The Snow Eater

Every January for as long as I’ve lived in this region there comes a day, if not the better part of a week, of freakishly warm winds. I’ve written about this elsewhere, reported stories from Wyoming drivers who were forced to pull over when their windshields suddenly fogged over. I learned years ago the phenomenon is called a chinook.

Yet nobody I know walks around saying, Ah, the chinook. It’s not reported in the local paper, and I never hear about it on the radio weather report. I don’t know why this is. Generally speaking I don’t think memory should be trusted in regards to weather. Especially not in the age of climate change. Every May for the past ten years, I wonder Jesus, does it always take this long to see the lilacs? But I do remember the chinook.

It’s the end of winter. Okay, not really. But it does mark a turning point in winter. Before the chinook, the snowfall is very cold and powdery. Dark creeps in with a kind of holy slowness throughout November and December. If not for the splat of Christmas, I would feel something close to reverence for this early part of winter. After the chinook come the days of soggy snow, heavy stuff that will wreck your shoulders to shovel. These are also the days of thirty-something weather when the sidewalks, the trails, and most of the roads are ice slicks. Everybody gets edgy dying for snow that refuses to come. Another way to gauge the before and after is the ice. The outdoor rinks are better when it’s really dark and really cold. Before the chinook. It can be good after, too, but often skating becomes an indoor endeavor by February.

On January 17th , the day of our twelve-year-old’s birthday party, there was a chinook. We took ten girls and two boys sledding. It was fifty degrees. Parents were shocked by the temperature and feared our sledding would be ruined, but in my mind, a chinook on the 17th of January was right on time. In fact, according to Instrument Flight Rules

(IFR) Magazine (“The Magazine for the Accomplished Pilot”), chinook winds are most common between November and March. They prevail in a region called the Livingston Box, a broad zone extending from north central Montana to southeast Wyoming, centered near Livingston, Montana. Chinook winds are common in Colorado and New Mexico, as well as in Alberta and even the Northwest Territories.

A chinook is caused by moist air from the Pacific coast cooling as it climbs the western Rockies, then rapidly warming as it drops down the eastern slope. The word itself comes from an Oregon Native American word meaning “snow eater,” referring to how the warm and dry air melts and evaporates snow on the ground.

This past Sunday the wind was coming from everywhere. The view of any given direction was decidedly different from every other. Over the mountains the sky was purplish blue, like a deep, stadium-sized bruise. Clouds would droop and sag, then be sucked back up again. Each time I blinked the colors changed. Behind us, on the valley floor, the brood mares waddled through their soggy pasture along the river. The sun beat cheerfully; the western slopes had hardly any snow. The northeastern slopes were a chute of ice. The sledding was wet and fast.

My husband and I walked around the dog the park once, keeping an eye on the kids. There are no trees in this park. This may shock some readers, for whom “dog park” brings to mind trees or woods. Not here. By the time we got back to the group, they had decided to make a sled train, one giant vehicle made of several sleds held together by rope, legs, and arms.

http://youtu.be/oJJ0ZbwmMdQ

The most successful was a J-shaped sled, not pretty but it held, all the way to the bottom.  As I stood back watching this transpire–and they must have made a half-dozen–I experienced one of those out-of-body moments of hyper-awareness. The kind of thing where every hair on your body stands up, your blood slows down and you can hear your own breath. An in-the-body experience, to be accurate. You stand inside yourself, being yourself, yet also beside yourself, aware that you are in fact, alive. Put another way, you catch yourself being conscious.

This can happen with language too. From time to time any particular word can become foreign in your mouth. In the same way the tongue will find a bone in fish, you suddenly get snagged on this one word. Usually, it’s a harmless, random word, like “cottage,” for instance. If you say it over and over again, it becomes utterly absurd. Cottage. How stupid that if you put that word next to cheese, it denotes a lumpy, white, half-liquid food. Use it alone and it’s a little house. Even the sound of it is ridiculous. Cott. Kott. Cutt kott kutt. Age. Aaage. Age. Cottage.

An in-the-body moment of hyper-awareness is like this, only bigger. Not just one word, but all of language, existence itself. You see such moments in almost all of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. Everybody who reads those stories, even students who pretend such stuff is out of their reach, recognizes those moments to some degree. They can be scary. It’s normal to deny scary stuff. They can also be exhilarating. They can change your life.

Surely this is what Ralph Waldo Emerson was talking about in his 1836 essay “Nature,” when he describes his retreat to the woods:

“There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity . . . which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

I think these moments are more rare the older you get, when it’s easier to get buried by daily routine. There are a million distractions from our own senses; attention spans are shrinking, now an old story. Parents are especially prone to sensory blindness. In particular, parents like me, who never really saw themselves as parent material. In my teens and twenties, I never once thought of procreating. In fact, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t. I thought moms had to be prissy and nurturing, without any flair or independent thinking. To be a mother was a kind of death. Creative death, for sure, very un-sexy, dull, and invisible. Not anything I wanted to be. Pregnancy and birth were great equalizers for me. At the risk of being wildly reductive, I finally learned that there are all kinds of women. Moms don’t have to look or act any certain way. Liberating, to put it mildly.

Almost to the point of detriment, to be honest. At times I feel like a great fluttery spastic, hovering around my children in awe, not quite trusting their existence, impressed with myself but teetering always on the edge of vast doubt, as in, oh dear god you are doing this wrong. This kind of hysteria is exhausting. It can blind one to out-of-body anything. In fact, one can become quite immune to the body itself. The sensory life goes dormant. Bye-bye to all that information that was once so loud and clear.

That Sunday under the unstable sky, I watched these kids put themselves in one formation after another. Down came the train, a messy organism made from brightly colored, moving, whooping, screaming separate parts. At the bottom of the hill, they would break apart, then scramble to grab sleds and crawl back up the icy, wind-sheared hill. Right there, it happened. I divided. I caught myself in the middle of my life, raising children. There was the roiling sky and the mountains and the J-shaped train. They are growing up in Montana. They are so lucky.

I understood my part in it. All the decisions and good-byes and surprises led me out here to this treeless place. A whole different set of decisions and good-byes and surprises led my husband to the same place. Together, we went through our own set of decisions and good-byes and surprises and here we are in Montana, with kids. And this killed me: they are no longer little. We’ve hit the halfway point.

Cott-age. Cott-age. Kott-kott-cott-age. Cottage cottage cottage.

Brilliant and absurd, that I, me, nobody from the middle of nowhere, should now be raising kids in Montana. In this moment, we shared a glance, me and the state. A cosmic nod. How can that be? The land, the mountains, the sky do not care that I have my kids, that they are growing up here as opposed to there. And yet here we are.

It didn’t last long. The clouds closed in; the wind got colder and we packed up, continued with our party. We had pizza and I found myself trotting to the basement with my plate and my notebook, set to record info for the thank-you notes. It’s what I learned when she was three: you record who gave what and then you send out thank-yous. But as I wrote down the first gift, a strange feeling came over me. Not any cosmic nod, something more pedestrian. Shame, I think it was. I remembered the four-year-old party, watching one of my dad friends pull his chair up to the party table, rubbing his hands together, muttering Okay, lets see what we’ve got here! How I laughed! It was exactly how I felt.

Now, my chewing slowed. I looked around at the girls, none of whom were paying me the least bit of attention, and saw that this kind of thing was no longer necessary. It’s now embarrassing to pull your chair up to the party table and rub your hands together in excitement. That is over. All at once, it is done. The list for thank-yous? Irrelevant. She is twelve. She can remember who got her what. Quietly, very slowly, I picked up my plate and notebook and sneaked back upstairs. I joined my husband in the living room. I did what I have never done in my life: I watched a football game.

I have to think these two moments were related. Not only because they occurred on the same day, the day of the chinook. . . well, in fact, precisely because it all happened on the same day. The word “cottage” is weird in part because of its meanings: runny cheese and a little house. That contributes to its absurd sound. Sometimes your own name can sound weird because it is the signifier for you. How random and absurd. Christy! Kriss-tee!  My moment of transcendence, the bizarre fact of me as a mother and my Montana family bliss, had to do with the fact that it is all half over. Add in the freakish imbalance of air currents and Shazam! This is where we are now.

Right now.

Cosmic nod indeed. See me anthropomorphize. Granting human qualities to something non-human can often belie a need/wish for a message from beyond. The longing for something larger. Yet the snow eater has come with such constancy over the years! Its deep, warm breath from who knows where—the distant ocean, the vast unknown? —is a great exhale, a big tap-tap:

Wake up!

One dream has ended. Another is about to begin.