Spindrift

It is snowing again. It has been a winter of single digit cold, fast moving clippers of snow and freezing rain, followed by blasts of arctic air. It has not been above freezing for more than a day here and there in a couple months. And now, a day before Saint Valentine’s Day, in what is late winter in the Mid Atlantic, a foot or so of snow.

People are getting crabby. Back when I lived in Montana, they called this dark-and-cold-induced malaise the “shack nasties”, and people died of it. Some years you’d pick up the paper in March and read about the ranch wife who solved the problem of her husband absent mindedly whistling “Camp Town Races” off key and under his breath literally all day for three months. She buried the kindling axe in his noggin over Cheerios and coffee at the breakfast table. It being too cold to dig a hole, the sheriff found him stacked neatly in the wood shed, next to the kindling.

Doo-Dah, Doo-Dah

While nothing quite so awful seems likely here, the weather is having its effects.

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Cookie, my English Setter, is a bird dog’s bird dog, from a proud lineage. His dignity is important to him. I put him out in the yard this morning, and then started coffee. Presently, I went to the back door to check on him to find him maybe 10 feet from the door immobile and glaring at me with the most baleful expression imaginable. His long legs notwithstanding, this is the deepest drift he has ever encountered, and his you-know-what is dragging in the snow. His hateful grimace conveys that this will never do, and further, that it is somehow my fault. He refuses to relieve himself or to come in until I get a shovel and clear a large enough place for his necessaries. After his ablutions are complete, he returns to his bed and will not look at me all day.

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I spent much of my morning completing and then varnishing the meticulous silk wraps that bind the guides to my cane fly rod, the first one I’ve built myself. This is painstaking, silent, disciplined and indoor work. It’s the antidote. As the storm beats on the window, and the snowplow entombs my little house behind a glacier, the wraps slowly wind on against each other, and the varnish transforms them to a deep translucent emerald tipped with fiery orange. The concentration and attention to detail entrance me, and I depart the storm for a soft green stream bank in early spring.

When I reach that stream, I will have with me a dozen or so freshly tied wetflies with bodies of bright green peacock and dark soft hackle collars. This is a simple and ancient pattern for the little stonefly so effective that the trout will chew them to pieces. They’ll be attached to a hand built leader that I’ll construct over the coming weekend when more snow and single digit temperatures are predicted. Even as I shove more wood in the stove, and prepare to start digging myself out again, the silk wraps and the wetflies confirm for me that death always yields to new life. The snow is water, and will soon enough fill the banks of streams. There will be green grass, and warm breezes, and the rings of feeding trout. The stoneflies will be hatching on the Letort before St Patrick’s Day, and I will be there to meet them, with this beautiful rod in my hand.

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It takes about 3 hours to shovel myself out. I learned how to do this from my grandfather, Giuseppe. When I knew him he was old, and deeply arthritic, and he moved slowly with his shovel, a narrow, metal flat shovel with a long handle. Younger men in my family laughed at him, at least initially. The measured pace made it possible for him to work for what seemed like forever, long after the younger folks went in for a lunch break. Half way up my mother’s long driveway, he’d stop for a large mug of very sweet tea, then he’d go back out again 20 minutes later. He would finish at the street, then start the sidewalks. He was in his 80’s.

When he was a young man, working for the Pennsylvania Railroad, he led gangs of men who hand cleared excess snow from the Rockville Bridge. The bridge is the longest stone arch structure in the world and is over a mile long. It is open to the north wind along its entire length. He learned from it. Specifically he learned that winter yields to pace, patience and determination, with occasional mugs of hot sweet tea.

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Back in the 80’s I was living in the little town of Libby Montana. Libby is in the northwest corner of the state, hard by the Idaho panhandle. For Montana, its climate is mild and pretty wet, in some ways more Pacific Northwest than Intermountain. Sometimes the big Pacific storms make it over the Cascades and arrive in the Purcells and Cabinets full of water.

One Friday, on Valentines weekend, the sky became so dark that the streetlights came on at about 3:00 PM. It began to snow. There was not a breath of wind. The snow came down in a perfectly vertical torrent, and piled up at a rate of several inches an hour. It snowed like that, without a pause, until Sunday afternoon, leaving in its wake about 50 inches of snow (in town…God knows what it left in the mountains). The storm paralyzed Lincoln County, which has lots of snow plows and is used to big storms. My neighbor’s snow blower threw snow against my house, and the resulting vibration dislodged a chunk of snow the size of a Cadillac which landed on him, knocking him unconscious. It took me until Tuesday to completely excavate my car. Late in the following November came the storm’s most significant result, as tiny Lincoln County hospital was overrun with babies. Babies occupied every cradle and crib, and were even placed in dresser drawers and bassinets lined with blankets.

When I read about the baby boom in the paper, I recalled that my own birthday is in late October. I too may be a child who arrived on a cloud of cold white fire. This pleased me no end.

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The snow picked up again just as I finished shoveling, lowering the ceiling of visibility to treetop level, and beginning to undo all my hard labor. I stood still, breathing hard, leaning on my shovel and letting the large wet flakes kiss me. I heard the geese long before the large V appeared low, right over me, in full cry. There must have been fifty of them. I noted with satisfaction that they were pointed into the weather. Appearances to the contrary, they know that spring is behind them, so they push on into the clouds.