But For Undistracted
People Winter Is One Long Delight Of The Eye.
In other lands one knows
the snow as a nuisance that comes and goes, and is sorely man-handled
and messed at the last.
Here it lies longer on the ground than any
crop - from November to April sometimes - and for three months life goes
to the tune of sleigh-bells, which are not, as a Southern visitor once
hinted, ostentation, but safeguards. The man who drives without them is
not loved. The snow is a faithful barometer, foretelling good sleighing
or stark confinement to barracks. It is all the manure the stony
pastures receive; it cloaks the ground and prevents the frost bursting
pipes; it is the best - I had almost written the only - road-maker in the
States. On the other side it can rise up in the night and bid the people
sit still as the Egyptians. It can stop mails; wipe out all time-tables;
extinguish the lamps of twenty towns, and kill man within sight of his
own door-step or hearing of his cattle unfed. No one who has been
through even so modified a blizzard as New England can produce talks
lightly of the snow. Imagine eight-and-forty hours of roaring wind, the
thermometer well down towards zero, scooping and gouging across a
hundred miles of newly fallen snow. The air is full of stinging shot,
and at ten yards the trees are invisible. The foot slides on a reef,
polished and black as obsidian, where the wind has skinned an exposed
corner of road down to the dirt ice of early winter. The next step ends
hip-deep and over, for here an unseen wall is banking back the rush of
the singing drifts. A scarped slope rises sheer across the road. The
wind shifts a point or two, and all sinks down, like sand in the
hour-glass, leaving a pot-hole of whirling whiteness. There is a lull,
and you can see the surface of the fields settling furiously in one
direction - a tide that spurts from between the tree-boles. The hollows
of the pasture fill while you watch; empty, fill, and discharge anew.
The rock-ledges show the bare flank of a storm-chased liner for a
moment, and whitening, duck under. Irresponsible snow-devils dance by
the lee of a barn where three gusts meet, or stagger out into the open
till they are cut down by the main wind. At the worst of the storm there
is neither Heaven nor Earth, but only a swizzle into which a man may be
brewed. Distances grow to nightmare scale, and that which in the summer
was no more than a minute's bare-headed run, is half an hour's gasping
struggle, each foot won between the lulls. Then do the heavy-timbered
barns talk like ships in a cross-sea, beam working against beam. The
winter's hay is ribbed over with long lines of snow dust blown between
the boards, and far below in the byre the oxen clash their horns and
moan uneasily.
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