Winter Holds Its Breath

Rainer Maria Rilke was right—the stillest of days these truly are—here in this bleak forest of stoic giants shuddering under the weight of snow. Squat, matronly pines and the ghastly shadows of birches keep watch in the night. I feel like an intrusion in this quivering, inky blackness. My words are deadened with the silence of snow. But it is in this mindful night that the forest comes alive. Although proud and deceitfully lifeless, what creatures slumber unseen behind that sloping bank, beneath the drooping fronds of the bushes half-buried in funeral robes of velvety white? What lush, forgotten summers do the bowed heads of those proud conifers now mourn?

Squeaking through the crystalline darkness on yet another Mihuta Grimm family vacation, I gather the fragments of those languid road-trip days of my eternal childhood, when my parents toted my brother and me around the country. Ben and I played endless games of magnetic chess (I always lost) and Uno and gin rummy and license plate bingo in the backseat while mom read AAA travel guides aloud from up front and dad pointed out ski trails traversing the distant mountains. Leafy shadows coquettishly patterned our bruised-as-a-rotten-banana legs and cut-off corduroys as a reel of landscapes strung by our aquamarine minivan, a shuttle of middle-class civilization, thrust into the wilderness.

My insatiable wanderlust is not my fault—I blame my parents. My family perpetually wandered West or migrated North for the summer months: the Canada Boundary Waters, Prince Edward Island, Maine, New Brunswick, the Adirondack Mountains and Tupper Lake, the race tracks at Saratoga, the gateway at St. Louis, Glacier, Yellowstone, Nevada (but never Vegas nor Reno), Colorado Springs, San Francisco and up the coast to Seattle, the North Dakota Badlands, Sun Valley Idaho, Nebraska’s endless monotony, Jackson Hole and the Tetons, and both sloping sides of the continent. Our minivan teeter-tottered over both sides of the Continental Divide and I’ve swum in both oceans. But I (ever-inadequate, little-ol’ me) remember grumbling over peanut butter & jelly or pork & beans on paper plates in endless smoky campgrounds. The yellow K.O.A. triangle meant real flush toilets and a gift shop—bison hide (fake, of course) tom-tom drums in Wyoming, polished volcanic stones in Utah, cedar wood jewelry boxes in Idaho, ballpoint pens with floating moose and canoes suspended in a plastic vial that never really wrote. Charcoaled campground signs swinging from a mailbox painted with Monarchs and blue bonnets promised mushrooms in the showers and tree frogs in the sinks (Outer Banks, North Carolina.) At the time I hardly hallowed the land my suntanned feet traversed, and for this, I resent my selfish youth.

We would habitually rise from our downy slumber with the shadows still slowly creeping up the sides of mountains that loomed above a canopy of aspens and white pines. Now I long for those mornings in the mountains, when the camp stove percolator murmured with the unmistakable sound of boiling tea water at summer’s still nippy dawn. Or daybreak on the Great Plains, the pale flesh of the morning sky an aching shade of yellow chiffon. Or the shrouded sun rising over the Pacific at low tide, two placid eternities colliding at the slate-grey horizon. The mornings I’ve seen could rival any Thomas Cole. All those vagabond years, all those ambling summers . . .

And here in winter’s black stillness—crisp, cold, menacing—I think of them, those suntanned and freckled summers. On stagnant winter nights when nothing seems to move but an incidental avalanche set off by a startled cardinal, I am clutched in a troubling internal freeze. My heart seems to beat slower, weary. These glassy midnights make me long for spring—those mountain springs, strangely delayed by altitude, when crystal streams that still bear a bitter chill reminiscent of winter come gurgling from a rocky throat in the middle of July. Mountain springs are still frosty in the mornings although buttercups already toss their blonde heads in the minty ditches.

Oh, how beautiful it is in the Adirondacks in the winter. But the glassy precipices of waterfalls, the skeletal branches clothed in white, the banks sharply drifted like a surprised puff in the ditches, and the steep-roofed cabins pulling sloping snow over their eaves like a stocking hat—all have an air of waiting. They hold their breath in suspension like two armies standing face-to-face in anticipation of the inevitable first shot. What icy dagger will fall first? Which stream will break through months of suffocation with a hopeful, watery gurgle? How many bruised snowdrops will wither before one brave, delicate head peaks through the frost?

These winter nights are so long—the twilight startles the southwestern sky at a quarter to four. But from this heated cabin, where my father reads an old newspaper in his socks and my brother and mother have fallen into a deep, exhausted slumber, I look out of the frosted window and see that although the forest hibernates with me, I can be assured that it won’t last forever. Until then I’ll bow my head with the sad, sad sycamores and let the patterns of falling snow say my bedtime prayers for me (the moon listens to the flakes more than it ever paid heed to me).