The forecast insists that we shall have five inches of snow by the end of tomorrow (and possibly as much as another five by the end of the day after that), with the start of the storm beginning two hours from now.
It’s hard to believe when the sky remains mostly blue, only puffy clouds scattered here and there, even if a few are tinged with gray on their bases.
Hard to believe, too, when the mercury remains stubbornly at the fifty-degree mark. This is not really even April weather, but May, with the feel and scent of spring firmly upon the wind. We all have the annual pollen-related effects to prove it.
But if itchy eyes and a sinus headache are inconveniences, the effects on the land are far more serious. And still, authorities at every level refuse to do even the bare minimum required to get control of this record twelve-hundred-year drought — a drought that is only the tiniest foretaste of what’s to come.
We need to preserve such water as remains, and we need the snow, desperately now.
It’s terrifying when we have no control over the outside world’s terrible waste, its profligacy and apocalyptic colonialism; maddening, too, the constant influx of wasteful developers and wealthy malcontents who want what they pretend is the “vibe” of this place without any of the inconveniences of extreme cold or heavy weather or a need to conserve and steward the medicines that still exist here at nearly eight thousand feet above sea level, at the end of The Dragon’s Tail.
For this is, fundamentally, an alpine land: in the depths of true winter, a land of snow, of ice, of extreme cold and drastic weather. In fall, it’s a place of fifty-degree temperature swings in a matter of hours, and an aridity that defies description. In summer, it’s a place of centennial heat that can plunge into the fifties or lower overnight, with dangerous monsoonal rains that ignite flash floods as surely as the early-season winds ignite wildfires. And in these days of late winter into early spring, it’s become a place of too-high temperatures and too many months of dangerous trickster winds, punctuated here and there by a sudden foot of snow, gone by noon, or by dawns wrapped in fog that turn our whole small world to a land of diamond-beaded frost at the moment the sun clears the ridgeline.
That is, in fact, the genesis of the image above, one Wings shot digitally some four years ago, just after dawn at the very middle of January. It’s a phenomenon more known to April here, but the last half decade has altered our timelines drastically. On that very, very early morning, in the moments when the first rays of the rising sun washed over a land beneath skies still dark blue in the west, Wings stepped outside and caught an image of the weeping willow, every branch beaded with those very same late-winter diamonds.
He called the photo It’s Only Frost, and in fact, it has become sort of symbolically perfect now: of the proper answer to constant incomer complaints; of the knowledge that whatever inconvenience it presents will vanish under an hour’s sunlight gaze; of the fact that the snow that once would have been the way of things here is already long since supplanted by its less substantive and far less effective form.
And yet, as I write, the western sky has paled, its blues now wan and tinged with the yellow of a gathering storm. Above, the clouds have begun to coalesce, a solid Slate-gray base moving directly overhead. The wind is rising, making this fifty-degree day feel colder than it actually is . . . but also, perhaps, getting ready to drive in the kind of cold that makes snow possible.
Tomorrow, we may have a world wrapped in white, above and below alike . . . or we may have only the beaded edge of winter to show for it. But even if it’s only frost against a cobalt sky, at least it will be medicine.
~ Aji
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