Snow and more snow, drifting down, blowing sideways, drifting again. Not a lot, but steady, enough for the machines to rumble out along the sidewalks. March is often like this here. I’m appreciating it, actually, feeling how ephemeral it is, both for the moment and in the long run as the planet warms. Enjoy it now.
I’m sitting in our bump-out living room, windows all around, reading Endurance, the story of Ernest Shackleton’s voyage to Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent. There I am, my ship suddenly trapped in the pack ice, watching helplessly as the specially built barkentine with its seven foot thick keel is completely crushed as if it were cardboard. There I am with the 27 other crew and the sled dogs, striking out on foot across the ice boulders, the tundra of ice.
I do love watching people figure it out, improvise. I love humans in nature, surviving. This is a good story. Presidents could take lessons from Shackleton, the way he keeps his crew working together. The way he stays fully in charge without becoming a dictator.
But what I really want to think about is snow, how it encloses, how it sends me downstairs to the library to pick a book I wouldn’t have thought of under other circumstances. Snow’s ruminating quality, the way it covers the delicate details so you have to see broader, wider. You’re not thinking so much about yourself as about the hugeness. Imagine Shackleton’s men, looking at snow and ice as far as they could see, and further.
Kids at one of the Fresh Air camps
What would the men and women, trapped by poverty in the inner city, be like if they had to figure out how to survive in the wilderness? There are reservoirs in people that cry out to be tapped into. Otherwise, a rot sets in. Drugs, for example, their pitiful substitute for real adventure. I’ve been donating for many years to an organization called Fresh Air Fund, that gives New York City kids a trip out of the city to find out about the rest of the world. There are host families as well as camps. I think I started donating when I read a story of kids, bussed for the first time out of the city, who asked the name of those large animals in the field, and were told that’s where milk comes from.
Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, being crushed by the ice.
Adventure’s a human need. When the continent’s been mapped and the bottom of the sea’s been videoed, there’s the sky, the quanta, the recesses of the mind. The books. The ones that make the mind work, not the ones that lull the mind to sleep.
My synapses are getting a workout. I read Patricia Bosworth‘s The Men in My Life about the Actor’s Studio in the days of Marilyn Monroe, Elia Kazan, Doris Day, Tennessee Williams, and then I take off for the Antarctic! I’m continuing to have this stubborn resistance to writing poems. What’s that about? My mind’s spent so many years pulling and pulling out of itself what it could. Now it wants to do nothing but greedily fill itself up.
Filling in gaps. That’s what it feels like. Nonfiction, memoir. While I was dreaming along in my self-absorbed growing up, caught in my own angst, what have other people’s lives been like? The nitty-gritty of them. The prose of them. It’s interesting, the changes in me at the moment. There is some subterranean shift. I wonder if I’ll write better poems, if I’ll quit writing poems, if I’ll quit writing. This of course is only interesting to me. But you may at least find some sympathetic comfort in watching me wobble along on my bicycle.
The P.S. . . Snow’s almost disappeared overnight. Spring’s official though not actual.