The Eskimos, I've read, have a hundred words for snow. Kansans this winter had at least as many, some unprintable.
True winter, which had been on leave for years, returned and boxed us with fists of ice. Arctic wind froze our cars doors shut, then froze the tears it brought to our eyes. Certain anatomical components of welldiggers and witches often associated with cold were brought to mind. It was "cold as the north side of a gravestone," as the saying goes.
At first, true winter was exhilarating. What was a little discomfort? To go a few rounds with winter put lead in one's pencil and hair on one's chest. It brought salutatory disruptions of routine. It almost made you laugh the way this frosty brute jumped up and down, grabbed you in a hammer lock and stuck its frozen fingers down your neck.
The snow came down in powdery flakes, in freezing drizzle, in fat wet slush. It peppered us in frozen pellets that mimicked the stuff that's supposed to melt the ice. It fell like ash, like powder, like mica chips, like chad from ballots cast by stars. It swallowed up and muffled sounds. It filled up ditches with confectionary drifts. Out of a gas jet blue and cloudless sky it fell like diamond dust.
In the fields the snow was like a scroll where you could read the comings and goings of rabbits, deer, quail and other creatures hieroglyphic records of the search for food. And there were scraps of feathers and fur and drops of blood to mark spots where some had become food for others.
Snow covered the dirty world, smoothed its wrinkles, filled its ruts and made the world seamless, pure and new. It lowered a ceiling and drew a curtain around us and shrank the open spaces to small room. But a sense of something smothering and still born in the chaste, immaculate snow made the onlooker ill at ease.
Whiteness "shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation," wrote long-faced Melville in Moby-Dick. "There is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink."
The snow falls "faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead," in James Joyce's immortal "The Dead." Even Frost's beloved "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" is haunted by a sense of finitude.
More than once when I couldn't find the paper camouflaged against the snow I felt my vital warmth fleeing and imagined my loved ones digging me out in the spring thaw, if spring ever came. By the seventh or eighth winter storm advisory, we'd gotten winter's point. The snow took on the look of dirty laundry. Winter became a bore.
A warm spell in mid-January lifted our spirits. Over night the snow melted and the country roads were dusty once again. The chiseled tracks of phantom deer that had walked across the pond one frozen day turned to shapeless pegs, dissolved, and the pond was water once again. The next day buffleheads and merganzers, harbinger ducks, appeared. Perhaps the worst was over.
The dog went on point another evening. Suddenly there was a tumult of wings, as volley after volley of doves flew from an evergreen treen. One afternoon I heard a sound like a gunshot in the football stadium, followed by an echoing ping in the metal bleachers: batting practice had begun. Surely the birds and baseball implied that spring was not far away.
But nature was only teasing us with cruel pranks. Back like a hammer from the north came an ice storm. The next morning all was silent except for a skeletal rattling of branches. A few chickadees fluttered about looking for seeds. A hawk shivered on a telephone line. He too would go hungry that night. Deer by the roadside watched without moving when we stopped the car. It would have squandered too much precious energy to run away.
But the Vinland Hills glittered like silver cataracts. The trees up close seemed like chandeliers. In the distance they looked puffs of cannon smoke. The cedars had become white-robed seers. The snow cover glittered in the moonlight. If this was death, it had a lovely shape.
Another round of warming, another eight inches of snow on the way. Another futile bout with the snow shovel to keep the sidewalks clear. Yes, "snow was general" across Kansas. "It was snowing and it was going to snow." It will be snowing in August. Winter will never end. Another ice age is on its way. Was global warming such a bad thing?
Any day now we'll burn the last stick of furniture and go out looking for buffalo dung. "Breathtaking," "lovely," "pristine" are no longer among our words for snow. Snow is "discouraging," "disgusting," "loathsome," "foul," "unfair."
George Gurley is a Lawrence resident who writes a regular column for the Journal-World.
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