First Snow

Santa Fe Snow (2007), painting by Clark Hulings.

It is coming down here in the southern Rockies on little bursts of wind that then subside and the flakes cease, too. Then a few more come down, as though they’ve been left behind in the rush and are only now catching up.

There will be more as the afternoon chill deepens and the light fails.

I have always turned to poetry for consolation and find it is still, along with the psalms and the hymns, my greatest comfort. The following is by Lewis Carroll whom we mostly know as the author of Alice and Wonderland but who was also a photographer and wrote a good deal more.

“I wonder if the snow
Loves the trees and fields
That it kisses them so gently?
And then it covers them up snug,
You know, with a white quilt,
And perhaps it says, “Go to sleep, Darlings,
Until the summer comes again.”

I will always miss the sensation of diving off the slope, at ten thousand feet, and sailing down the longest run with big curving sweeps of my skis.

The road below this studio is full now of cars and trucks racing madly for the ski basin at the top of the mountain, which opened for the first time as it used to years ago, on Thanksgiving, before global warming took our snow away. There’s not much up there now, at nine thousand feet, but it’s cold enough for the big monster machines to go to work, making snow from precious water. I see their bug-like headlights shining on the high slopes at night and think of the young men drivers who are probably enjoying what they are doing.

I learned to ski in my sixties and adored it for more than a decade, then finally grew enough sense to know I needed to stop. I don’t miss the edge of anxiety that used to drive me up the mountain, pedal to the floor like the drivers I now resent, but I will always miss the sensation of diving off the slope, at ten thousand feet, and sailing down the longest run with big curving sweeps of my skis.

Now I’m waiting for the first snow to thicken.

In New Mexico Santa Fe