couldn’t stop laughing or get any control over my limbs, which felt heavy and fluid, and soon we were both on the ground in a heap. “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” we chorused.

  That’s how I met him. He and an older man came down from the porch and pulled Krista and me off the ground as though we truly needed help. The older man was behind me, his arms hooked under my armpits pulling me to my feet. When I was upright, he held me there for a moment, waiting, I presumed, until I gained balance. “What’s so funny, girls?” the older man asked from behind me. When he said that, I started again, laughing so hard I would’ve fallen if I wasn’t being held up.

  “She’s just fucked up,” Krista explained, grinning. I saw the younger man behind her. As I tried to catch my breath I focused on his face. In that moment, that small window of rest in my laughter, his expression seemed to convey several things at once. I saw in his face amusement, sadness, and recognition, as though he was trying to place me, or wanted to say something but didn’t know how.

  Krista and I struggled to gain some composure but, as soon as we saw our own expressions reflected in each other’s face, we spat out laughter again. It turned into steam around us. The older one let go of his hold on me and shifted so he could look at both of us. “Whew, I’d like to have a bit of whatever you two had,” he said.

  “You probably can,” said Krista. “Whatever we had, we got it here.”

  He held out his hand to one of us, then the other, to shake. “Thomas.” More of a statement than an introduction.

  The younger one simply stared. I thought there might be something wrong with him. I cracked a grin and he beamed back. His eyes were huge. Even the crinkling of a smile didn’t diminish them. Dark hair fell in thick curls over his forehead. His body was lost under layers of clothes. “I’m Gabe,” he finally said but didn’t hold out his hand for us to shake. He was too close to our age to do that.

  “There’s hot chocolate in the cookshack. You two want some?” Thomas asked.

  “Oh, my God!” Krista exclaimed.

  Thomas took a step back, laughing. “Whoa, Nellie. What?”

  “Don’t mind her,” I said. “We would just really love some hot chocolate right now.” People who are used to smoking pot forget about how extreme it can be at first, how good the thought of chocolate can taste.

  “Oh my God!” Krista repeated. “Why didn’t anyone tell us there was hot chocolate?”

  It wasn’t like I read it would be. I didn’t feel Gabe’s presence like heat; I didn’t feel like I’d always known him. My legs did turn to water, but only because of the intoxicants. Nothing fluttering and small lodged in my chest. When I met him, what I did feel was my tongue, like a stone under a river current, rubbed smooth.

  GABE

  Peter and Anise have decided you should be home-schooled. They believe that the stratified, hierarchical socialization of children into one generic mass, distinguishable only by grades that reflect a limited range of abilities, can’t be healthy. You are disappointed even though they tell you again and again that you don’t want to be part of that kind of system. You’ve actually enjoyed school so far. Entering late in the second grade has been some kind of strange blessing, a buffer. Teachers make note of it and don’t expect as much, so when you do well – catch on to long division quickly, excel at spelling tests – they are pleased. You have become a testament to how well the system can work. You’ve adapted well and fit in, you know this from the comments on your report cards.

  And you do fit in. You are in the sixth grade and have made it this far without getting the tar beaten out of you. You don’t consider yourself popular, or even well-liked, but you are tolerated in a kind and gentle way by both the girls and the boys. It isn’t like this for everyone. There are kids who are teased and bullied ceaselessly, and sometimes brutally. Marty Cruickshank has been kicked so many times since the first grade by boys and girls alike that he has dents in his shin bones. The sad thing is that it is Marty, himself, who points this out, invites kids to run their hands down his almost hairless legs, feel the ridges. He has had his arms twisted around the tether ball pole, hands in the grip of two boys while others line up to slam his head into the pole with the ball, the chain catching in his hair. He has been teased with such fervour during a class presentation that, before the teacher could stop the taunting, Marty wet himself, a dark stain growing on his tan-coloured dress pants. Barbara Sanducci has been called Brabra since she developed at a startling rate in the fourth grade and it was revealed that she received bras in her stocking at Christmas. She has been stripped of those bras, forcibly, in the boys’ change room, and once gagged with one, hands tied behind her back with her own shirt. The janitor found her there and, they say, she wasn’t even crying. It is the girls who do things like this to her, call her Brabra. The boys take the “duc” in her last name and call her “the Douche.”

  You are not one of these kids, and while you feel sorry for them, your own feeling of relief overrides this. You don’t do anything terrible to the Martys and the Douches – no one would expect you to – but you are vigilant in ignoring them. Clearly, there is something wrong with kids like that and you don’t want anything to rub off on you. The other kids treat you well. You were given the nickname “Mouse” shortly after you arrived for, of course, being as quiet as one. Like other small cute things, you have become a kind of mascot for the kids in your grade. The boys pick you for
teams in gym class. Not first or second, but often the third or fourth call someone will say, “We’ll take the Mouse-Man” and it’s not because you are remarkably good at any sports, although you have passable skills in most of them. Girls have always tried to help you with your schoolwork even though you haven’t needed assistance since the first couple months of the second grade. They hover over your desk, smelling like root beer, bubble gum, dirt, until the teacher tells them to sit down. Recently, they’ve even approached you in the halls. They say, “Hi-i, Mou-ouse,” dragging out the monosyllables, twisting pieces of their hair, giggling. They’ll do this one after another sometimes, in quick succession, and then all gather at the end of the hall and giggle together, looking over their shoulders at you. Some of these girls are “going around” with boys in the seventh grade but those boys don’t mind. In fact, now even they acknowledge you. “Hey, Mouse-Man,” they’ll nod as if to concede some strange kinship developed through the sixth grade girls giggling at you.

  All this has come to an end, though. You, apparently, do not want to be in such an unhealthy, unnatural environment. You are going to learn at home, at your own pace. Because you won’t have twenty-seven other kids to compete against, you will learn faster, retain more. In fact, Anise assures you that you will learn so quickly that you will only have to “do school” for half the day, the rest, you will be allowed to roam free. “Roam free!” Peter says. “Just like you did back at the farm, hey? You can explore the forest, do some fishing, help your old man in the shop.” Peter and Anise have invented some kind of 1950s American boyhood for you to enjoy. They have missed an important element though. Other kids. There are more and more kids being home-schooled, they tell you, “We’ll hook up with them, you’ll meet some other home-schoolers soon.”