THE SNOW IS DANCING

It snowed all day today, and it's still snowing, with flakes at times large and round like scraps of confetti floating onto a parade, and at other times tiny and granular like sand blown about by a stormy gust. Never does the snow just fall to the earth - always there is this rhythm, this undulation, waves, a kind of physical glimmering and twisting about, like dancing. Of course I am thinking of Claude Debussy's impressionistic musical portrait of snow. And I am looking at it outside my window, wanting to dance with it. Earlier today I met Paul Sandlin at Diedrich's, the local cafe, and after a time we finished talking and decided to walk outside, for the express purpose of being surrounded by the snow, and have it touch the skin of our faces, and land on our eyelashes, and bounce and flutter in performance before our very eyes ...

The snow in Montreal, I remembered, could be so beautiful and unabated, especially in January and February, the thickness of winter. i used to strap on my cross-country skis and head out from my apartment on rue Clark, in the Plateau, and wind my way up Mount Royal to the top, where groomed trails led to a loop between groves of evergreens, and into clearings from which large vistas of the city skyline would sudenly appear, glistening in yellows, whites and reds against the fading pale blues and mauves of the winter sky at dusk. Later, in darkness, I remember arriving at the base of the cross which looks out on the city from the crest of Mount Royal, a thick steel-framed structure studded with hundreds of light bulbs, which hummed like a hive of bees in the muffled quietness of the snowy night.

Walking in Cheesman park with Paul, I recalled these scenes, and felt the cold snowflakes landing on my face, and melting; I remembered the bracing coldness of the air and the breath streaming out of my mouth and nostrils into plumes of steam.

When you walk in the middle of a snowy day, your senses are alive, your body awake. The snow is dancing.

Denver gets the most snow of any major city in the United Sates - after Buffalo, New York, of course. Denver also holds the record, according to Paul, for the most snow accumulated in a 24-hour period: 94 inches. That's a lot of snow. Later, Joe Klein, my housemate, and Paul reminisced together about the snowstorm of 2002 that hit Denver so hard that many people were simply housebound for 2-3 days. I guess they were hoping that kind of an interruption to the daily grind might once again befall them. I reminded them that hospitals can never close because people will get desperately ill around the clock no matter what the snowfall or the road conditions, but that, they decided, was beside the point.

Crested Butte got 37 inches of snow already this week. And for the first time in years, the snowpack in the Rockies in 103% of normal - wow! A respite for this drought-stricken land. There will be skiiing and snowboarding!

As for me, I take delight in riding my mountain bike around town, my nobby tires gripping the snowy streets with reliable steadiness. An old woman walking into the grocery store this afternoon asked me how safe it was for me to be riding my bike in the snow like that, and all I could think of was how, sooner or later, she was going to hit a patch of ice in those flimsy smooth-soled city boots of hers, take a tumble, and show up in the Emergency Room with a wrist fracture.

"It's pretty safe with these treads," I told her, motioning toward my bike Marin Wildcat Trail. "I feel safer on this than in my car (a 1983 BMW 320i, which was never designed for driving on the snowy streets of Denver, Colorado, believe me)."

It was last winter, in Boulder, when I noticed bike treads on the fresh snow everywhere in town, and realized that CU students were not letting a little thing like snow stop them from riding. As it turned out, Colorado snow is so cold and dry and crunchy, it's quite bike-able and not anywhere near as slippery as you'd think. I had so many wonderful sunny morning bike rides in Boulder, following a fresh snowfall the night before.

And there was much talk this weekend of why Colorado is such a wonderful place to be in the winter. The snow in the mountains is dancing in all of our heads, with visions of snowboarding, skiing, snowshoeing ... Paul and I discussed the relative merits of backcountry skiing vs. snowshoeing and all I wanted to do was go, go, go ... 37 inches in Crested Butte ...

I don't know where I would be without the Gay and Lesbian Sierra Club, a section of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Sierra Club, with whom I have had so many excellent excursions into the mountains this year. Last February was my first outing, when I went backcountry skiing in the Rawah Wilderness west of Fort Collins, with Jacob Morgan (pictured here, state outings director for the Colorado Sierra Club) and a group of guys from Boulder, Denver, and Fort Collins. On that day the snow was dancing furious dervish whirls all over the mountains and what a day we had! Ah, winter is here and I'm ready for more.

I look for more poetry of snow and find Mary Oliver, of course, fluent in all the moods and manners of the natural world. Here is an excerpt from "First Snow":

The snow
began here this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, and energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! ...

At this writing the snow outside my window: a billion tiny specks of pointillist imagery, reeling and swirling around the lamp post, appearing out of blackness and disappearing back into it - this is time and motion and life and everything. This is the present moment. Dancing, dancing.

Image credits: montrealnight.jpg [http://latourfl.com/eng/montreal/montreal-Images/3.jpg] la croix [www.la-grange.net/photos/2000/12/Montreal/source/img_0446.html] square.jpg [www.numoonus.com/BizTravel/Denver/Square.jpg] crestedbutte.jpg [www.onthesnow.com/ski/trailmaps/120.html]
Other images by John Krotchko

Comments

[dave]

Cool post. I was in Telluride when the Butte got the big dump. They got the majority of that storm, but Telluride wasn't far behind...best opening weekend in 10 years there.

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