Those are memories, 1970s-style. But the piles were never struck through with flashes of sky blue.
Sinking my shovel into the white stuff Monday after that foot-deep accumulation, a light Sno-Cone tint peered back at me from the resulting gash. “Just enough ice in the mix,” I thought, before being transported back to the last time I’d seen such an effect, though brighter, deeper, and more of it — standing near a Seward, Alaska, glacier.
That was, what, 30 years ago? Who knows, maybe it’s even still there.
Puffins, too, were memorable, Dall sheep precariously high in the surrounding Kenai Mountains, and a brief but lasting lit major’s fantasy of opening a shop somewhere in that Old West of a downtown — Harbor Books.
Funky Homer to the west, now that was somehow more familiar, like Montauk on steroids, these coastal fishing burgs tending to bear an odd resemblance: scrubby vegetation, though more of it there, the dock, of course, though Homer’s is as long as a landing strip, copious flatfish, though what was landed out there were monstrous Pacific halibut.
Those impressions were vivid because I was a visitor. My home at the time was Fairbanks, in the interior, mentioned because this rare dose of winter here on the South Fork, a dumping of snow that will stick around a while, what with the forecast calling for below 32-degree temps for at least a week, is how it happens up there. It’s dry. There isn’t that much precipitation, but what does fall goes nowhere.
It isn’t always so idyllic. In the city proper, the snow darkens with soot and generalized pollution. When there are temperature inversions, when it’s warmer higher up in the atmosphere and colder, denser air settles, smog is trapped near ground level. It’s worse than L.A.
When the big thaw comes, every single piece of dog shit and detritus that accumulated over more than half a year of winter gradually rises to the surface as the snow and ice recede. I saw it up close, as a driver out in the mess all day, delivering this, collecting that, shouting with pain back in the truck from handling cold metal.
And then I’d arrive back at my cabin outside of town to be told by my girlfriend that I reeked of exhaust.
Ah, but those northern lights, a regular show of undulating curtains of heavenly pale green. I’d admire them on those nights when I stood outside in air that seemed to crackle with cold to take a high-arcing piss off the back deck, adding my own yellow hue to the snowbank below.