Snow, at Last

We’ve had an anomalous winter–the warmest in Minnesota’s history. This has been difficult for me to take. Day after day of brown vistas. But from a practical standpoint, it is hard to defend grief over a lack of snow. A snow-covered world is inconvenient, taxing, dangerous. But snow is also a reason many of us live here in the north. When I finished my Ph.D. back in 1995 and went on the market for a university position, my wife and I agreed we would not look for jobs that fell below the “snow line”–the latitude below which winters were snowless. You can imagine how excited we were to get a job in Minnesota.

Why do I love snow? It provides opportunity for sport–pond hockey, skiing, dogsledding, and the like. I used to be a big cross-country skier when I was younger, and I loved being able to fly along snowy trails. More recently I’ve taken up snowshoeing, and the slower experience of walking through a silent snow-covered forest is deeply satisfying. But these experiences aren’t main the reason I miss a white landscape. There is something almost metaphysical about snow–especially the first snow of the season. It is connected with that primordial feeling, first apprehended in childhood, that the landscape has a spiritual meaning. To me, the joy and awe a child experiences upon awakening to a snow-covered landscape signifies an openness to the world and, simultaneously, an openness to the depth of feeling the world can evoke. A willingness to be moved by a perceived connection between inner and outer states. A child gives this easily, but it’s an openness and a willingness we often lose as we get older.

From my new book, EMPIRE (Shipwreckt Books, 2023)