The Reemergent Kingdom of Thule

On Tuesday morning I drove out because the weather reports said that on Tuesday evening we were going to be hit by snow. I am happy to be living in these days of few meteorological surprises; in New England the memory of unexpected storms has managed to encode itself, in a few short decades, into the collective DNA of the locals. Hurricane Carol in the 1950's. The blizzard of 1977. A random tornado that struck the touristy shores of New Hampshire's Hampton Beach on the fourth of July, 1898, and killed nearly a dozen. My sister had come upon a row of these graves once, in the little antique cemetery in the little antique town I lived in. Father, daughter, two sons, all with the same death date. As it turned out, two of the bodies were never recovered from the sea, and the stones marked empty earth. To the right of these, the mother's grave, finally dug thirty or more years later, and inscribed with the legend "One day we will understand."

A hundred years later, four hundred miles away, and in an opposite season, I am thinking of that family, that storm, as I drive to the store for milk and flour and whatever else I think I may need for the rest of the week. My New England training--turns out the genetic memory the locals share is transmissible, and I acquired it during my years there--tells me to stock up, to hoard, to expect the worst. On Tuesday morning the air is quiet but has the unsettling quality of being smoky all around me--but white smoke, not the resinous gray stuff that pours from the innumerable wood stoves in this town. I can't identify the source. It seems too cold for it to be frozen mist from the river; it seems too motionless to be some sort of precipitation. As I watch the trucks rolling down the road ahead of me I realize that they are kicking up the haze in their heavy wake--I may be, too--the air is full of salt, because the whole valley is full of salt, it has been laid down daily for many days and has finally, I think, saturated the roads beyond their ability to hold it. Now, ground to its finest possible dust, it seems as though it has attained the ability to shapeshift, to acquire form beyond its intended form. The metamorphosis has been gradual. Mornings, the streets are so white that I always think, upon rising, that it has snowed in the night. It has not: it is only the chalky trail left by salt trucks overnight. Many trucks, on many nights.

And eventually, they seem to have been the catalyst for this gossamer form that's permeating the air in the morning. It's not Dame Winter herself, it's not quite holding a mirror up to Dame Winter, but it's not that far off, either. Something slightly foreign is in the atmosphere. It takes a long time for the real thing to finally get here. That came, finally, Tuesday night. By the end of the storm last night we'd gained maybe 20 inches of snow, maybe two feet. I shoveled all day. Several times while I was outside an older man in a pick-up truck passed by me, and each time stopped to speak to me, offer a comment, force a laugh at the circumstances, at some dull joke. I have no idea who he might be. He had two gas cans in the bed of his pick-up, and each time he went by, the snow had piled a little higher until on his last trip, the cans were completely covered. I do not know where he had gone to amass snow like that, since it wasn't falling that hard, as far as I could tell, anywhere else. On his final pass, I was shoveling out where the plows had once again filled the bottom of my driveway (note to county crews: Lift. The. Blade.) He stopped and leaned over toward me, saying, do you really think you're ever going to catch up? I thought, no, I don't, but what I said was, well, the other three seasons sure are pretty. He threw his head back and laughed as though I'd said something really witty, something that in any way made sense as an answer to his question.

Which of course it didn't, but I've discovered that in this kind of weather, with this kind of change to the landscape, the regular rules for What's Real turn viscous and malleable. The Greek Pytheas claimed to have sailed north from Scotland into a land he called Thule, which, in the malleable metamorphic way of salt-into-mist and strangers-into-friends, became a myth of a lost outpost of ice, a hidden realm of the fantastic locked away far from the northernmost points of our world. (I also acknowledge that some members of the Aryan Nation, displaying the typical lack of imagination and continued lack of understanding that is their most prominent characteristic, co-opted the term as a symbol of racial purity. Well, I'm taking it back.) I imagine right now that I am living in Thule, and despite the inconveniences of snow and wind and muscles made painful by the heavy work of the shovel, it is still the mythic that trumps the mundane here. The spinning planet carried this storm to us, and I have been carried into it whether I will or not. I know a dozen folktales about Winter and in most of them, Winter is a woman. Yesterday while I was bent over the shovel I had just such a glimpse out of the corner of my eye: a woman, dressed in white, throwing her arm out in some vast, indecipherable gesture. She was gone before I could turn my head. This morning I can look more directly at what this Thule has engendered: the patterns of frost on the window, the patterns of snow on the pines and the gestures of branches tossing in the wind. In the life of the mind, this is a treasure box. All of these patterns, once I learn to read them, will reveal themselves to be lines of poetry, shapes of stories. Forms for the next tile or woodcut I carve. It can take a long time to learn to translate all of this, to learn the language of this particular kingdom with its ancient days and its viscous seas. I have come, over the past several years, to like the idea that things take time to do. My younger self never felt this way but my older self, who is clearly more suited to life in frozen Thule, truly does. This morning, I feel I am starting from a good place for it all. There is milk in the refrigerator, later there will be soup in the pot. The house, with its thirty-three windows, is filled with light today, as I knew it would be once winter came and the sun fell on the snow all around me. The imagination streams out across that snow on its steel runners and if you could reach out and touch them as they flew by you, the cold would snap the bones in your hand and send its shock straight through your teeth and spine. For a long time after, you would taste that metal in your mouth.