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Never begin with weather, says Elmore Leonard

November 24, 2018
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It is a gray rainy day, cold and damp. I am standing at the glass door looking out. I am 70 years old. Yes, that is relevant.

Leaves on the ground, bare trees like leading against the sky, hands on the edge of being numb by the cold. I have my camera and decide to make photographs from where I stand behind the door. How many different images can I frame without moving my feet?

Each of the captures bears the weight of meaning. The leaves are dry, curled and brown. Some make patterns, but most are merely random scatterings. There is no avoiding the match between the internal and external worlds.

I am alone in the world. A lifetime of experience has built up a complex web of neurons in my brain, like interwoven roots. Those connections, alive with electricity, hold seven decades of memory, learning, disappointment, fears, joys and, perhaps more than anything, language. It is the means through which I most interact with the world.

Or so it seems. Yet, it is also imagery that carries meaning. I have been speaking since I was a toddler, reading since before kindergarten, but I didn’t begin making images until I was out of college. I don’t mean snapshots, but consciously trying to find visual analogs of emotional and mental states. Images as art, if that is not too fancy a word.

So, again, through the window, I see the tangle of vines that are axons and dendrites. I see the crisped leaves wet on the ground, their lives and usefulness complete. I see the trees as nudes against the colorless sky, a black-and-white photograph even while in full color. Naked we come into the world; naked we leave it.

The vines are not just a projection of brain-tangle. They are also the way I have come to understand the narrative of my existence. Once, it may have seemed like a simple story line — a plot with beginning, middle and an upcoming end. But the longer I live, the more the plot becomes muddied, clouded, balled like tangled yarn. What was linear becomes a Pollock painting. Where does my remembrance intersect with yours? Where does it knot, where disengage? We met once; which of us recalls? Or perhaps we didn’t.

There is more ahead. I write this as I perhaps begin a new adventure.

The progress of winter

January 1, 2018
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It is going to be 6 degrees  tonight. Even in the day, it won’t get over freezing until Wednesday. It is winter.

I have not been out of the house for three days.

I may climb into the refrigerator for warmth.

Now that I am old, winter gets into my bones. But when I was younger, I loved the bracing cold, the breath congealed on my beard. I made myself warm by chopping wood. A good walk in the woods, with snow crunching under my boots left my cheeks ruddy and numb. I felt like I was skin to skin with nature. It was a glorious feeling.

Many years before that, I remember building an igloo on the front lawn in New Jersey. I must have been 8 or 9 years old. Inside, it was dark and if you stayed there long enough, it began to get a little warmer. The neighbor’s yard was a hill, and my brothers and I would sled down it when it snowed.

In New Jersey, the snow only stayed white a short, glorious period before turning soot gray as the snowplows piled up moraines of the stuff along the roadsides.

So, I am not so fond of winter now as I was then. The cold makes my knees ache. Yet, there are still elements of the season I cherish. In North Carolina, there is always a midwinter spring, often in February, when the temperature rises for a week before dropping back into the bin-bottom of the thermometer to remind us winter is not so kind, nor so short.

In February, the red maples earn their name, with spreading leaf buds uncovering the red beneath. You can see, even as the winter grips hard, that spring is working its way to the surface.

In March, as winter recedes, the frozen ground melts and mud season descends. Boots get stuck in the mire; you have to watch out not to step completely out of them.

But it is January First, and a cold snap has bottled up Asheville. The trees seem brittle with the freeze. It is a perfect day to listen to Sibelius and stare out the window.

For some reason, although most other people seem to most appreciate trees in the spring, when they come back to sap-life or fall, when they turn gaudy colors, I have always responded to the empty trees of winter. Looking over the Blue Ridge in winter, the leafless trees, from a distance, become a gray fur on the backs of the mountains. The hills look almost soft.

I think of the winter trees as nudes. They have dropped their clothes to show their real form, the trunk, branch and stem.

If you remember your Wölfflin from art history, there are eras — and people — who prefer painting and those who prefer drawing. I have always been a drawing-guy. I appreciate the linear, the ink-on-paper scratches of tree limbs, the crosshatching of twigs. There is something dour in my soul that enjoys gray more than party colors. Not a flat, simple gray, but a complex gray built from dusty blues mixed with tawny beiges. A good gray has as much depth as a river.

In winter, the air is clearer, except when a cold mist obscures the trees. The cold keeps you awake. The floors are icy underfoot, even if the room temperature inside is kept a comfortable 68. One sleeps well at night, with cool air in the nostrils.

A steaming stew or vegetable soup with a crusty bread and the evening seems just right.

Winter light, low and dim; early dusk, late dawn; the sun not strong enough to reach zenith, but arcing across the sky barely above the trees.

I remember one winter day, 40 years ago, walking across the railway bridge the cuts over Lake Brandt. It was probably 20 degrees and the air dead still. The surface of the water was not yet frozen, but it was mirror-smooth. The remains of snow covered the lake’s banks and no one seemed stirring in the landscape except me, walking tie by tie over the water beneath. It was silent; so quiet I could hear my breathing. It was one of those moments of epiphany, when suddenly the world becomes clear. It is almost a religious experience. You recognize that fact of the planet beneath your boot sole, and the atmosphere above your watch cap, bleeding into infinite dark space.

Such moments are delicious, and more valuable for their rarity. If we are lucky, we have perhaps a dozen or so such instants in our lives. For me, most of them have happened in freezing cold.

But now, my joints ache. What glimpses of eternity I get are less optimistic. Winter has a different meaning as you turn 70.

Listening to the quiet

May 20, 2013
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poconosnow3

There is no silence more palpable than when you’re alone in the woods on a windless winter morning with new snow a foot deep on everything.

It is eastern Pennsylvania, in the meatloaf Pocono Mountains on a late November weekend and when we pitched our tent late the night before it was cold and dry. The stars were acetylene, caught in the naked treebranches.

But during the night, it began to snow and when we got out of our sleeping bags in the morning, there was a new layer of white caught in those branches and all over the rocky ground underneath.

Winter camping has many rewards, but certainly the most magical is the weird acoustic effect of snow. It sucks sound out of the air and replaces it with something as solid as styrofoam.

What breaks the silence are your own squeaky footsteps in the snow as you step out of the tent and start to prepare breakfast. You rub your hands together noisily and blow fog into them with your breath.

Silence is an exotic commodity and we should learn to value it and enjoy it as if it were a balm from heaven.

It is a rare place that you can find where you can’t hear a gasoline engine.

The internal combustion engine fills our noses with stink and makes the roadside clutter of ugly billboards and fast-food restaurants inevitable. But what is worse, it fills our ears with the rattle of rpms and gears.

You stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and the tour busses roar by. You take a sailboat out on the water and the lake-shrinking Evinrudes drown out the sound of your luffing jib.

I knew a woman once who told me that when she was a little girl, she heard the summer sky hum.

As children, we often are content with the mystery and don’t ask for an explanation. It’s just the way the world is: The summer sky hums.

As an adult, she came to recognize what the noise was, and how banal. She was hearing a sound hardly known anymore: a propeller-driven airliner flying too high to be seen.

That was more than half a century ago, when the planet was still quiet enough that you could pick out the airplane’s buzz over the local noise. Nowadays, even though jets are much louder, you seldom hear them flying at 30,000 feet because their roar is drowned by the din of traffic, the boom of car stereos, the cackle of the TV set and the occasional gunshot from a few blocks away.

Complete silence is profound and rare. It is the aural equivalent of complete darkness: the place where no sound exists at all.

In a cave, for instance, when you are still and your lamps are turned off. The deadest sound and most obscure blackness are somehow cousins. But even that silence isn’t complete: In such a silence, you can hear the blood squirting through the capillaries of your inner ear. Perhaps you can hear your relaxed heart thumping.

At such a time, there is nothing that exists but your autonomic sense of your own meat and nerves. You face only inward; the outer has ceased to matter.

And the only quiet more utter is death.

But that isn’t the kind of silence that recharges our batteries. For that we turn to nature and wilderness.

It is the reason we drive to the Poconos and hike into the campground.

If there is a place we can get out in nature, away from the parking lot and out from under the flight path, we can let our ears register the planetary rhythm. There are dry beech leaves that crackle in the breeze all through winter before they fall off in spring, there are the squirrels chattering in the elms and the occasional cardinal flapping its wings in the snow to clear a spot where it searches for some food.

Sounds such as these are always present, but are suffocated by the commotion of daily urban living. If somehow all the electricity and gasoline were instantly neutralized, and our ears somehow adjusted, we would hear the natural sounds even on Main Street downtown.

You recognize the symptoms: The air conditioner suddenly cycles down in the office and you notice that you hadn’t known it was making noise till it stopped. Silence is in part only known in relief, against the unheeded white noise.

Part of the appeal of wilderness hiking is the silence we enjoy there. Our cochleas catch their breath and come to terms with the persistent quiet of the natural world. And if we stay long enough, and our ears catch up with the reality, the birds begin to seem noisy and even sunrise groans.

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