White With Frost

It snowed last night, not a lot, but enough to cover the ground, the white interrupted by tufts of winter-dead grass. The snow is granular and slick, heavy with water, slippery underfoot. I almost fell twice during chores but each time regained my footing at precisely the right moment and thus was quietly pleased with myself, as if saving myself from falling on my ass were a skill cultivated across years of rigorous training. Which, in a certain sense, it is.

The second time I slipped, I remembered (for reasons that elude me) the summer and fall we lived in a tent on friends’ land not far from here. This was before we bought this property; it was while we were saving for this land, and part of our savings plan involved avoiding rent at all costs. One of those costs involved clearing our tent roof of snow, and I suppose that’s the connection between my almost falling this morning and my remembrance of that experience: The early, slippery snow. The way a warm, wet snow is actually colder than a cold, dry snow.  The way we used to poke the snow off the roof of the tent with a stick we kept by our sleeping bags expressly for that purpose. We called it the snow stick. Have I written about this before? It feels familiar.

Anyway, I remember one particularly grim night, when we gathered in the shell of our friends’ as-yet-unisulated house (they were building on the same land). All of us were bone weary and chilled right to the gut, and we sat in a silent semi-circle around the wood stove, which radiated enough heat to warm whichever side of us faced the hot iron. Each of us were lost in whatever personal miseries we’d decided to carry, mostly having to do with the raw and exposed nature of our respective shelters, which had seemed sort of charming and even romantic only a few weeks prior, but now seemed squalid and desperate.

Penny and I would be breaking camp in a few days, as we’d secured a $100/month rental. It did not have electricity or running water, but it had a metal roof, and as we sat around the stove with our friends, changing position whenever the discomfort of the too-cold side of us grew greater than the discomfort of the too-hot side of us (or vice-versa), I remember thinking how nice it would be to not have to worry about poking snow off the roof. As if it were a great luxury. As if it were something to aspire to.

Twice recently I have been asked what I hope people take from my work. Both times, I struggled with my answer, because I guess I don’t know what I hope people take from my work. And maybe I struggled because some part of me thinks I should know, that knowing would provide a reason, and that a reason would somehow guide my work in a way that gives it shape and form. Logic, maybe.  I didn’t used to worry about this, because it was quite clear why I wrote: Money. Not that I didn’t enjoy my work, but still. Money.

But that’s all messed up now, and to be honest, I feel sort of caught between the reasons I used to write and the reasons I write now, which aren’t even all that clear to me. Someone else asked me about my mission recently, and there was another thing I couldn’t articulate but wished I could. A mission. That would make things easier, wouldn’t it? That would give me something to point to, sort of like when Penny and I were living in that tent in December in Vermont. That was some serious mission-based camping, right there. We sat ’round that stove in our friends’ hollow box of a house and we were sort of miserable, true, but we were also on a mission and we could point to that mission – the land we didn’t yet own but someday would – and say see that? Even if we only said it to ourselves.

I am envious sometimes of other writers who seem driven by a mission, who seem to know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. I think of someone like Charles, who seems propelled by a force much larger than himself. I mean, just look at his event schedule. Australia, Bali, a weeklong workshop in PA (he’s a great speaker and a wicked nice guy, you should go). How does he do it? I have no friggin’ idea. Or someone like Sandor Katz, who travels almost constantly, preaching the gospel of fermentation. I know his editor. “He’s relentless,” she told me, and that made me feel sort of shitty (though that was clearly not the intent), because I am anything but relentless. In fact, I might be the most unrelentless (irrelentless?) person you ever met. Nor do I feel propelled by a force larger than myself. There is only little old me, 6’3″ and 185-pounds of eroding bone, atrophying muscle, and expanding love handle, scratching the age old itch of putting words together in a way that is pleasing to the ear. My ear, anyway. I mean, sometimes it works that way, though you might be surprised at how often it doesn’t.

Anyway. I’ve come a long way from slipping in the snow during my morning rounds, and that was not my intent. Really, I just wanted to tell the story of the new snow and my near-falls, and how they made me remember the story of the night almost two decades ago when we sat around our friends’ wood stove and then went back to our tent to poke at the roof with our snow stick and climb into our sleeping bags and fall asleep as the sky cleared above us.

And in the morning when we awoke we could see that our expelled breath had turned everything white with frost.