In the Elk Mountains of Colorado, where I reside, nearly a foot of snow fell on the night of November 5 – the first notable storm of the year. It was piling up pretty good by the time the polls closed at seven and even better by the time I stepped out with my cross-country skis at nine. Part of me wanted to remain on the couch, absorbed in the election, the news, the glowing screen, the addictive drama of confusion and distress: How did the United States split in half this way? Will we survive the future as a collective? But another part of me wouldn’t allow it.
Look at the spruce. Flex your body in the cold. Take a friggin’ breath, man.
Sage advice. Thank you, Inner Voice.
When I returned home an hour later, tired and wet and calm, I told my partner, Sophia, that the woods at the edge of town were beautiful. “White darkness,” I said. “Black brightness.” I wasn’t trying to sound poetic, nor was I trying to make a profound point about democracy, opposites held in precarious balance, the embedded tensions that constitute anything whole. That was simply how the words came out, an unselfconscious report of what I’d observed.
After a shower, I checked my laptop – POTUS and Congress, a couple specific ballot measures – then went to bed. I didn’t sleep well, kicked the covers, dreamed weird dreams. But the next morning at dawn, though I felt exhausted and it seemed like all the coffee in the world would barely do the trick, I nevertheless hurried straight to the mudroom, yanked on boots and jacket and gloves, and grabbed the shovel.
Again, I heard the Inner Voice.
Bow your head to the task. Use your knees, not your back. Focus on this, now.
To state the obvious, snow has no politics. It doesn’t give a hoot about right and left, red and blue, elephant and donkey. While we busy ourselves drawing lines (policy, values, vision, etc.), it steadily erases them, falling with sublime indifference across diverse communities. In doing so, it touches the lives of tens of millions of Americans, eliciting a unique response from each individual. A rancher may see it as water for irrigation ditches. An artist may see it as the subject of a new painting. A trucker may see it as danger on the road. A cross-country skier may see it as a healthy alternative to that seductive, ever-glowing screen.
Okay, but here’s what isn’t unique, what all of us who get buried in snow, whether six inches or sixteen feet, share every winter: The damn stuff, the delightful stuff, the mysterious sky-born stuff that arrives on a schedule of its own and turns a deaf ear to our opinions and beliefs – nay, temporarily mutes them, silences them – it must be moved, managed, scooped and thrown, scooped and thrown, scooped and thrown.
As I cleared a path from the front door to the driveway, I thought about humongous swaths of our riven nation swept by blizzards and smoothed over with a continuous layer of fresh sparkling snow. I thought about shoveling as a common cause that bends so many of us low – so many friends and enemies, so many strangers – with clean, honest, strenuous, rewarding labor. I thought about a sentence from Dancing at the Rascal Fair, a novel set in wild Montana, authored by the late great Ivan Doig: “A white blanket for your mind.”
And then my thoughts were interrupted once more by the Inner Voice, for which I am eternally grateful because it pulls me outside, where my anger and fear and us-them worries are scoured by wind, burned by severe temperatures, overwhelmed and consumed by elegant, delicate drifts – by a sense of expansive togetherness and ancient elemental freedom.
You should’ve done a write-in yesterday: Snow for President!
I smiled.
And, duh, Shovel would be on the ticket as VP.
With that I went in, changed clothes, kissed Sophia on the cheek, cooked eggs, washed dishes, clipped my toenails, vacuumed, and searched for other excuses not to re-engage the mess, i.e. not to check email. Ultimately, though, I did face my inbox, where messages from family members in different pockets of the country – people I love (and love to hate) – awaited a reply.
One read: “Finally we’ll have a real United States again.” One read: “I’m sick to my stomach.” One read: “How are you doing?”
I wanted to type snow and be finished.
Alas, I was fully aware that the difficult work had only just begun.
