Coping with the approach of another winter

 

It gets dark so early now, this late in November, this far north, and the library is cold. I am at the front desk of my library. It's not even half past five in the evening, but it feels strangely like it's two in the morning. I was woken up at six this morning by loud machinery doing some kind of strange grinding on the street in front of where we live. And then, with that dismal door thrown open, sadness dogged my heels the rest of the day.

At work, all my favorite co-workers have applied for slightly better-paying, minor promotions at other library branches. One has already accepted and will be leaving here. I could perhaps bear this one's departure, I have managed before, but the next one considering an offer I would find fairly devastating, both cumulatively and particularly. And then it would only get worse from there.

A mother carries a small child in her arms, past my desk off to the Children's Room. The child is wearing a colorful tiara. As I regard the wee princess she turns her head and looks at me. Her face blossoms into a smile and she waves enthusiastically at me.

So at least there's that.

Arctic trails

 

There is a lot of snow here. But after all the bad weather, and the month of illness (I'm still coughing!), I finally got out for a picture walk in some of our snow covered prairie. There is a preserved area of swamp near my library that has boardwalks running through it. My wife and I were happily there a lot in the Fall, and sometimes I would also go alone before work and take pictures of its unique beauties. This is where I was this morning.

It is very different in this season.

Most of the lively wildlife- ducks, geese, turtles, and songbirds- were long gone. And in the bare plants of Winter much of the illusion of wildness was gone too. In the heavy foliage of Summer and Fall it was easy not to realize how close these trails are to the buildings and roads that ring the area. But not so in the stripped bare nakedness of Winter! Even the park buildings- a wildlife rehabilitation center and a visitor center- usually well hidden in the other seasons, were always plain to see, no matter where I stood or how far away I went.

But, and here's the good part, it was still beautiful. Golden plants bent and contorted under heavy ladles of snow. Lost woodpeckers beat their wings heavily passing through. Great fields of snow lay undisturbed. Thickets swirled roughly all around. There was an impossibly complex, tangled richness to it all, a dizzying loveliness.

Unfortunately it wasn't the kind of thing that could readily be captured in pictures. The gray fog and bleached, narrow range of colors didn't give any of my cameras any excitement, even if my eyes were pretty happy with it all.

So I did what I usually do in this situation- I fudged. And folded. I mixed it all up. I mutilated and mangled and committed copyright violations.

And here we are...

More and more snow

 

This morning it was still snowing, but our major storm was over. Well over a foot of snow fell to the ground, but this morning's snow, still falling, was mere flurries, where the tiny snowflakes dance lightly in the air and never come to rest. And as I look out of the library now, the sun is shining on quiet trees laden with great boughs of snow. It's not as shockingly pretty as immediately after the snow stopped, because in a city the snow starts to color and degrade as soon as it can, but it's still pretty amazing, and even mundane things like plowing add to the effect by creating great, wild banks of white piled up against verges of new made wilderness.

Having been so sick this last month, and with the walking and driving made so difficult by ice, I have barely been out in this winter, except maybe in the homely areas of my neighborhood. But looking upon all the wonder I am starting to feel that urge again. How different the lonely woods and the river must be under all of this!

A few days ago I made homage to our current Winter with a couple of photos that were maybe more light sketches for this series today. Today the pictures are a bit more complex and complete, but their aim is the same: To give some feel for the grandeur of all this mighty snow!

 

I do not know how long in the snow...

 

It has been snowing and snowing and snowing here. The library is very quiet, perhaps because it is swaddled and muffled in copious drifts of snow, but probably more so because there aren't many people here. The main work of the day is answering the phone and saying:

"Yes, we are open until eight."

At which point the callers for the most part exude a pleased and mild surprise, look out their window, and decide to just curl up with an old copy of Pride and Prejudice instead of going out. 

Then they poke around in their cupboard to see if they have some cognac and Grand Marnier and lemons to make a Sidecar with. They grab some really good blue cheese, some Marcona almonds, and any package of decent crackers they might have...

But perhaps we drift to far into my own personal fantasies of the day?

Outside of the dreadful commuting this weather involves, and the unpleasant car scraping, and the bitterness of having to leave my wife at home to go to work, it's all lovely; the snow, the quietness, and the commiseration over the weather with the patrons who have made it in.

I tried to take some pictures of the heavy snow to show to you, but I didn't feel like it conveyed it in all its altering depth. So I went out to the library backyard, plunged out by the pond thigh-deep in the snow, and photographed a couple old friends there to give it some scale.

I now have snow in my shoes, but it was worth it. 

White can be beautiful

 

Not that many days ago I referenced a classic Melanie song while I was talking about Winter:

White can be beautiful, but mostly it's not.

Her comment was in a song about not eating animals, but wisdom is wisdom, n'est ce pas? And I found it a suddenly insightful comment in regards to Winter.

Unlike the wall to wall beauty of Spring or Fall around here, Winter strips the land bare, reveals the dirt of the city, and exposes the thinness of our scant urban wilderness. Or more specifically, it covers everything in a thick, glorious and angelic shimmer of white, and then, in something like an over-speeded time lapse it turns grey and thin and bare and dead and mottled. It is punctured by urine and showered in the residue of the toxic exhaust of a city.

Oh white can be beautiful, but mostly it's not.

But it is snowing now and god it's lovely. 

Housebound, sick for days, all I can do, ALL I can do, is look out the window

and marvel.

This city in the good part of Winter:

Two seasons at once

 

Winter is a little tough around here, especially when we're deep into Winter and Winter doesn't even begin for another week! Today, as the ice falls, turns to slush, gets churned into some kind of unholy slurry on the roads, people tend to complain. To paraphrase the great Melanie: Winter can be beautiful, but mostly it's not.

Yesterday I walked out to Shangri-la, my little secret woodland. It didn't seem quite so secret with its luxurious blanket of leaves stripped away, and I wondered how I could properly illustrate this most dramatic of seasonal differences. I thought it would be neat to take some pictures in the Summer and then take some of the same place in the Winter. That sounded hard though, and like it would take another six months.

Then I remembered I have taken a lot of pictures!

Sure enough I found some random Summer shots of Shangri-la. So I tracked down their locations and did my best to match my original point of view. 

Here are the best of my results:

Out among the snowy wastes of Winter

 

Today I went out among the snowy wastes of Winter. The wind blew fiercely and 18 degrees of Fahrenheit felt colder than it was. I took pictures of the stark sun, bare copses, hard light, and freezing streams. Sometimes they looked like the desolation at the Earth's poles, but mostly they looked like a bunch of snow had fallen on a golf course.

There was truth in both these visions, but I was thinking one vision would be more picturesque than another. So I came home with my frozen trigger finger and at least one camera out of battery power, and lo I consulted with my artificial intelligence friends. Using all the history of imagery ever produced by human beings in all their profligacy, we tried to nudge my pictures in the direction I had been thinking of as I roamed the bitter tundra.

We had mixed, but mostly positive results, which, in the interest of science, art, better relations between robots and people, and your edification, I present here: