Just Ice

It is not nearly far enough into the new year for the spring rains and swollen rivers occuring all around us. One anticipates cold this time of year, not arms of snow melting in the yard. In New England, we expect snow to stay around in the winter. We expect layers. This precipitation today, for example, seems like it should have been another layer. A fluffy dusting of fresh powder. The sort of blanket of ice that Thoreau would have loved to have wandered in, detecting the lives that lived beside him in the forest and meadows of Concord, their footprints in the piles of crystaline water freshly fallen the day before. He saw intelligence in the paths of their footsteps. We cannot even see the footsteps today. Sadly, in both literal and figurative senses, we do not detect the lives that are around us lived. We cannot find metaphorical bridges or literal tropes to gap the gaping divide. We watch the snow wash away from our yards, a snow that barely held on after the previous snow had melted, and the one before that. This warming cycle is proximate, but part, no doubt, of the random changes that are expected under the soup of carbon dioxide that we now live. And so, neither true space nor genuine time mean anything to us any more. Each moment a fleeting one, a desperate lunge into the next, a blinding certainty. This snow here, for example, this natural last embankment in the middle of my yard, jumped up to me as a fine image of global warming, a picture of its implications. But my memory reminded me that this curvature of snow is something else as well. It exists as the final remnant of a family of snowmen built up by my family and I in full knowledge that that forces of human nature would bring them down again. They were chopped to bits by middle and high school boys, all muscle and hormones and energy and welcoming the opportunities to use them. This is the last remnant of that opportunity given to them that day and taken up predictably and with a fury out of proportion to the harm the snowmen had done to any one of them. Their force against the snow compacted the crystals making them more difficult to wash away. Their fury left this rain-resistant pile, now lying here in my yard as a reminder, a material memory of the boys' muscle power, their physical emotions manifest.

We understand the world too imperfectly to move with the sort of certainty our nation state has determined to move with. We have harnessed force with the utmost precision and toward too many ends to conclude our ambitions have been soley evil, but we have never learned the table manners of the gods. "Our whole life is startlingly moral," Thoreau reminds us in the "Higher Laws" chapter of Walden. "There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails." Force and power as ends in themselves cannot help but bring despair, misery, and continued death. We know better than these days have shown of us. We could do better if we chose to try.