January, Newfoundland
By Tim Marsh
This is the season they warned us about. The time of year, they said, when you’ll be sorry you’re not in California, staring fatuously at a hibiscus flower or watching the breezy rock-a-bye of a Mexican fan palm. December inclined to be quiet and tactful in Newfoundland, but January brought a bleak return to punitive form. We were warned of the year’s first big storm by several of our neighbors, and on their word made the customary preparations: gathered our tools by the door—our shovels, blowers, scrapers and sweeps; brought out our most formidable attire, best boots, thickest mittens. But of course there is no way to nobly prepare for an unconscionable invasion. If you’re smart, you flee; if you have nowhere to go, you burrow and evade.
The morning began under the usual steel. Not a sky in the cloud.
First signs of reckoning appeared shortly after breakfast: a rough lick of wind and sleet out of the north. At 10:30 we noticed turmoil in the pine tops, shivering in the bushes, wrinkles in the puddles. We heard the flyers slapping the phone poles and several loose or barely fastened contraptions begann to clang and toll—an ornery crescendo of which not one of the audience members was pleased to hear.
At 11:00 we ran to our car to grab a few books and were met with disturbing news from our neighbor, who told us about Holyrood and Foxtrap, both stomped flat and swallowed whole, devoured in white, and we shook our heads and cocked an ear to the oracle wind, which foretold nothing we didn’t already know.
Back inside we drew a fire, put on coffee. We listened to the house and tried to isolate the boards that groaned loudest against the gusts. We did some reading.
At noon the wind turned into a sequence of detonation gasps, the skies opened, and the snow galloped down upon the province like the fabulous hordes of Kahn. The veterans found it old-hat, a familiar tantrum sure to run its course. Others stood by the window and marveled at this interlude of lunatic despotism so abruptly and maliciously visited upon the earth—how quickly it trounced all cheer, the frenetic lust to punish it showed, as though it were fulfilling a duty with a strict and impossible deadline.
We stayed inside much of the day. Our mothers warned us to keep away from wild dogs. But when we heard the mournful bleeps of the snowplow, we were shamed by the vigor of its driver, carrying on despite the conditions, and emerged on the excuse of some trivial errand to prove we were not so easily dominated.
The winds rose to meet our rebellion; the wild drifts drove against us. When the wind relented, each breath hung in the air like a white balloon containing a vision of a warm, bygone affair. We found others like us—we were heartened to find ourselves part of a community built to withstand. But our satisfaction faded meekly to a death when we saw the stooped and trudging way they performed their perseverance, and our own demoralized hunch reflected in the dark windows of the shops.
Suddenly the day turned into a public flogging. The wind became an implement of punishment, a multi-tailed whipping device that lashed the skin of our noses, tore at our cheeks, aspired to lacerate anything pink and exposed.
We made an obligation to haste, completed our errand without a single courteous noise to the clerk, and with the weight of our stupid insolence heavy in our chests, started home through the same abuse, head bowed, shoulders bundled, cursing at every gust, no longer interested in making a statement or proving anything to ourselves or our oppressor—who, if she was impressed by anything, was surely only impressed by the absurdity of our pride.
Now it’s late and all of Newfoundland is dark, everywhere—dark, cold and wet—and our windows run as though their glass panes bear the weeping of an injured child. We tried our best to avoid our neighbor, who’d only tell us more we didn’t want to hear about our luck, but soon after we came home he delivered fresh rumors of 40 centimeters overnight, power outage, and the cancelation of education throughout the land.
And so it seems we’ve been thrown back into the flameshadows for an indeterminate time. Our children are without their schools and the juice that feeds their diversions, and we will have to humor them with stories by the fire. Even now you can hear the plows plodding through the midnight streets like slavish pachyderms, heaping banks of grimy snow on top of our cars. Tomorrow we will all be excavators. Our footprints will be three inches deep.
But we have no right to complain. We made our choice. It was just a shock, this afternoon, to see how good California looked from across the room of North America, dressed in sun on Spanish-tiled roofs, barefoot as always—like a wonderful brisk girl from our past, whose arm we once held in our own, and for some inscrutable reason let go.
——
Tim Marsh is currently on a folklore fellowship at Memorial University, Newfoundland. In the last year his work has appeared or been accepted in several literary and academic magazines, including The Crab Orchard Review, The Nashwaak Review, The Newfoundland Quarterly, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Paragon and The Oregon Literary Review.
Photograph appears courtesy and copyright of the author.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under Non-Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
