Like a Banquet

“…for the snow comes

not to cover but reveal

the woods I thought I knew

laid out like a banquet”

-Dave Bonta

On the first day of the snow, a chattering of starlings had gathered in the middle of the blanketed interstate that I drive and know four times a week. No pavement or movement or painted lines to indicate danger, the interstate was a long, blank field for gathering and banqueting. Mesmerized that they continued to gather—a handful and then another handful gathered until there must have been 40 of them—I took my foot off the gas pedal, allowing my car to organically slow its velocity in the unplowed, dangerous snowscape. No one was behind me. What are they doing? Why aren’t they flying away? I queried my husband over speakerphone. I feared that they would not move before I arrived. I also felt curious and left-out. The congregation of birds seemed ceremonial and ritualistic. Was there carrion? Are they celebrating something? Was I invited? I felt like an intruder. Did the birds not realize that this was not a pasture? Before I knew it, another vehicle blasted by on my left. Lanes? Are there even lanes right now in this world? I watched the vehicle plow into the starlings, sending an explosion of black bodies flying upward in escape and outward in death against the whitescape.

On the second day of the snow, I donned a camera and stepped into the twilit wetlands. The night-sky overcast, only Jupiter shined above me, not knowing anything about landscape or snow. My tracks were the only human ones; the others were deer and something else mysterious and small that walked from the river, across my path, and into the brushy wetlands. The dried stalks of autumn’s golden rod held heaps of snow on their shoulders. I walked the white path, my bum foot not faring well in the snow. I approached the river where a layer of snow hung off the roof of a wood duck box. The river, black and oily, looked like a crevasse into which one could fall forever. I imagined falling into it, my crooked footprints being all that was left of my narrative. I delighted in the thought of falling in only to experience the exhilaration of a river’s ongoing monologue of rock, roots, and bends. I continued on. Besides the inevitable pairs of wild eyes and the winter wren warning the wetlands of my presence, I stood there as anonymous as lichen clinging to a cold stone. This place where my foot frequently falls was now a cold stone. Eventually, I stopped walking and stood still in the darkness. In this kind of silence, in this kind of rare, dark air, I heard the traffic on the interstate as well as passengers driving on the test paint strips that sounded mysteriously like Darth Vader’s theme song when driven upon. I looked up and the bare boughs against the sky wrote their own psalms. I could pretend to read it and it wouldn’t matter what message I took away, as long as it was a message. Such is the nature of messages. People transcribe their lives in fascinating ways: tea leaves, coffee grounds, tarot cards, the movement of a needle hanging from a string. On my way back to my car, I heard melodic chimes. My wintermind—frosted with magic—believed it to be from the sky or boughs but alas, it was a windchime in a neighborhood all-aglow to the south. Back in the plowed parking lot, I felt lighter, my knees still rising high as if in snow. The hard, black surface I walked upon felt foreign. Jupiter, always moving, had never moved. He followed me home.

On the third day of the snow, I drove up a mountain with my dog Silas. It had been a while since I snapped on snowshoes. I slid them from their bag and plopped them into the snow. I shed a cumbersome layer, placed it on the driver’s seat, and put up my long hair before bending down to fuss with the straps. Once secured, I put my layer back on, removed the lens cap from my camera, and off we went. The snowshoes felt wonderful and I floated along the surface of the snow. My bum foot, not bummed at all. We followed the parallel lines of a cross-country skier; however, the skier apparently gave up just minutes into their expedition. Silas lowered his nose into the snow where the mullein, hemp dogbane, and milkweed hibernate. Robins roost here, high in the trees, in the winter. We arrived at the frozen pond where the swamp and song sparrows trilled. The red-winged blackbirds were gone but will be among the first to come back to sing their squeaky door-hinge song. We continued until the woodpecker window—a cavity drilled through a dead tree, exposing the landscape on the other side of the tree. I looked through the window from both sides. At this point, we turned around. Silas returned to his life-long winter ritual of running ahead, plopping down, and chewing the snowballs out of his fur until I caught up with him. Once I caught up, I bent down and helped him with my bare, pink hands and the process repeated until we reached the car. Let’s go home and thaw I told him. The road home meandered, black and slick like a river down the mountain. We drove on the asphalt river, no waterfowl in sight.