REFLECTIONS ON SNOW

I grew up skiing down the side of mountains. Skiing really fast down the side of mountains. But before the really fast part I was 5 years old skiing uphill at the base of the mountain. You can’t ski downhill unless you’ve skied uphill at least a little bit, and skiing uphill is all you– no mountain whatsoever. In fact the mountain is resisting, no, it’s indifferent but it’s a mountain and you’re not going to make it any less of anything it isn’t already less of.

I used to go in my backyard when it snowed and there was a lot of snow and I would shovel a hill down the four steps to my deck in an attempt to go fast and ramp myself off of a jump that I had made with snow and a shovel and my own moving of the weight which that consisted of. 9 out of 10 times I would ski down the steps and right through the jump I had meant to fly off of.

I used to throw snow at my dog because he would sit ready for it and when it came he would snap at it with his mouth until it was no longer moving at him at which point he would sit ready for the next go. He would do this until I decided it was time to go in the house, at which point he would follow. This is with my hand thus far. When the snow blower was out and gurgling he felt an anxious complication. The snow was coming at him like a daydream of his own ejaculate but his barking at the engine let this orgasm slip right out of perception.

One time when I was five or ten I stuck my hand in the snow until it was numb and then I just left it there because it was numb and for the first time in my life I felt as though I was above my tolerance for pain. When I was 16 I was under a bridge holding a can of spray paint with it’s nozzle frozen shut, much like my hand to the can itself just before the cops showed up and busted me for having paint on my hand despite the can being there in the snow some feet away from me.

Some winters ago I was on a mound of snow playing king of the mound of snow but staring blankly over a fence and across a football field when a block of ice hit me square in the face making my vision go purple and red for a second before crying all the way home to my house that was a block away. I came back some days later in hopes of reclamation but the mound was gone.

In total I’ve probably eaten about a shovel’s worth of snow. It is salty. I’m not sure if the salt was the result of being poured by my father to melt the walkway to our house, or whether snow is naturally salty. I’ve never eaten enough. If it is salty then you might die of dehydration before you drown from ingesting too much.

When I used to open the back door of the house my dog would fire like a rocket with his white coat disappearing into the snow that was deeper than he was. You could hear him snorting with delight underneath all that fluff. As he got older his coat became yellow and he only just stepped out of the door to make his yellow steam in the snow on the back porch before turning back around for house.

I used to pray for snow to melt. In winter I would skateboard in the dry spots on my street or under the public library in the parking area until winter started receding. Once in a while my skateboard would get wet and ruin the next few hours for me. I think I love snow because it leaves and comes back ad infinitum.

In October of 2006 a snowstorm killed all the power to my house and two hundred thousand other houses for two-weeks. We listened to hockey games and the weather report on a wind-up radio in the candlelight of my living room. We slept next to the fireplace on the floor between shifts of bailing water from the sump pump in the basement. It was at some point during this period that I first smoked marijuana.