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Areas of Fog. Will Dowd
Читать онлайн.Название Areas of Fog
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isbn 9780997745597
Автор произведения Will Dowd
Издательство Ingram
It’s been called a gentleman’s agreement, and, given the mayor’s tacit consent, the whole thing has a vague semi-legal status.
More than anything, I’m interested in what people choose to leave in their shoveled-out spaces. While it’s often cones, which have an air of officialdom, you also see a lot of beach chairs, open and turned toward the street. These chairs work because they play a mind game. You can’t help but imagine the owner sitting there like a ghost, watching intently, a tire iron resting across his knees.
In fact, it’s all mind games. You often see children’s bicycles, which are good for sympathy.
I once saw an old toilet—who’s gonna touch that?
And then there’s the really small, frail gestures—ironing boards, empty shopping bags, gloves—which work by reverse psychology. Whoever has the audacity to leave an old shoe must be a trained killer.
The ultimate power play, I’ve always thought, would be to shovel out your space and then erect a small house of cards.
Like I said, it’s a war out there.
And there’s more to come. Tonight, my swathe of Massachusetts is forecast to receive another bombardment of 8 to 10 inches. Already tiny flakes are arriving like light infantry.
The weathermen are beginning to sound like Winston Churchill, whose wartime speeches gave comfort to the Britons huddled around their wireless sets as bombs fell from the sky.
Churchill used to spend eight hours at a stretch working on his broadcasts, and his best lines still echo today on coffee mugs and specialty greeting cards. A new book, however, suggests that the public wasn’t as inspired by Churchill’s speeches as we imagine in retrospect.
They didn’t like his long-windedness, they couldn’t bear his fondness for double negatives, and there was a widespread suspicion that during his speeches he wasn’t not drunk.
I’d like to do something—or at least say something—to help you all get through this winter. This war.
I think I’ll leave you with these words.
Keep calm and—well, you know the rest.
IT’S BEEN A winter of naming. Every week the weather-industrial complex introduces and circulates a new buzzword for a weather phenomenon that has always existed (“Bombogenesis” is having its moment), while The Weather Channel has gone rogue and begun naming blizzards. They’re not even proceeding through the alphabet. It’s chaos.
But is it surprising?
Sooner or later, winter was bound to be branded, or at least hashtagged, relabeled and resold by the paranoid-delusional 24-hour news cycle as yet another sign of the Apocalypse, which itself has an impressive catalog of names—Doomsday, Armageddon, End Times, Eschaton, Ragnarök.
That last one, Ragnarök, refers to a climactic contretemps between Norse gods, a clash to be preceded by a mighty winter and a wolf swallowing the sun. It’s all described in a 13th-century compilation of Icelandic poetry, and, according to one group of Viking experts, it’s scheduled to occur this weekend.
Yet despite the media’s best effort to trademark various aspects of the season, we still lack a basic wintry vocabulary.
We still have no name for the first labored swipe of windshield wipers over morning frost.
We still have no name for the mist that rises off the shoulders of melting snowmen like their departing souls.
We still have no name for the evening snow that falls like Pompeian ash, redly illuminated by the brake lights of infinite traffic on your commute home.
We still have no name for the desolate winter rain that fell on Wednesday, the kind that would be depicted as thin vertical lines in a Japanese woodblock, nor for the sideways, abacus-like sliding of freezing raindrops across the brim of an open umbrella.
And still, still we have no name for a balmy February afternoon, such as the one we had on Thursday, when the sun comes back to you like a lost dog from childhood and lays its golden paw on your chest.
THEY SAY MARCH comes in like a lion, and this year they’re right. We had a whiteout last Wednesday (I skidded home in four-wheel drive on a tread of Hail Marys), then a Nor’easter that never materialized (some believe it’s still out there, biding its time), and finally temperatures so unseasonably, unreasonably cold that everyone in the Greater Boston area, fearing winter might be permanent, scurried around in a state of near panic, as if a lion had cleared the fence at Franklin Park Zoo and begun picking off pedestrians one by one.
But then things changed.
This morning, the sun remembered to bring actual warmth with it. There was an ocean smell on the wind. A couple of hawks, back from the Florida Keys, rolled around in the bright wind, scanning backyards for a Pekingese let out to pee. I heard a sound that was strange yet somehow familiar, like the looped melancholy tones of a long-forgotten arcade game. It was birdsong.
Most critically, it was a few degrees warmer. That doesn’t sound like much, but a few degrees can hinge a season just as surely as it can unhinge a mind.
Earlier this week, I ran a low-grade fever. The slight change to my microclimate altered the landscape around me with frightening, hallucinatory efficiency.
“[H]ow astonishing,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals.”
Woolf would know. She suffered her whole life from mysterious, unexplained fevers. She would lie in bed and listen to the sparrows speaking in Greek outside her window.
Her diary, which is full of gaps, tracks her periods of convalescence like a thermometer. In the most moving entries, she resurfaces from her sickbed, laments how much time she has lost, and resolves to pick up the thread of her novel-in-progress.
It’s probably a sacrilege, but I prefer Woolf’s twenty-six-year diary to her novels. She was a diligent chronicler of her own life, jotting down anything, everything. The only experience she would not describe in her diary, she told a friend, was her own death.
Naturally, the diary is full of weather.
Here she is in January: “All frost. Still frost. Burning white. Burning blue.” And in June: “Perfect summer weather. It’s like an invalid who can look up and take a cup of tea.” And in September: “Hot weather; a wind blowing. The substance gone out of everything.”
Even in her last entry, Woolf was careful to note the “curious sea side feeling in the air today.”
A few days later she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse.
It was March.
I FIND IT hard, impossible really, not to see the weather on my birthday as God weighing in on things. I turned thirty on Wednesday.