Up until the 1950s, mail was delivered by dogsled, pulled not by huskies but by Airedales. “It's what we had in our backyard, and so they got used,” Dorothy, a ninety-six-year-old resident, tells me. She and her husband did all the mail deliveries here. He's gone now, and she lives on her own, splits wood, guts trout, and bakes bread.
By chance, a young couple I once neighbored with twenty-two years ago are now neighbors again. I met Mark and Pat Domek at the beginning of the third-worst winter in the history of Wyoming: 1978-79. We'd rented run-down, side-by-side, one-room cabins on an abandoned ranch. The snow came on November 7 and didn't disappear until late April. It heaped up around our cabins like wings, and the nighttime temperatures dropped to 60 degrees below zero. Mark and Pat were newlyweds then. Sometimes I'd tie a note to Rusty's collar and send him to their cabin. It read: “Can I come for dinner?” Or, “Please come over here.”
The cold made the winter seem lonelier. My fiancé had died of cancer, and I was broke. No parka, no Sorel Paks, one pair of cheap long underwear. Cold was the crucible from which I had to rise. It stood for the brokenness of my life—the loss of the man I loved. I had no neat stack of firewood, no meat to eat. Extreme cold and a feeling of bewilderment became forever linked. If I could survive the winter, I could survive David's death.
Some weeks I helped ranchers feed cattle. The snow was so deep there were no fence posts in sight. To get to the stack yards took all morning; feeding hay in lanes plowed by a D9 bulldozer took the rest of the day. We'd get frostbite on our hands, cheeks, noses, ears, and toes. After feeding, we'd cuddle on a couch by the woodstove—not for sexual pleasure but simply to warm each other after a whole day outside.
The rest of the winter I stayed in, with one mandatory walk a day along the frozen North Fork of the Shoshone River. The rest of the time I read and reread most of Faulkner, García Márquez, Kawabata Yasunari, Steinbeck, Camus, Octavio Paz, Thoreau, and Emerson, plus all the medieval Chinese and Japanese poetry in translation I could get my hands on. I thought of them as winter poems—not about winter, necessarily, but written in a dark time. In Poems of the Late T'ang, I learned that Shih Huang-ti, an emperor in 221 B.C., tried to build a bridge over the sea to see where the sun rose. In the poems of Li Ho, blue raccoons wept blood, the God of Rain rode into autumn pools, green flames rose from an owl's nest. Describing the coming of winter, he wrote: “In the slime of desolate moors the floods of autumn whitened.”
I pored over books of Sung and T'ang dynasty paintings. The painters and writers of the time were often victims of political turmoil, and their inked images of remote valleys and deep forests stood for the way the natural world soaked up their anguish, disillusionment, bewilderment, sudden losses, and consequent solitude. Their paintings were emblematic. In those spindly mountains and etched valleys, lines of trees and bamboo forests, and tiny human-made pavilions there was a hallucinatory balance, a clear track out of reckless exhilaration and despair. I too had withdrawn from the world and turned my energies toward ink on paper—both painting and writing. Semisuicidal and unable to sleep at night, I'd peer at those landscapes by flashlight. Though stylized, they emitted a fresh sense; they were places to which I could go in my mind's eye. They never failed to save me.
That was two decades ago. Now Pat is the town's postmaster and Mark is building a cabin for me. I still beg dinners from them on lonely evenings, and when Sam was still alive he liked to lie at Mark's feet as if out of some genetic memory passed from canine father to son. Despite the long interlude, we still fit into each other's lives with ease. The hard winter of 1978-79 has turned into something sweet, a raison d’être, not a reason for suicide.
5
I'm wrong when I say “nothing is happening.” For the time being my movements are being restricted by a pissed-off moose outside my window. There's snow up to her hocks. Her back is bleached brown; she has patches of darker hair on her ribs, a pale underbelly, and a loose, hanging lip. The too-long ears and slender legs are specially insulated with internal oils to keep them warm. She has no calf and nibbles on red twigs with tight buds. Perhaps she's hungry; a winter diet of willows isn't very nourishing.
John, a sturdy, no-nonsense outdoorsman of Norwegian descent, admits that the moose had him cornered last week, and Lucy had to drive fifty yards from the house to the barn so he could jump into her car. “It's the easiest rescue I've ever made,” Lucy says. She's what John calls “an ambulance jockey,” an EMT who regularly saves lives.
The moose eyes us, then drops her head and goes on eating. “The moose is what you have to watch out for,” John says. “They can be more dangerous than bears or wolves. They don't scare off, and if they're mad, stay out of their way.”
I lie alone in the cabin. Wedged between the humps of a moraine, I imagine a mountain of ice grinding by, dredging thousands of feet of dirt and rock and dropping house-sized boulders in its wake as it backs away.
Nothing of the kind is happening. On the contrary, snow stacks up and two ravens feast on a road-killed elk. Cold-adapted animals are snuggling in their subnivian empires. Snow is a wonderful insulator. It provides emergency shelter for ruffed grouse and ptarmigan. Grizzlies are in their dens having babies. Like bears who delay the implantation of the embryo until winter, martens, minks, long-tailed weasels, ermines, wolverines, spotted skunks, badgers, and river otters do the same.
Light struggles to return. Since December 21, the days began to widen, hope resumed, no matter how low the temperatures were and how bad the evening news. My sheepherder friends always said, “Let's just hope we make it to green grass again.”
6
Snow emits light. We just can't see the long wavelength of heat energy, but it's there. Snow is a “black body” that absorbs 100 percent of the energy incident upon it. As trees and bushes sponge in heat, molecules begin jumping. The temperature of the tree trunks, branches, and leaves rises. The warmth makes snow melt and slump and the hollows around boulders and at the bottom of trees widen.
A foot of snow falls in the night and shifts uncomfortably under its own weight. The open collar around sage and willow fills in. Errant snowflakes dart around the yard as if lost. Gaby tries to catch one and finally succeeds. It dissolves in her mouth, and she cocks her head in wonderment. Just up the hill, snow-laden pines drop their loads into deep drifts, and Gaby wonders how such explosions of white could be so silent.
In the morning I deliver a bag of fish to our neighbor Dorothy. In the afternoon I snowshoe to the river. A channel in a nearby stream opens briefly Riffles break around a beaver dam and trap bubbles under ice. In midstream bunched crystals twirl and chime: candle ice. I jump onto a gravel island whose snow has gone sugary. On both sides, water pours out from under green lids. Ice ticks, splits, rings like a distant phone, and refreezes. Once, flying over Ellesmere Island, I saw down through a vertical stack of blue ice that had frozen and re-frozen at the foot of a mountain like a storehouse of separate rivers, each one waiting to flow again.
Downstream I search for ducks. There are none. The trunks of old willows are striated—white with gray—arboreal hyphens between what words? Water. Shade. Desire. Mallard. Up by the highway, the huge osprey nest on top of a telephone pole holds only snow.
The layers of white settle as days go by. Wind and occasional sun do their work on drifts. When the snow crusts over, I unbuckle my snowshoes, step into skis, and make the six-mile round trip to my unfinished cabin. Then I see coyote tracks and follow them. I love coyotes because, unlike the hierarchy-obsessed wolf, they hang loose. Bachelors have their own society but help out harried mothers when the pups are born. Once a New York editor asked me to investigate why coyotes howl. After following them around for a winter and talking to biologists who had studied them for years, I couldn't really give a reason why. When not vocalizing to declare their geographical position or calling to a mate, they seemed to howl just for the hell of it. Why not? As if insulted by the coyote's sense of fun, the editor killed the story.<
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Overhead, clouds boil. The deeper into the snowy mountains I go, the happier I am. The Japanese word oku means not only “north” but also “deep,” “inner,” “the heart of a mountain,” “to penetrate to the depth of something or someone,” “the bottom of one's heart,” and “the end of one's mind.”
When the sun comes out, Gaby and I use my snowshoes as seats and bask in the sun like two seals. Our planet rotates around a sun that is rotting, the rotation itself in the midst of its 100,000-year change. The ellipsis of the orbit is taking us through the spiral arm of the Orion nebula. At any moment we could be pelted by asteroids—a sudden blackness approaching, then wham: all megafauna would become extinct.
We don't need any extra excitement; we've created our own. We are living in the midst of a holocaust of extinctions that goes unmentioned because the victims are not held captive in one spot and can't use language.
Moving again, Gaby and I pass through a stand of old aspens that are wind-tortured and wavy, as if they've been trembling for a hundred years. Below are the beginnings of my log cabin. It's a one-man project: Mark cut the standing dead trees, milled them, debarked them, shaped each to fit one on top of the other. From a rocky knob, I watch the walls rising slowly. He says, “This is how we take a dead tree and make it grow again.”
7
A week later. The moose has gone and has been replaced by a bear. John points to the hill behind my cabin. “Go see for yourself.” Under a white knob a yearling black bear is curled up in the snow taking a nap. Bears are partial hibernators. They wake often, go outside their dens, ramble around, go back in again. Wakefulness comes not simply from warmer weather but as a result of the way their cold-adapted bodies work. In the winter the bear brain gets glucose from ketones made from the fat in the liver instead of from proteins. But livers are toxic-waste dumps: as soon as the toxicity gets too high, an internal alarm rouses the bear. He wakes up, leaves his den, and goes hunting for a proper meal.
When I snowshoe by, the bear opens his eyes, wipes the side of his face with his paw, looks at me, sniffs the air, then goes back to sleep. He's a small bear, not yet fully grown. His black coat is sleek and snow-dusted. A curved bank in the snowdrift fits him like a pillow. He makes snow look like a warm place to snooze. One paw goes over the top of his head, rubbing his small ear. There's a deep in-breath, then a low, snuffling sigh. I crouch down. Oh, how I'd like to lie down next to him, to be (as in the arctic legend) the woman who married the bear.
Clouds float, the temperature warms, and four feet of snow on the ground settles to three. It's become fashionable to seek out or retell the worst extremes of weather and travel, as if simply living—wherever we are—isn't juicy enough. I've endured much colder winters than this one. I was in Fairbanks, Alaska, in January 1989 when a Siberian blast dropped the temperature from minus 52 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 82 degrees along the Tanana River. There were only a few hours of daylight. My breath froze; the town of Fairbanks was encased in a hard fog that crackled like fire. Tires went square, a friend's retina popped out, contact lenses couldn't be worn, a child's tongue became frozen to the school-bus window and had to be cut away from the glass with a scalpel.
Our faces had to be covered at all times. I learned not to cough or laugh outside. My skis wouldn't work—not enough lubricity in the snow. Such temperatures reminded me that extreme cold is just like the great heat of a desert. Some sort of moisture—and therefore, warmth—is necessary to make things work, to enable skis to slide, to create an environment where living and breathing is possible.
Ten days later, when it warmed up to minus 20 degrees, the air felt almost tropical. We skied up to a hot spring and helped bathe a baby born to a hippie couple two nights earlier when it was 75 degrees below zero. Even so, getting into the hot water was excruciating. Our bodies had become cold-hardened, and sudden heat was almost more than we could bear.
The Alaskan cold followed me back to Wyoming that year. The water pipes at the ranch froze, and the nail heads inside the house were capped with frost. Calving had just begun. It was only minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit, but calves were freezing to the ground as soon as they were born. I had to attend each birth to make sure the mother cows got their calves up in time, which meant almost no sleep for me at all.
By comparison, it feels cozy here with John and Lucy next-door, and our dogs, horses, the elk, moose, and bear, all part of our winter society. This is “a global warming winter,” John says. “Not as much snow as we used to have, but enough for us to remember the ways cold and snow rule our days.”
In the morning John sets out on skis for one of the lakes near his house. He cuts a hole in the ice and catches enough trout for dinner. “He knows winter the way other people know the layout of a town,” Lucy tells me. “He knows where the elk are, which ones didn't make it to the feed ground, how many wolves there are, and of course, where the fish will be. Like, which side of which pond they'll be on, and the day he can begin finding them there.”
Over a trout dinner we tell stories of days and nights living in wall tents with snow leaning in on all sides, Coleman lamps hissing, foot-wide warm streams gurgling by; of trying to keep the collapsible woodstove from collapsing, and waiting hours for food to cook over what John calls “squaw fires” at ten thousand feet. But it's the do-nothing hours of tent life that we miss the most, hours when we simply listened. Up through the river wind and tree hush and the sneezing, squalling storms came the whistling grunts of bugling elk, so eerie and sexual. We watched snow stack up and talked to animals, making their calls our own.
8
Two ravens make black X's in the sky; a horse is snoring. My head is filled with the pots-and-pans clapping-and-bolting gurgle of internal gossip, not about people but about the dogs and horses I've worked with and known. My current bout of what sheepherders used to call “people-phobia” should worry me, but it doesn't. I like a strong binge of socializing, followed by a few months of monastic quiet—as long as I can be with animals. My older sister reminds me of the nights she'd come home from parties to find the family dog neatly tucked under the covers, head on the pillow, while I slept on the floor.
Solitude becomes a reflex. Instead of calling friends when I'm lonely, I shy away from them. On the other hand, solitude is highly overrated. We've romanticized Thoreau's days on Walden Pond, forgetting that he ate with the Emersons most evenings. The famous “examined life” included dinners and intelligent conversation with extraordinary neighbors, and I admit, I long for that now. People who have lived where the winter weather is truly harsh—like the Arctic—know that solitude is anathema to mental health and is inevitably linked to suicide. I concur. But living with animals is something else again.
On the ranch where I lived, I'd lie in the snowfields with the cows at midday, leaning my head against their bulging, pregnant bodies. I'd search out coyote dens, sit above the entrance, and wait for the pups to wander out. There were colts and working dogs being born and growing up, and cougars and bears on the benchlands above the pastures. Then and now, I apprentice myself to birds and animals, spending days trying to learn the way they know about one another and about my state of mind. My dog Rusty knew when something was wrong during calving. One night he pawed at my arm during dinner until I followed him outside to a distant pasture where a cougar was crouched by the cows and young calves. The mother cows had formed a wall and were pacing back and forth between their calves and the cougar. I made a lot of noise and scared the cougar away. Other days, the “using horses,” as they are called, always seem to know what's up. “Hell, that horse knows you're coming out to the corral to catch him before you even get out of bed,” Ray Hunt, the horse trainer, said. But how?
Life with animals sponges up our human arrogance. We're not the only ones who “know,” and we're anything but alone. There's a great sensory mechanism at work in the world: millions of noses, eyes, and ears, and nonhuman howls, bugles, grunts, screams, and song.
I'm still grie
ving about a recent loss, and winter helps me with the job. My journal from September reads: “Facing the darkness, a hummingbird comes to visit because my dog has died.” Before the writing of this book was begun, Sam began faltering. We were making our daily hike following two string lakes in the mountains. He kicked up dust with wobbly legs. At the willow-choked stream that feeds the lake, he lay on green moss among wildflowers, one leg resting on glacial till, the other dipped into floury water. In those hours everything ticked—springs dripped, wind stirred dew inside the cups of harebells. Noctilucent clouds shone in the north. We walked home as the sun was setting.
Later, in the night, I lay on my sleeping bag and watched Sam breathing, knowing we wouldn't have too much more time together. I pondered all that he had tried to teach me: wild enthusiasm, rustic joy, easygoing love, and unconditional living.
We were living in our tent. Below, a well was being dug for my cabin, and Sammy, Gaby, and I went down to watch the activity. In one hour the derrick went up and the drill augured down. Jim, the driller, said, “We have to use a diamond bit to go through these erratics. The glaciers put a lot of rock down here, but they also left a lot of water.”
The drilling of the well was like running through pages in nature's book, each deposition, each shelf of rock, a turning page. Under the rolling shell-bed was a layer of loose-grained sand and gravel, then tight gravel, then more shells, then a gigantic “page” of granite.
Jim hit water at 150 feet, where it lay in horizontal bands between depositions, but he went deeper. What he was doing was bringing up the collapsed history of ice ages, and the warm, shallow seas that came before and after. The diamond bit went deep. Down there, Jim told me, are mountains and rivers, oceans and beaches, glaciers and fires. The water, when it came, was blue-gray and looked like flannel. It turned muddy, then gray-green. The flow lessened, then surged, and the water came clean. Sam, Gaby, and I lay on the excavated sand and drank from the pipe.
The Future of Ice Page 6