Today dawned in a veil of perfect gray, lightening now to white everywhere: white earth, white sky, white in the air between. The snow the forecasters promised us for yesterday did not materialize until the early hours of this morning — a gift of extraordinary dimensions to Wings and me personally, given that we were forced to spend yesterday traversing the treacherous road that lay squarely in the path of the storm. We did endure ferociously bitter winds all day beneath a bright and glaring sun, but the snow held off until well after we were safely home.
What were heavy wet flakes at dawn have transformed now into a fine dry snow, with a few inches of accumulation already. Every now and then, a faint yellow glow filters through the haze of white, a sun only barely concealed from view. Here at Red Willow, snow and sun are in no way mutually exclusive, and this is a time of gray clouds and golden light.
Wings captured the image above with his film camera some twelve or thirteen years ago: Sky Lodge, a reference to the place where the spirits dwell. In reality, that rocky outcropping — more accurately, a set of outcroppings, from this vantage point seemingly layered upon each other — is known colloquially as El Salto, The Jump, although its real names are far older (and far more hidden). To me, it has always been The Old Man, courtesy of the way its layers come together visually here at its base to form what seems to be the craggy face of an elder turned upward to the sky. Wings tells me that one of its ancient identities is consonant with such a name. The day that he took this shot was one much like these: the weather of late winter, of fast-moving snow clouds dusting the slopes and occasionally more, then fleeing to make way for the late-afternoon light. As pure as the whiteness of the sky is now at midday, we will in all likelihood have a bright and beautiful sunset.
We may not have sight of the peaks before tomorrow, although I suspect that they will put in an appearance before dusk, the better to bask in the waning light. It’s a powerful sight, to witness the roiling clouds in the very act of delivering the snow even as the sun lights up the lower slopes in a golden amber glow.
This land is nothing if not elemental.
And the truth of the matter is that, even yesterday, there was a snowstorm on the peaks. We chased it home once again, watching as the clouds raced from northwest to southeast ahead of the gray ribbon of road unfurling before us. Town and valley rose into view beneath a blanket of white, but by the time we reached the first turnoff, the clouds were already thinning; as we wove our way around the winding back road toward home, each successive peak hove into view like some ghost ship across the great gray lake of my own homelands.
It’s disorienting to those not of this place, or who at least have not lived here long enough to know the weather patterns intimately. In most places, a storm is a storm: gray clouds, precipitation, an absence of direct sunlight.
Here, a storm can swirl above and below, around and through the blue of a cornflower sky. The sun itself will put on a show amid the swirling snowflakes, turning them into a vortex of diamonds in the light. It is, perhaps, one of the gifts of the spirits of winter here, one that often occurs in times of bitter cold — as though to remind us that, while the cold is a necessity for a healthy earth the rest of the year, the warmth of a nearer sun is not that far off now.
For the moment, though, we travel the Storm Road — the name of the image just above. It’s not a road as the dominant culture understands it, snow or otherwise, of course. But in this place, a road can be many things: a path, a trail, a line between snowdrifts that leads to a place that has meaning only for those who live here. It’s often a road filled with heavy weather, snow and ice and fiercely cold winds that buffet and batter, obstruct and obscure.
But it’s a road that manages to be illuminated, too, touched by the sun and embraced by the light. It happened again, just moments ago, and for an equally brief moment: a filtering through of the sun and the barest thinning of the veil that hides the slopes.
Toward winter’s end by the calendar’s reckoning, in a place where winter is known to last until June, we go about our days now in a time of gray clouds and golden light, and it is beautiful.
~ Aji
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