Snowshoeing

Yesterday afternoon Tom and I went on a snowshoe hike across our yard into the woods and then down onto the snow-laden stream bed. Breaking trail is hard work, but our eventual goal is to get to the bog at the end of the stream, a mile or so down the waterway. For the past several days we've been chipping away at the trail, on each outing stomping down a few more meters of untouched snow.

The stream bed is gloriously beautiful--overhung with cedars, punctuated by rifts of still-running water. The sound of the water bubbles up into the silence, into the trudge and squeak of our snowshoes, into the sudden squawk of a woodpecker. Animal tracks--squirrel, rabbit, deer--circle the open drinking holes, and now our tracks wind among them as well.

Compared to skiing, snowshoeing is an unglamorous activity. Instead of gliding elegantly, we stump along like dwarves heading home from the mine. In order to avoid stepping on our own shoes, stopping short, and immediately pitching headfirst into a drift (which for numerous reasons involving terrain and dogs does happen pretty often anyway), we have to walk like bow-legged cowboys. This awkward trudge turns out to be surprisingly healthful for my hip joints, which have a tendency to seize up after too much sitting and driving and standing around at my writing desk.

I have written only one poem about snowshoeing--"Dog in Winter," the sonnet that was reprinted in the Portland Press-Herald last weekend. As I was trudging along yesterday, I was wondering if the stolid heavy rhythm of the activity--chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk--makes it difficult for me to relax into any sense of poetic line, for certainly the visual patterns (cedars, snowdrifts, ice etchings, current flow) and the sounds/silences beyond myself are immensely evocative.

I don't think of myself as a nature poet, yet this place I live in--the clumsy trudge of my snowshoes, the trickle of thawed ice, the scream of the woodpecker, the quiet--this is my keystone. I hear it, I see it, I don't always understand how to absorb it into myself, into my work, into the decisions I must make about how to grow old.

In Winter Music, composer John Luther Adams writes,

Maybe art is the house we're always building for ourselves, somewhere between the stark truths of the world as it is and our longing for the world as we dream it.