snow

seeing the snow in canada was an amazing experience, as much as anything in this world can be if you have the opportunity to encounter it with open eyes. i’m interested in that kind of interaction with the world, in a more everyday sense. even if it’s ordinary, even if you’ve seen it before, you can still see it anew. everything has the potential to be a quiet, tiny wonder. i love those moments when you realise how profound and miraculous everything is. the world opens up, time disappears, there are no words. i suspect that everything is actually like that, all the time, but we learn to shut off from it in order to function – you know, to get from one place to the other, and to not lose our minds.

here are some things i wrote about the snow from my notebook and a couple of letters to people.

The first time I saw snow, I was on the train going through Saskatchewan. The train lumbered past miles of paddocks, flat fields of stubble, and shallow pools of water. It was a beautiful clear day outside, big blue sky. The sun is so bright in the prairies. It flashed off every tiny puddle of water hidden in the scruffy grass, showing which path the tractor had taken, or where the cows had walked on soft ground. Our movement through the landscape revealed all these drawings in light that appeared for a second then fell away into the past.

The first snow i saw was just scattered lightly on the ground at first, just sort of gathered behind tussocks of grass. And you know, I actually thought it was salt. Honestly. I don’t know why, just that that was the only thing that came to mind immediately. And there was more of it, and it got thicker and in wider patches, and I thought “now why would they fuck up their fields like this?” Yeah, it was strange, but it actually took me quite some time to get it. It was only later when we passed some pools of water and I realised that each of the branches and fence posts and grasses sticking out had a little ring of ice around them, just at the point where they pierced the surface of the water. It was freezing outside. It kind of spun my head around to realise all of this. And the snow on the ground got thicker and and the ponds started to be frozen over and I couldn’t believe I was seeing this.

I also saw the most beautiful thing, a forest of small skeletal trees or bushes, all bare with very fine branches. The branches were completely coated with ice. The sun shone brightly from behind the trees and lit up the ice, like a forest of glass, which glittered and changed as the train moved past.

I had a day before I was due in Calgary, so on Saturday I took a bus out to the mountains and stayed there for a night. The next morning I got up early and went for a walk. It was so incredible. There was no one else around. I was heading up this trail, and nobody had been there yet that day, so there was a perfect blanket of snow on the ground, with animal tracks that had started to fill in but that was it. What an amazing feeling to walk across this. There is a moment I remember clearly where the sun shone directly through where the trees parted for the trail, and illuminated the snow crystals on the ground. As I walked, these glittering particles would jump out at me, reflecting colours of the rainbow like little prisms. It felt like walking through a dream, everything soft and vivid and solitary.

While I was walking up the trail, snow started falling out of the sky – just sparsely at first, but then more and more, in big pieces. I caught one in my hand and for the first time I saw a snowflake – just like the ones I’d made in paper as a kid – clear and delicate and perfect for a second before it melted and vanished. This just blew my mind! I guess we all know what snowflakes are supposed to look like, but I kind of assumed you needed a microscope, or a magnifying glass at least. I didn’t realise they were so big you could see them, and see that they are for real! There were some bigger clumps falling out of the sky, and when they landed in my hand they burst, scattering little snowflakes everywhere, each one of them unique and amazing. I could not believe how special, sublime and precious all of this was.

There are some things that you cannot truly accept until you are faced with them. So now I understand…now I believe in snowflakes.

I remember the first night it started snowing in Calgary, I was staying with some lovely students from ACAD, Heidi and Greg, who live on the 23rd floor of an apartment building downtown. It was quite late at night when the snow started. I kept going back out on to the balcony every so often to see how it was all going. It just looked like rain in my hand, and it looked like a cloud of flashing light under the streetlamp far below. It took hours for all those tiny particles to collect on the black bitumen below enough to show up, and to cling to each other and not melt into the road. It was so incremental, but there was enough of it, and it happened.

The next morning, the falling snow was so tiny, it had more of a 3-dimensional form, not quite like a flake but more like jacks, almost. When I walked out to catch the train that night, they had become flakes. I could see it just from the way the light reflected off them as they fell, it was really different. Under the streetlights, they reflected fleetingly colours like green and purple, even from the ground as I walked over it. And the river kept trying to freeze over. It looked amazing. It was a constantly changing thing, slowing, solidifying, then shaking off the torpor and melting into hundreds of little icebergs. In the evenings when it froze all this mist rose off it, just like everything else downtown – all of the smokey buildings in Calgary releasing the steam from their heating systems.

On the days when the sun comes out, the light on the snow is so beautiful in the afternoons – a strange thick orange light, and the shadows it casts are blue. I’m in love with snow. I love its gentle purity when it has fallen and no-one’s walked across it yet – the rounded edges where it’s piled up creating forms that no human could make, that are only created by the slow accumulation of millions of falling particles landing and clinging to each other. I love the tracks through it too, all those great lines and drawings, records of movement and short-term history. And I love the layering that happens when tracks get snowed over, then drawn again, then covered. When the black bitumen shows through the snow, in the shape of footprints or tyre tracks, it just takes a gentle snowfall to turn all these grey, like a half-tone. Then you get fresh tracks which are black, and this process keeps on happening until you have all these gradients telling a story on the ground – a story that fades out of existence on one end whilst continually being created on the other.

Of course, I’m obsessed with the idea of a palimpsest, in any shape or form. And I like to think about our actions and rhythms being like a big drawing in space.

Rick told me that when his grandmother first came to North America from Brazil and saw it snowing for the first time, she started to cry. The other thing that made her cry was seeing for the first time people in their cars making way for an ambulance to go past.

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