Aurorya's Journal: a walk in an ice storm

9:30. Snowpants on, coat, rubber boots, mittens scarf hat, I was set. And slightly hungover.
        It was an ice storm. Not enough snow for a blizzard, but that was the only difference. Besides the ice. There was a constant light brushing of snow, or there would have been if it wasn't for the 25 mi/hr winds. Because of the sleet, freezing rain, hail, and snow, and the perfect temperature conditions, there was a layer of ice on everything. On the houses. On the walkways, on the roads, the trees, every leaf, every pine needle, blade of grass, berry, bump in the tree bark. Everything had its own seperate case. One of those things you read about in your 7th grade text book, but never get to experience yourself. "Much tree damage due to the weight of the ice and the brittleness and the wind." It was beautiful. I'm sure if the sun had been shining, it would have glittered like diamonds.
        But the sun is NOT out. It is cold. And I am going out into it. I have 2 and a half hours, an eternity for my purposes. I set out.
        On the hill behind the library, the wind threatens to steal my scarf. It is too strong to face, so I let it push me forewards as I lean backwards into it. Thanks to the snowpants, this is basically the only time I got cold anywhere besides on my face, my only exposed skin. I let the wind push me a moment, then head in the woods.
        No footprints yet. Probably for several hours, too. Saturday morning, after all, at college. No one else is crazy enough to be up yet, much less to be voluntarily walking around in this kind of weather! Walking by the river, the wind is strong enough that the only foreign sound I can hear is the mechanical building about a mile away, downstream, on the other bank. The path I'm walking on...it, like the ground, is frozen and there's snow blown over most of it. The snow has a secret though. Underneath the snow is a thin layer of ice that crunches like butter brickle under my feet. If I had never walked on ice-covered snow before, I would have no other way of describing it. There is nothing to compare it to. You step and sink about a quarter inch, and it sort of crinkles. At home, some winters there would be a foot or more of snow under an ice layer, and if you stepped too heavily, you would sink down quite a ways! Well, I turn my head to get smacked by the stinging snow and to see my footprints. Strangely, half of them are puddles. The snow holds two secrets then: beneath the ice is water. Weird. Never seen anything like it ever before. Up ahead I notice large slush puddles. I step in one, and realize I should avoid doing that in the future when possible. Deep, several inches. My boots are solid rubber for about 5 inches, but my snowpants and full-length peacoat could drag and that could get messy.
        I look up at the river. Holy fuck, a bald eagle is perched on a tall tree. I didn't know there were any in the arb! [Carleton's nature reserve I was walking through] "Oh my God!" I say as it flies off, leading me down the path. It is huge, and graceful, and I had seen picture of eagles and had always thought they were kind of ugly things, but it was beautiful and magestic. Grey and white with the confident yellow beak. And the wingspan. I will never forget that encounter. I looked up, it was looking down at me. We, well, it sounds silly when I think of trying to explain it, but we communicated before it took off. It was a proud eagle, not at all afraid of me, more disdained perhaps that I had interrupted its enjoyment of the storm.
        So I trudge foreward, in the direction of the eagle. The path splits to accomodate a non-maintained trail, only wide enough for one person. It follows the river more, so I take it, hoping to see my guide again. But I realize I'd rather visit the other part of the arb today after a little while so start cutting back to the other path. I walk through what in the summer is a small field of tall grasses, but right now is a snow-covered swamp. It is deep. At least 6 inches in parts, and I try to avoid getting wet like the plague. I feel a little guilty walking through the field, breaking twigs off the occasional bush and just destroying some of the grasses. Because of the ice, twigs snap at the lightest touch. I find that walking on the vegetation ensures at least a couple inches of clearage, and most of the time a complete avoidance of water. It's an incredible distance to the other path, maybe an eigth of a mile. I don't think I was even on the small path more than a quarter mile...
        10:00am. Back to the path. I stop to look at some plants, look at the berries in their balls of glass, snap twigs and leaves with a flick of the thumb. I feel guilty for that too, a little bit. I choose my fork to let me go out to the farthest reaches of the arb, on the advice of both my desires and a little sparrow ahead of me. Still being guided. It's comforting. At the top of the hill, I head left and step on some deceptive ice. CRACK! and four inches of water underneath. I step off the path onto some grass and watch. The ice crack has spread about 10 feet down the path, and water is slowly seeping onto the surface, changing the texture and color. After a moment, I crack it again and watch the traces repeat the same game. It's pretty. A bit farther down, the wind gets really intense, and I face it to fix my scarf. I am at the one spot on the hill with neither trees nor high grasses to block the wind (coming from down the hill), and it's even stronger than behind the library. I lean way foreward and am still threatened to move backwards. It's a powerful, magical feeling, and I stay there for quite some time. I can see the blurs of trees pretty far off when the snow is light, and almost nothing when it's heavy. Finally, I move on, take a right at the fork, and head out into the grasslands. There's lots of slush puddles, huge, unavoidable ones, deep and meanacing and yellow. They almost look soiled in places. I know, after a particularly large one, that I have crossed some sort of threshold that no one else will want to cross, that even if someone else ventures into the arb this morning, they would not come this far.
        Beyond the grasslands, off the path, there is a farmer's field, and the snow is like fog out there, blowing thickly, eliminating visibility, playing, blowing, swirling. The snow clumps make the wind visible, sort of like giving speech to a cello. I can see the personality of the gusts, watch them tyrranize the field, possess it, opress any hopes of peace. I backtrack a few steps and decide to experience it.
        Out in the fields, the wind is much much stronger then when I was in the grass area. No three-foot break now! It pummels me, juggles me between its hands, cackles manically when I try to fix my scarf during a respite. I am more than half under its control. In the field, there are many fewer slush puddles, many more dry ice patches. Very little snow stays in any one place with winds like this! However, I find a large patch of ice with white marks *under* it. Air pockets! Water! I crack it with a step and watch the bubbles get agitated. Another crack, more power, get some water to surface. After a minute or so, I look farther down the fields. The wind is stronger there because there's more field before the high grasses start. I keep going out. Now the winds are intense. I can still control myself in them, however, and the snow isn't as bad as I thought, so I go farther still and mount a hill. There's a higher hill ahead, so I climb that. Finally, the highest hill, the most open space in front of me, not even any trees at the edge of the hill where I was before, on the path. Nothing to stop the wind. The wind. It blows, and my leaning into it is imperative, and a struggle. Can words capture those five minutes or so when I am standing out on that hill? I was impervious to any bodily cold at this point, but the walk to the hill froze the right side of my face, and I had the scarf way high over my right cheek and ear. Now my entire face is being shot with the machine gun of snow, a constant spray, and I wrap the scarf all the way up to my eyes and look out.
        As with the eagle, there was communication. This time, however, is a monologue. No, not the "screeching of the wind, howling in my ears," as if I would have my ears exposed at this point! I instead feel the discourse. I feel it in the strength of the gusts, how much snow is in them, where they hit, if they make all my clothes feel like a single worn t-shirt or not, it it makes it through my mittens. I pause, turn around to pull my hat down over most of my eyes. This is the only way I am able to keep them open when I turn back around.
        What does the wind tell me? No words, no formal thoughts, or contemplations or conclusions or questions. Just an emotion. Power. Twisted power, threatening power, mean, tortuous, hateful, prideful power. The wind is gloating in its power, enjoying how it can sweep over the fields like a paintbrush full to brimming with paint over a canvas. It is reveling in its ability to blow without end over the icy fields, the fields it made icy. How it can fire the snow around, sculpt it in the air and force it cruelly wherever it wants. It shares this feeling with me, and I'm sure if such a feeling allowed for kindness in the telling, it would be kind. But it is not kind, neither the emotion nor the wind, and in gloating, it pummels me, fires snow at me, ices my face, mittens, coat, everything, for I am just another part of the field.
        Finally, I think my face is going numb, and I head back. The left side of my face is now being tortured. Ice thrown upon it, tender skin assulted by the wind. Looking at the path, I realize I am perhaps a quarter mile into the fields. When I get to where I think it is, I can't find my cracked ice. It's a big field, and I was moving around. Back where it meets the path, i can barely see my footprints in the slush. Scary. I could disappear without a trace. No one would ever know I had been here, except for where I was in the slush, and within an hour or so of me being there. Back on the path, I see my own foot print, then another one up ahead. Except I never made it that far. The rattling of the branches and the squeaking of the trees makes it sound like there's always someone nearby, but I gave up that thought long ago. I keep going, and see another little bird in the grasses. It is really near to me and doing a very private little bird dance, hopping about, trying to find where it needs to go. It would never show me or anyone else these personal activities if it weren't for the extreme conditions of the storm. The footprints are back again, up ahead. Going in the opposite direction. I am no longer the only person out in the arb. How fresh are they? They take the same forks I was planning on taking, so I decide that they are my new guide. Out in the more woodsy part, the wind is minimal and there are actually several inches of snow on the ground, slightly drifted. Then the footprints start to fade, then they are faint, then they are gone. Alone again. I measured back a bit by their distance that it was a runner, moving pretty fast. I wonder what he thought when suddenly there were footprints, mine, in the slush. All of a sudden, marks in the snow leading...but he would forget when they started, just that they appeared and that their creator up and disappeared somewhere. I doubt he saw me. I must have been on the hill at that point, and when running, even without the blinding snow and wind, it is unusual to look anywhere but the path.
        So I am someone else's enigma. Judging by how quickly they faded, he was very recent. Crinkle crinkle. There is a tree, maybe 10 years old, with a protective fence along most of its trunk, that is leaning way too far into the path. I push at it, play with it, toss it into the wind a little (mostly tall grasses again). The fencing is very solid plastic, mesh, and covered in ice. I crinkle it and know it is not living, I feel no guilt. I wrinkle it and crumple it and the ice chips off, flakes away. I try to do the same to the wind-facing side, but it won't budge. Too much ice. After realigning the tree with the stick with it in the fencing, so it doesn't lean quite so much, I head on.
        I hear geese overhead and watch them. Poor things. The wind isn't so bad right where I am, but it looks awful up there. They are facing the wind, but not really moving, just staying almost directly overhead. One barks a suggestion, others reply. They still face the wind but now are moving sideways, sort of moving foreward, then backwards. They try regrouping, someone offers another suggestion, little progress is made. Eventually, one decides to just face sideways, they finally form a 'V', and very quickly fade into the snowy sky. A little too quickly for comfort. I keep moving.
        My backwards guide, the footprints, reappear and disappear, and I keep going. Out here is where, on a quite summer day, you can't hear any cars. Just nature. It's one of the few places I've ever been to like that, so I pause, and because of the wind, I am pretected from all foreign sounds, encased in nature. Away from it all, from last night, from tomorrow. At peace. Cold, blown, snowed, iced, happy to see all the white and the glittering and the trees and the little glassed berries and the occasional bird. I grab an oak leaf still somehow clinging to its tree, break it off. It looks like candy, so I start to nibble. I find I can crunch the ice and swallow before the strange texture of the leaf kicks in. I get in a few bites before dropping it.
        Once again walking, I see something remarkable. People! Two men in their 30s, running through the arb. I grow nervous with anticipation, as if I am about to meet a celebrity. I keep walking, blush, look down, glance up, almost there! Look down again, why am I shy? Then I look up and say "hi" and the one smiles in greeting back, and the other, well, he looks at my boots in concerned approval. I keep walking. After I am sure they are past, I stop to look down and see my boots for myself. My whole appearance is rather irregular and striking. First is the hat. Everyone loves the hat. Off-white, realistic looking fake fur in a Russian-style oval, flat topped, thick and tall cuff. It comes down to my eyebrows. It is large and unusual but somehow it works on me. Then we have the coat. A huge, straight, dark grey peacoat with three large buttons and three large "for show" buttons down the front. It goes to my ankels. I say "grey" and not "gray" because that's what it is. It looks promising and classy. Under it, but you can't really tell because it's so long, are my black snow pants. Then we have the scarf. It is, in contrast to the sophisticated tones of the coat, bright bright blue. Playful, cheery, fun. My mittens, the visible parts, are a vibrant shade of pea-green, also a stand out. And my boots, and killer part of any outfit, are the old-school, solid rubber flourescent pink that only I would wear. And I wear them with everything. Before the hat, everyone told me they loved the boots. People notice them. People who would normally only smile at me in passing would stop me to tell me they loved them. They're wild. So I look a bit unusual, and the runner noticed my boots.
        But now I see why. There is a gigantic slush puddle ahead, twenty feet wide. The runners' footprints tell a tale of woe through many other slush puddles, sometimes 5 inches deep, icy water, just running shoes! large gaping holes in ice, yellow ponds violated by their marks. But this yellow pond, this one is huge. Too huge. My original guide had gone through it, but not these guys. They had dipped into a field on the side, so I follow them. Out in the field, I loose their path. Guidless. Perhaps they started in the field? But no drifts of snow further out are disturbed. The footprints just started from nowhere. I look back at the last one I found. There it was. And no more. Well, I remember seeing their marks earlier on the path, past the pond, so I keep looking. Finally I see them ahead. There are many, in fact endless ways to cut back to the path, but I decide to be faithful, like a daughter lowingly following the wishes of her father, and step on exactly the same places they did. Often, using their footprints, even. Back on the path, I realize why he looked at my boots. Were I wearing anything else, he would have warned me. But he saw them and probably thought "now there's the right idea. Wish I had thought of that, my feet are freezing. I bet hers are dry." In fact one was a little damp from the first marsh I cut through, somehow the snowpants got some water in there, but never cold.
        Finally, and coniferous forest starts. No more adventures, I think to myself, now just the coniferous trees, the point farthest out, and the path going home again. When there's no wind, you can hear the freeway over here. But I get in the woods and realize I have come upon one of the best parts of the whole arb. Even on still days, the trees creek when they rub one another, talking to each other slowly but with poise. Today, they are electric. It's a constant chatter, pierced by exclamations during the gusts. Furthermore, it is raining needles. Not needles like you find on the forest floor, but clumps still attatched to the branches, little balls of green fluff. I watch it come down all around me, like green, organic hail. There's a bench-like tree on the ground a bit off the path so I sit down and watch and listen.
        The trees aren't talking, they're dancing, swaying, singing. Letting the wind pass through them, weave between them, and it excites them, like magic. They shiver at its touch like feeling the finger of a lover tracing their spine. It feeds them, it is everything they've ever wanted, and then some, and they shudder with glee! But it is too much. They think they are equal to the wind, but they are still looking up to it, still under its power, and they, like me in the field, are being injured. They are bleeding twigs and needles, slowly dying in their exstacy. A few have caught on, but the rest are so consumed with pleasure that it is impossible to warn them. And at every gust more clumps fall, tinkling their ice-coated selves through the ice-coated branches, fighting their way down to the ground.
        I have walked a bit farther and paused at places where there are many clumps on the path, hoping to be graced with contact. But next to me I hear a very loud thump of a particulary heavy branch, and decide that perhaps it is a little risky.
        At the final distant point, I decide for a change not to follow my guides out of the arb to the freeway, and instead take a left to start on the path back. But there the two men's marks are! Again backwards. They are fresh, so I assume they had just finished their loop and were heading out. So in fact, they became my new guide, and I was still following them. Comforting.
        11:10. I should be able to make it back just by noon. Perfect. No more time for adventures. Up the hill, into the oak forest, down a hill, up a hill. The trees lean way over the path, and I try fixing some of them, but there's just no time. A chain is hanging from a branch, and I loosen it, link by link, cracking the ice. It's satisfying somehow, like picking peeling paint off a wall. Eventually I tire of this and replace it.
        Trudge trudge, crinkle crinkle. Suddenly there are mroe footprits, going in my direction. Fresh ones. Huh? I look down, right where they start. Two people had come out, turned around, headed back. Hm. No interesting landmark or anything at that place. Just where to turn around. The runners' marks are faded by here anyways, and these two walkers seem just as capable of leading me where I want to go. I discover I am once again next to the river. I search in vain for the eagle, but the factory is really loud here, and a dog has been barking for the past 10 minutes. It is funny how I can watch some trees up ahead, a barely-discernable brown against the dull gray of the sky, but it's not the sky, its the snow between them and more trees. Then, tehy come more into focus and the next rank of trees behind them is visible. The rest is blank. The artist was too lazy to draw it in. Just nothing. Kind of discomforting that there is *nothing* beyond the trees. No sky, really, no color, no hope for a cloud or a branch or anything. Just...nothing. I look back down at the stings along the path.
        A few other details, and much less time. 11:30. I grab a milkweed pod, split open and frozen, and contemplate it as I walk. Most things I pick up I stick in my mouth to clean off the snow so I can stare into the icy depths, berries magnified under the glass casing. But this, this would terrify me without the ice. Even through my mtitens I would shudder to touch it. Cotton filling visible through the split, hairy tendrils sticking out, spiky scaly cover, cleft open by some force of will of the evil trapped inside, which will normally threaten any who came near, if not for the ice pausing it, and pausing everything.
        But today I am safe, and I put it to rest farther down the path. Now I take the fork back to the path I had already been on. There's a lot of slush, and I look for my marks, but I can't find them. None. Perhaps I was in the marsh? No. I had been here. Nothing. I was a disappeared object, an unsolved mystery, while I was out there. Later I find where I think I had hopped out the other marsh, but no footprints, nothing to tell a worried mother where I had been before they lost me. Then, a beautiful yellow pond, very large and very deerp-looking. Most remarkable, a brown semi-circle in the middle of it, like a rust stain from a carriage wheel. A step around it, play with another part of the pond, keep going.
        Back towards the arb entrance are more footprints. No one going in my direction ever made it through any slush puddles, however, everyone scared off by their wetness, their surprising hand that reaches around your ankle when you make the mistake of disturbing them. And then I am back on the road, heading home, 11:55. Not cold, not warm, but iced. Sung to by the wind, privy to the private lives of birds, witness to the secret addictive wind dance of the pine trees, partner, for an instant, to the eagle. They are my secrets, for no one else would imagine going out on a day like today. I can't imagine not going out.