I think of Shackleton only because Owen is working on a report about him for school and the research is spread out on our kitchen counter. There’s even a copy he printed out from the Internet of an advertisement Shackleton placed nearly a century ago in London newspapers:
MEN WANTED: For hazardous journey.
Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete
darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful.
Honor and recognition in case of success.
I imagine the Big Valley as a ship, bobbing through the year. We’re about halfway to the safety of spring, but I am not a man, it isn’t the early 1900s, and any chance I have at honor or recognition is laughable. There is no sea here, either, despite my active imagination; we are landlocked. The rest, though, sounds about right.
The boys and I have been lucky so far, and this has been a relatively mild winter, with some bone-bitter cold snaps but not a lot of snow—far less than the hundred or so inches we usually get. We’ve managed to keep an egress clear to the outside world by shoveling two long tracks in our driveway, from the Quonset hut all the way to the road, each track just wide enough for a vehicle’s tires.
But some time last night while we were sound asleep that luck ran out. After two months of winter, we’re finally socked in.
I’ve worked some long hours over the last two weeks on regular Finding Utopia projects, plus landed a few new freelance assignments, all of which require hard-copy edits and can’t be e-mailed. I might not be anything close to an English knight on an expedition stuck on a frozen ship far from home, but I am a writer with finished work to deliver and get paid for; a mom with an empty refrigerator to fill with groceries I’ll buy with the money; an adult with a gas bill and an electric bill so overdue they’ll be shut off unless I pay them in person. Today.
Which I’ll gladly do, just as soon as I can make it off this terrestrial iceberg.
And here’s the crazy thing. Thundersnow is so rare that years, and sometimes even whole decades, pass without a single incidence of it. Then again, years pass without horses being panicked out of their secure pasture, without the unemployment rate climbing into the teens, without pig viruses mutating into a human flu, and without once-reliable freezers dying in the anonymity of their dark basements.
And certainly years pass without all of these misfortunes arriving at the same family’s doorstep within just a few months of each other. This, I think, drinking my coffee and watching the light begin to reveal the entirety of just how snowed in we are, just isn’t one of those years.
“Everything happens for a reason,” Mr. Wonderful likes to say.
“No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place,” a Zen saying goes.
“The Lord must have wanted it that way,” Grandma Link used to say.
But it’s February, it’s winter, it’s Michigan, and I don’t believe any of it. I believe things just happen, and are neither good nor bad, but human beings are so hungry to believe in something that we try to make meaning out of random events. Especially the bad ones. We look for any good we can find in the hard stuff, hoping it will make us feel better, especially when we’ve got places to go, money to collect, and bills to pay. And sometimes, while we’re looking, we’re wearing snow boots and a wool hat and armed with a rusty snow shovel.
I let the boys sleep in and go outside and shovel the snow away from the door and partway down our brick walkway. I see what we’re dealing with now and know the boys are going to need the extra rest, and don’t wake them up until 8:30, when the thunder and lightning have passed. They come downstairs to the warmbutter smell of a pancake breakfast. There’s still no sign of Jesus’ face in any of our pancakes, but I’ve set the table, put out the butter, cut up the bananas, warmed the maple syrup, and even poured the orange juice.
If there are two words I could say that would please them more first thing on a February morning than “snow day,” I don’t know what those words would be. But if there are two they dread hearing more than “snow shovel,” I don’t know what those would be, either.
It’s full daylight outside when I utter the latter, gesturing toward the window. My pajama-clad snow-removal team stands together, bellies full, and takes a good long look outside, sighting down on exactly what we’re dealing with.
“Oh, rats,” Will says, putting his own two words in.
“Thanks for the carbo load,” Owen adds, seeing right through my elaborate breakfast. Luke is already dressed and heading for the mudroom, where we keep our coats, snow pants, hats, and gloves.
After his brothers get dressed too, the team and I suit up, boot up, man up, and head outside. We choose our weapons from the bent, cracked, and rusty options I keep jammed, handle first, into the snowbank that edges the walkway. There’s so much snow and it’s so heavy and wet that it takes us ten minutes of digging just to get the gate open so we can wrestle with the driveway.
Which, up close, gives us all pause. A lunar landscape of white stretches for what seems like infinity in front of us.
I plan a strategy while my sons stare at their bleached-out day. Feet stuck in drifts, holding their shovels at the ready, they are like a winter chain gang waiting for instruction. With my dark sunglasses, I feel like their chain-gang boss, mean and weary. I size up the job and just hope that my mysterious genetic heritage doesn’t destine me for an early heart attack, stroke, or brain aneurysm. Because this is going to tax our systems.
“This is going to take us all day,” Owen predicts.
“What, you have a prior engagement?” I snap.
“No. But snow days are supposed to be days off.”
So they are. And refrigerators are supposed to be full, houses are supposed to be warm, and college-educated mothers with half a brain in their heads are supposed to be able to figure all this shit out. Everything happens for a reason? Whatever.
“Owen and Luke, you guys take one side, I’ll take the other side, and Will, you clean up what we leave in the middle. Let’s start at the garage and work our way to the road. Don’t try to shovel it all at once, because you’ll just get tired faster. Take it in small scoops.”
That is the way we accomplish everything: in small scoops. That’s the way we stocked up on squash and froze extra vegetables, that’s the way we’ve kept the fireplace stocked with wood, that’s the way I’ve grown, gathered, and bought our food, and that’s the way we will get this driveway shoveled.
It takes us more than five hours. Our hearts are banging in our chests and we’re out of breath, all sweaty and hot by the time we finish even though it’s barely twenty degrees outside. But we clear every inch of our driveway out from under all that snow. We stand together at the end, where the driveway exits to the road, look back at our work, and catch our breath.
And for the first time in a long time, I’m proud of us. Proud enough even to balance my camera on the flat hood of the farm truck, set the automatic timer, and take a picture. Looking at the image, at my sons’ faces, I’m pretty sure that they’re proud of themselves, too. My memory of this day is dominated by smiles, by the sound of thundersnow, as well as the sense of heaviness that pressed down upon the morning.
But for once, something from that blasted SMILE handbook feels more like acknowledgment than judgment. “Parents are role models for children and need to set a good example for them. Children imitate the behaviors and attitudes of their parents.”
If I can model hard work, that will at least be something.
With the job over, we are ravenous in a way that comes only after spending long hours outside in the cold. The warm air inside the house hits our stomachs, and those pancakes are just burned-up fuel. There’s not much food in the house, and so the boys eat Jethro-sized bowls of cold cereal and milk.
I deliver my writing and editing work, cash the checks, pay the bills, stop at the grocery store and buy two bags of groceries. Pulling into the driveway, I make a stop for the mail. Bills—of course—and something else I actually look
forward to receiving this time of year: three vegetable-seed catalogs. In the heaviest white glare of an endless winter, they promise that the colors of spring and summer still exist somewhere in the future.
While I’m gone on my errands, Owen finishes that history report—the one about Sir Ernest Shackleton. The snow day has given him some bonus time to finish it; he’s used that time well, and his report is pretty good. I read it over when I get home and am reminded that even though it took Sir Ernest nine long months, he saved all of his men from what was thought back then to be certain death in the ice.
“Caution, perseverance, reckless courage, and strong idealism were his leading characteristics,” according to Owen’s research.
My son ends his report in the logical spot—with the once-triumphant explorer’s death. Despite the man’s long-shot heroics, and his years spent in the coldest, most remote and inhospitable places on earth, he didn’t freeze to death or starve. He died of a heart attack, on board his comfortable ship, which was safely docked in port. He was probably even looking forward to spring.
9
March 2006
ECLIPSE
A total solar eclipse is probably the most spectacular astronomical event that most people will experience in their lives. Observing the sun, however, can be dangerous if the proper precautions are not taken.
—NASA SOLAR ECLIPSE BULLETIN, MARCH 2006
I am a winner. As unlikely as this seems, a radio announcer tells me it’s actually true. On a weekend the boys are with their father I am listening to the classic-rock station in the afternoon, volume up real loud, drinking wine straight from the bottle, standing at the window, and watching it snow. When prompted by the deejay, somewhere perhaps between Van Halen and Heart, I pick up the phone and call in and am informed that I’m a winner.
My prize? Two tickets to see Uncle Kracker and his band that night at our area’s one and only nightclub.
This is completely out of character for me. I have won things before, but always by skill and never by luck. I win tournaments at the local pool hall and even some that are held in large conference rooms far out of town that I carpool to on weekends that the boys are with their father. The prize money is enough to buy each of my sons a new pair of snow boots. I win a few honorable mentions in writing contests, some even with money attached. My divorce hearing is in a few days, so soon I’ll know whether or not I’ll win in court when my house and my children are at stake. But I do not win at luck—not ever.
And I do not call radio stations, either. Not to request songs and not to win prizes, yet here I am, in possession of two tickets to a sold-out performance of Uncle Kracker.
And another thing I do not do, ever, ever, ever, is ask men out on dates. I just don’t do that.
In middle school, I wait as my mother decrees that boys have to call me, and not the other way around. In high school, when my boyfriend finds Jesus and refuses to take me to the senior prom, inviting me to a prayer meeting instead, I do have the wherewithal to tell him to cram it, but I don’t call up any of our school’s unattached jocks. I wait for one of them to hear the news that I am open and call me. The first one who does is my prom date.
Winning at luck must have changed my perspective, though, or else it’s the wine, because I call up Pete the builder and offer him one of my free tickets. He can go with me if he wants to, or he can just take the ticket, go, and have a good time on his own or with someone else. I give him an out.
I’ve only spoken with him a handful of times since meeting him at that bar last fall, but I do still think of him often, and there’s no one else I’d rather go to the concert with. What I actually say to him in my big moment is: “You don’t have to go with me, I just thought you might want the free ticket.” Aphrodite, we have established, I am not.
“How about if I meet you there?” he suggests.
Clairvoyant, I think, the way he senses my inner conflict. Either that or he is just as ambivalent about the prospect of the two of us out on a date as I am. I know he is the father of two sons, and I know he is estranged from their mother, but I know little else about his romantic life.
Maybe Pete isn’t even attracted to tall, big-boned women with smart mouths and brassy hair. For all I know, he prefers petite girly-girls. In which case, I’m out of luck. Raised as the only daughter of a tomboy mother, I’ve made it past my fortieth year knowing very little about applying makeup, walking in high heels, layering, the suitability of plaids, or eyebrow shaping. I like clothes, and even have a twisted, voyeuristic love for fashion magazines, but I don’t have any idea how to assimilate what’s in style.
Both money and time are lacking for this pursuit, which seems to require a pile of each to do well.
But Pete has agreed to meet me at the concert, and actually sounded happy about the prospect. The boys won’t be home until tomorrow afternoon and a half hour before my half date it’s time to make myself look feminine. If that’s even possible.
I start at the top, with my hair, which used to be a perfectly respectable dark brown. Then, in a moment of pre-menopausal hysteria, or post-thirtysomething showboating, or both, I went blond on my fortieth birthday. I don’t mean that I got a few highlights. I don’t mean that I went a shade lighter than natural. No, I mean that I went full-on sunflower-and-chardonnay, honey-and-butter, slap-my-ass-and-call-me-Judy blond.
Before the split, I’d been maintaining my color for four whole years. Now, I haven’t had a hair appointment in four months, and boy, does it show! But I’ve plaited it in more than a dozen small braids as a kind of follicular camouflage to hide the dark roots. Standing in front of my bathroom mirror, I take out the rubber bands one by one and then use my fingers to comb out the braids. With my height, my prominent shoulders, my dark eyes, and my obviously dyed hair, I’m a little concerned that this style will inspire comparisons to Dennis Rodman, but it actually turns out okay.
Now for the hard part—clothes and makeup. I put on mascara, cherry-flavored ChapStick, my favorite pair of jeans, a dusty-blue tank top with sequin trim (this may actually be something called a camisole, I’m not really sure), and over all this I plop on the garment so distinctive my sons have given it a name—Ugly Brown. This cabled and shapeless sweater is usually sitting vigil on my desk chair or tied around my waist, and tonight I find that I don’t want to leave the premises without it.
This get-together with Pete is not really an official date, anyway, I tell myself. So there’s no real reason to be nervous. It’s just a—what does Owen call it?—a meet-up. A casual night of live music and fun.
It’s only much later that I learn Pete is not anything close to an Uncle Kracker fan. That he likes his rock music harder and darker. That he would actually prefer listening to, say, Lawrence Welk sing about his bubble machine accompanied by a thousand accordions than listen to Uncle Kracker live, but that he wanted to see me, and if that meant enduring “Follow Me” at high decibels, he was willing to make the sacrifice.
I don’t know this, though, when I head out into my driveway with my rockin’ hair and my sequined camisole and my pointy-toed ankle boots that are castoffs from a friend and a half size too small, but free.
And I’m almost to my minivan when a flash-freeze of wind aims itself right at me like a stun grenade. According to the calendar it is the middle of March, and winter is supposed to be on the downslope, but just try telling that to the weather. I angle my torso like a ski jumper, arms tight to my sides, and enter the whipping snow. Ugly Brown is flapping away in this gale that feels like it’s been saving up since somewhere over the western prairies just to blast me and my little acreage. While I’ve been inside getting ready, this wind has sculpted snowdrifts in front of my door, next to my farm truck, and over the hood of my minivan.
The distance from my garage door to the end of my driveway is about half the length of a football field, but I can see that the road itself is pretty clear and it’s just my driveway that looks like a scene from Dr. Zhivago.
Because here’s the deal. Once I’m driving down the road toward the nightclub with my two free tickets, I’ll be out on the town on a Saturday night as a single woman with plans to meet someone of the opposite sex for the first time since, no lie, the Reagan administration.
I skip the minivan tonight and decide to take the farm truck instead. It chugalugs the gas, but it also has beefy tires and four-wheel drive, making it a better hedge against all those icy drifts now standing between Pete and me. And it’s not until my gloved hand is on the door handle that I notice how well my hair’s brown roots, and my brown ankle boots, and my Ugly Brown sweater all color-coordinate with my transportation option of the evening, my farm truck, “Cookie.”
As much as I eschew signs, omens, and snowflakes in particular places, this unplanned symbiosis of earthy hues is a development I interpret as containing a deeper meaning. Okay, a sign. I am certain now that I was right to ask Pete to accompany me tonight because my hair has brown roots, I’m wearing a brown sweater, walking in brown boots, and getting into a brown truck. Hey, if everything is random, then you’d better just go on and grab some meaning wherever you can find it.
A blizzard in such a serendipitous circumstance as this seems like only a minor inconvenience.
Cookie rams the biggest driveway snowdrift head-on at 25 mph. That’s as much speed as I can muster, stomping my pointy-toed boot on the accelerator and jamming the stick shift into second gear, but it’s not enough. My truck lodges in the snowbank, both front tires half-buried and spinning.
And of course I know not to gun the engine. Anyone who learned how to drive in a snow state knows not to gun the engine when you’re stuck in a drift. Especially when you’re in a hurry. Because you’ll only make it worse.
Bootstrapper Page 14