Last week there were ice floes on the Housatonic. I watched them grind down the bank beneath Lake Zoar and make their way out to sea to bob among the buoys of the steel-cold Sound. I watched them from Route 34 and nearly ran my car off the road, craning my neck (manic, looking for deeper snow, playing with latitude and aspect, skis rattling in the backseat) over the guardrails of river bridges: more ice floes, solid ice in flatwater stretches. If I’d made it as far as Kent there might have been enough to ski without scraping my battered bases on Connecticut schist. I turned around at Woodbury.
This week it’s cold again. Not the same bitter cold, but enough that the snowline is south of Long Island. With any luck, today’s Nor-Easter will leave us with five or six thick inches of snow, and tomorrow the plows will be out in force in New Haven. I’ll wake up at dawn to the din of metal on asphalt and the winter smell of diesel and snow. It will look like January.
If I check the weather forecast, I will find that in the Pacific Northwest the weather is unseasonably warm: it’s raining in the mid-elevation Cascades. It’s raining far above sea level in Western Alaska, too, and in Iceland, and in most of Northern Europe, where snow has scarcely fallen outside of the high alps this year. Last week, during one of the lighter hours of the polar night, it rained above sea level in Greenland. Back home in Kansas, the high temperature tomorrow could break sixty.
But for now it feels like proper January in New Haven. The snow piles up outside my window, whipped into drifts by a bitter Nor-easter wind, and my radiator sighs. Somewhere the world is burning, but not here. Here for a moment it is finally winter.
