We had the faintest of flurries last night; more flurries this morning, a little of it managing, momentarily, to stick. Now, the flakes have stopped, and to the west, the clouds have begun to break apart. There will be clearly visible sun before the day is out, but for now, we are still wrapped in the soft gray embrace of the last of the storm.
The real difference today is in the temperature: The air outside is cold. It’s deceptive, of course; in truth, these are the temperatures we should have now, but the recent unseasonal warmth has turned “normalcy” into a shock to the system. The forecast for the rest of the week suggests that seasonal temperatures are at last here to stay, with a decent prospect of a little more snow on Thursday.
For now, though, we are watching the clouds lift in real time, a gradual retraction and retreat from the lower slopes as the white haze rises to reveal an even whiter dusting beneath. For the first time this season, there is a little rime on the highest outcroppings of El Salto, evergreen stands enshawled in white as well. Closer in, the spots of bare tundra on Pueblo Peak are no longer earth-toned — no longer bare, for that matter — and the clean, unbroken patches of new alpine white seem an unusually special gift now.
Still, the wind, which has blown all morning, is rising, gathering force and speed sufficient to drive out the storm. It’s been frustrating to watch its track, mostly circling around us, stopping omentarily here or there, but never actually settling upon the land that needs its medicine so badly. On this day, the lines of the storm will be most visible in what they leave behind: a dusting of white at higher elevations, a blanket of leaves stripped from their branches below, and a hazy scribing of shadows not fully formed upon the earth.
In other words, a day very much like the one in the image above, a digital shot that Wings captured almost exactly three years ago, on a November day in 2019. It’s taken from a spot just inside our front gate: far away from the house, up the drive by the highway. That’s the northwest side of our land, and he was facing southwest, the two old cedar posts standing strong in the foreground beneath a cloud-webbed sky.
What’s always struck me about this image is the interplay not of the angles themselves, but of what inhabits their spaces: not the sharp edges of sky to post or post to earth, but of the flowing dance of clouds and sun and the faint shadows they permit those posts to cast upon an earth now golden but utterly dry. It’s the lines of the storm not as weather system or radar track, but as environment and atmosphere: ambient and animated even in their subtlety.
As I write the clouds have almost entirely lifted from the peaks. Oh, there’s still plenty of gray that has not moved out yet, but the glow of the sun is clearly perceptible behind it now. The air is cold, the winds are fierce, and the only visible snow is some few thousand feet higher than where we sit. But the lines of the storm, though mostly having gone around us, remain visible and clear, both in its directional track and it what it leaves behind.
It may seem, to most, that in fact it has left behind very little, and it’s true that at our level, there’s not much to show that it was ever here. But it has left behind something more important, if less easy to perceive: Hope.
Hope, in the face of a year of megafires andd megadrought, in the face of climate collapse and all that attends it, that we may yet be granted the medicine of a real winter.
And so we look next to Thursday, and the possibility of the snow’s return.
~ Aji
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