On Friday night, because Tamika and I decided to stay for an extra day, we were invited for a dinner party at the Hastings. Ron and Anita Hasting have been friends and supporters of my parents for a long time. When I was little, I would go over to their house, and play with their boys Aaron and Ryan, and hang out and eat sandwiches with Binky and Gram, their grandparents, who lived in the house next door. Continue reading “Hastings, Snow, and Earaches”
Snow
I originally wrote this right before we left Schefferville this past December.
Snow.
That’s all I saw. Just snow.
I watched it from my parents front door, staring out onto the silent town. Silent not just because everyone, save a few die hard insomniac drinkers, had gone to sleep, but silent because of the snow itself.
Make no mistake, this was a storm. Far from the fat gentle puffs in It’s a Wonderful Life or Charlez Shultz’s self-depricating Christmas (don’t get me wrong, I love the show, just wish he would have cheered up on occasion).
No, you stick out your tongue to catch these snowflakes, and in a matter of seconds you’d learn that, yes Virginia, you DO have quite a lot of pain receptors in your mouth.
But these snowflakes were silent.
Movies get it wrong. Whenever they depict snowstorms, it’s always this whipping, howling wind, that screeches and whistles, slamming doors and rattling shutters.
To be transparent, that does happen sometimes, but most storms are like this one. A steady, silent march of sound-absorbing ice crystals, unceasingly falling to a barely perceptible yet maddeningly familiar pattern. They dance and swirl with charisma around lampposts and stony parked snowmobiles, but you’ve never heard a silence like that of a steady strong snowstorm.
And it is quiet.
You can stand out there, bundled up in a parka, and not feel or hear anything, but the gentle constant shove of a million tiny snowflakes across your back.
Standing out in it, at times it seems to suck the cacophonous choir of everyday noise right out of your head.
And I, one of the very few, was grateful for it.
I needed it.
I grabbed the brake above the wristgrip and wrenched the handlebars to the left. The Skidoo, which had been traveling at a great rate of speed, locked it’s tread, and pirouetted in the middle of the vacant midnight road, the loose dry powder kicked up by the twirling skis and tread, revealing the slick smooth compacted ice underneath.
I held on, leaning automatically to counter the force trying to pull me off.
Once. Twice. Three times. Four times I spun around until I was pointed back in the same direction, a spiral snake echoing out behind me made of sleek black ice. I hit the kill switch, the engine hummed to a halt, and I stood.
The ringing in my ear from the roar of the engine subsided, and I was wrapped up in the snowflakes.
The sound of nothing.
The flakes beat against my visor, slamming themselves against the plastic, but making no noise. My eyes welled.
I pulled the killswitch back on. Yanked the cord. The Tundra roared back to life, throttle on.
It sat there and spun on the ice, immobile, until it finally caught and surged forward. I fought the machine up the ridge, holding back tears. I felt my demons clawing at my back, gripping my arms in fervor. Fatherhood. Debt. Marriage. Work. Zerflin. Faith. Courage. Weight.
I prayed.
Through the screeching engine, through the whistling air piercing the gaps in the helmet, I couldn’t hold it back.
And as I stood on the ridge, blanketed, torn, broken… the tears came.
