The month is not yet over, and the thaw has already begun.
Spring will be here early; winter will leave us late. This land takes no notice of calendars or other human means of reckoning time: Here, the elements rule, in all their apparent willfulness and caprice.
It only seems like caprice to us, of course. In any contest, the weaker party prefers to impose as much control upon circumstances as possible, and sorting seasons and time is one way we do that.
It shouldn’t be a contest. But colonialism is an impositional dynamic, one that is not merely defined by but exists as structures of control. Of authority. Of, as the colonizer’s holy writ terms it, dominion.
But in a place such as this, even colonizers are regularly reminded that dominion is a chancy and elusive thing.
It’s also a deceptive thing. The dominant culture has, for centuries now, regarded itself as in control of the environment — the land, the waters, the resources and mineral deposits, space itself. The reality is much more intimidating; punitive, even. And we are all facing that dynamic now.
Not quite eight full weeks into the calendar, and we have made the drive along the watershed above eight times: four down; four back. At this time of year, it’s a dangerous proposition even when we have not had heavy weather at home; storms here skip along the surface of the earth, touching down here, glancing off there, missing whole stretches of miles entirely and then dumping snow measured in feet in wind-driven swatches and strips. This year, we have had weather patterns that depart more than usual from our norms, with snows driving in hard from the north to paint white the slopes that are more usually a piñoned evergreen year-round. Meanwhile, the south-facing slopes and surfaces have alternated between bare and branded white, harsh lines driven on the winds of repeated brief blizzards tattooing everything aboveground until the next thaw.
The thaw will arrive today, with a vengeance.
We still have eighteen inches of snow on the ground here . . . and a brilliant sun expected to warm the world into the forties all week. Within days, the white blanket will have been thrown off, discarded in favor of exposed earth running in rivers of its own rich brown mud. The river itself, running fast all these weeks but still far below normal levels, may at last begin to rise to a more ordinary depth.
That’s if we are lucky. Even so, we shall still be paying the price of a colonizing and colonized humanity arrogant enough to try to assert dominion over the Earth and her elements, over the very powers of the cosmos itself. It was bill that came due in spectacular fashion last year, and we all perforce remain very deeply in the red — a red that finds expression in a cracked and arid earth, in the crimson blaze of the wildfires that, so long unmanaged in the way of our ancestors, feed upon the spirits of destruction.
For the moment, our world consists of blue and white, a turquoise waters against a cornflower sky, both arrayed against the diamond shimmer of the snow. In a matter of days, the white will be replaced with an earthy brown and green — a nascent pale jade of new grass, the raw emerald of the shadowed river winding beneath the chilly blue.
None of it will be enough, and yet, we have to make it enough.
Winter is the mother of the waters, and we are now moving into the cold wild currents of spring. In this world, life is a river of water and time, and both have been too long running out.
It’s time to find a new way of reckoning— and reckoning with — the latter if we are to have any hope of keeping the former.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
