Thursday, February 21, 2013

Snow, Heart-ache and Obliteration

Today was a Monday morning road trip the fifty miles back from where I was selling art in a lakeless peat land hushed with snow. Since yesterday evening's approach you could trust in the arrival of more snow as the skies became ever more opaque white, like a mirror of snow alongside the route. Snow had not fallen in the night but, by this morning, had gathered in a cloud ceiling over the region, already the odd flake zooming past my windshield. 

I wonder if all single people reach a point when their singleness, which they've sometimes relished on taking leave of a crowd, and savored out of a notion of personal freedom that married people seem to have sacrificed, intensifies into heart-ache again just like a lonely teenager's. We see we have to make some effort to re-adjust to the single state since temporarily we found we had family or a mate, and we might marvel we could feel this bereft in the age of instant wireless communication. Weather and scenery can heighten a feeling of abandonment by all others who used to demonstrate their care for us. If we love many people now and cherish others from our past, and anticipate reuniting with at least some of these favorite folk, we can hope the loneliness abates as naturally as the ebbing snows of this current, reassuringly traditional winter's lengthening days.

Driving this straight road across the miles of boreal bog all commingled with white over black needles I'm reminded of the 20th-century American writer Conrad Aiken's short story Silent Snow Secret Snow, which must have been included in several of my school English anthologies way back in the 1970s. Made into a movie as well, the story describes a boy losing awareness of his schoolmates and parents around him as imaginary snow fills itself in over floor and furniture in the classroom and in his home, till there is nothing he chooses to know but his enchantment with his surroundings all buried in white. The reader knows it's a disease process, the boy named Paul, aged twelve, fleeing a confrontation with the doctor and his parents to his bed where the snow fantasy can prevail with no adult intrusion. This morning I'm drawing on dim memory of snow majesty a little bit from that literary perspective.

I think I know from long ago the anticipation of snow as a protection and cloak that gave surrounding light a new splendor. When I was a child I'd hanker for snow weeks and months before we'd get any, and savored how it unified all the odd-colored, odd-textured surfaces outside the house, into the woods and pastures beyond us.

A white-out happened to me in early 2010 as I was returning from Ely, Minnesota to the Twin Cities via Two Harbors, where a squadron of long-tailed ducks had been reported by local birders. It took me little time using the spotting scope to zero in on the flock cavorting on Lake Superior's waves. The ducks were white-necked with dark patterning to their cheeks, dark wings sunken in white flanks, and black, ornamental tails spiking upward. Over the birds diving and bowing bill to bill in rituals of courtship moved the snow squall, swiftly denser and denser till every individual was erased just for a few minutes. They sounded like the voices of elderly women seized by hilarity, bearing witness to the former  name 'oldsquaw', abandoned as derogatory, now replaced by 'long-tailed duck.' It seems to me that the flock was on the wing, crossing down-lake, as I left the scene marveling at how quickly a crisp sighting had faded into a mere listening-fest, the flock unperturbed in their blindness and still cackling.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/95122207/original-watercolor-painting-sea-ducks

It was my wish to express a sort of ultimate conviviality, given out by the ducks, upon a background of lostness and disintegration, a whole atmosphere of snow, vapor and seas. 

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

In the Manner of Wildcats

An old girl and an older boy are treading ice and snow and relishing the frozen sun along a frozen road in February, one wearing mukluks with leather and gum soles treading as softly as socks, one in hard-soled boots. The friends have hardly set forth in the sunlit silence when he says--Wolf! Look! There's an animal hunkered on the road many meters ahead. It's not a wolf, despite initial expectations, but a cat, not moving except to turn its head as the couple approach twenty paces or so at a time, stopping always to gain a better view in their binoculars. The creature is crouched in the posture of a cat on a window ledge, mostly facing the outer side of the road, chin tucked in a manner suggesting sleep, but sometimes turning to gaze at the human forms easing forward in stages side by side.

He says he saw that the cat walked clumsily before it came to rest in that spot and it seems like it might be sick. She says she has always hoped to see one of the wild cats but never has yet, and this one is looking more and more like a bobcat. The tail, which is stumpy, would be black-tipped all the way around if the creature were a lynx, but just black-tipped on the outer side if bobcat. But why would this richly-colored cat, reddish along the sides but darkening blacker along the spine, bob-tailed since no tail shows, be so trusting, even dozing in a road while two people approach like stalkers? The animal can't stay there much longer, he conjectures. Then suddenly, on the margin to the right, is a second bobcat, much browner like pale milk chocolate. The crouched cat rises and the tail flicks--definitely bobcat, not lynx. Oh, this is a scene about mating, oh of course that's what's going on...

A pickup truck rolls into view around the bend, the young driver smiling at the older couple as he passes as if to say sorry I scared your animals, each of which has cleared the scene in a swoop into the cedars on the same side of the road. But the gent says let's stay here watching, they may be back--and he is so right! they are, they're in a stand-off with one cat on the road again, the other alongside in the saplings. The blacker cat's hindquarters are sinking barely perceptibly into a sit-down, the slowness exquisite with all that it may be expressing of both confidence and fear. The thought comes to the old girl's mind: haven't I seen cats in a yard someplace I have lived, acting like this?

In the mind's eye it is more a state of being than of doing; the cats are live imagery, a vivid painting of their kind from out of the present, future and past put together. Like remembered cecropia moths fresh from a cocoon, they are central, and time in which they're embedded appears to have stopped, and the sun's afternoon course and the distant approach of spring too. We Are and They Are, the man and woman both know, though in the time before the cats' re-emergence the woman has been able to sit down on the road and pull on a second pair of socks to warm up her cold feet. 

In retrospect the darker, most beautiful of these cats on the road may have been a female in heat; that would be unsurprising even though it's a guess. Later the mature couple themselves, back at home base again, feel themselves like the wild cats to be loose-legged and deliberate, full of body language, aware a lot of the time of their placement in relation to each other along the road while they walked back to their parked vehicle in temperatures of single-digits Fahrenheit.

Most significantly, in paused time two bobcats were free to claim a road created for cars and trucks and use it for their own, unhurt or harassed, observed in their rituals by humans whose distance, even from so near, was enough for them. My art, foolishly and everlastingly, says: let this moment in this dark tree entanglement stand for all time, though forests change and go away with or without our involvement, and so when our excessive strength and numbers have done their worst upon the land maybe the beasts and infrequent birds, relegated to far edges, will be back as masters of their former realm; something like this has been seen to happen in miniature in modern central Europe, due in major part to warfare...

https://www.etsy.com/listing/80321335/bird-note-card-watercolor-chickadees