Winterland 3 comments

By Caroline Langston

It’s one of those family stories that’s so well-thumbed by now that I can call up my older brother on the phone and ask him to recount it by citing only its simplest coordinates: “Hey John, tell me again about Shoot Up to the Chalet. When exactly was that?”

“Story,” frankly, is stretching it—rather, it’s nothing more than an anecdote, although one that’s burned deeply into our sibling relationship, and thus stands as a mythic synecdoche for The Difference Between Him and Me, in a close relationship that, over the years, is plenty mythic enough.

So here it is: Sometime in 1973 or 1974, and my brother (I am five at the time), is a soft-spoken, long-haired boy dropped from the soul-funk Mississippi Delta into the mannered quadrangles of Yale University. His colleagues in Branford College are all either Jewish and from New York or blunt-spoken preppies, frank and outdoorsy, from elsewhere in New England. It’s a dizzying new world, for sure, but with a cornucopia of new freedoms as well.

All of a sudden, the promise of somebody’s mountain house in Vermont is proffered for Winter Long Weekend, and the plan is hatched, in somebody’s words, for a whole gaggle of friends to Shoot Up to the Chalet.

They made the trip with all of them stuffed together in somebody’s big old Cadillac, and by the time they got to Vermont, the driver was bearing down on the gas, flooring it on the narrow mountain roads.

All the way, my brother was nervous, envisioning the heavy car sliding off the icy asphalt. (And in the mystery of memory, the scene I always see in my mind is not of my brother and his jaded college friends, but, inexplicably, Robert DeNiro in The Deer Hunter off on that last hunt before the boys leave for Vietnam.)

At last they arrived at the mountain house, where for the entire weekend, everyone else went skiing and enjoying the winter weather.

My brother, meanwhile, sat in the house by himself, all weekend long, writing a paper.

The moral of the story thus becoming: “I hate winter,” my brother, who turned his back on New England and went back to the Sunbelt forever. “You all can have it.” And none of my cajoling can serve to convince him otherwise.

For it is winter I love, in this strange city—of Northern charm and Southern efficiency, as the tired old local joke goes—where I live. Spring and summer: you’ve had more than enough encomia in literature, what with your Azalea Trails, the forty-foot-high trees dripping with magnolias—“the size of soup plates,” as a decorator friend once described them.

On top of that is the obsession, at least among the retirement-obssessed East Coast upper middle classes, with the coastal and semi-tropical: Places like Charleston, and Key West, and tiny well-preserved women in jeweled sandals and lime green Capri pants, dripping with mascara and gold jewelry. The obsession with mojitos in the garden, the shining ever-distended dimensions of Weber gas grills.

The entitlement, my inner crank (which apparently I’m feeling frisky enough to let out) is saying to me. Who is going to iron all of that tasteful classic linen?

(“Now see, there you go again,” my brother says. “That has nothing to do with those people, it’s just your ressentiment.”)

Somebody, in my opinion, would be far better off shoveling the walk, the wet snow bleeding through gloves and their Thinsulate linings, the scouring wind turning cheeks and lips first red, then blue.

Who shall sing of winter and its transcendence? O not the Swiss mountains or the Colorado valleys, but of a streetcorner in Medford, Massachusetts, on a 15 degree day: a little storefront shopette thronged with teenage deadbeats in leather car coats and jeans, cigarette smoke tendrilling through their elaborate feathered hair, kicking at clods of dirty snow with the soles of their shit-kickahs.

This too, I aver, is a landscape of the Holy.

And what’s even more: Winter and all its portents of Doom, its intimations of apocalypse. The hidden and unbidden clank of radiator pipes deep within the walls, at the darkest sleepless hour before the advent of morning.

I kid you not: One February night in New England, I was awakened by a black Pentecostal preacher from a congregation in Harlem, thrashing his sermon across crackling AM airwaves from the radio I’d forgotten to switch off, and the whole bedroom white with the light of an unexpected snowfall, an exhilarating benediction.

Even here, in D.C., with its watered down winters, there’s the snake of cars with tinted windows, speeding on the black-ice avenues. Once before I was married, on a night when the temperature dropped to single degrees, I marveled at the blazing lights of office buildings on K street, thinking of all that industrial warmth blasting inside the walls and wasted, while the gray figures of the homeless waited on grates outside, wrapped in stuff blankets like snowmen.

Later, after I was married and a mother, I spent an hour calling the Emergency Shelter Hotline to get them to pick up someone on P and DuPont Circle —someone who had been missed.

And my body in winter: a landscape of leather so dry that a fingernail drawn across my arm can raise up a white hieroglyph. I tumble warm from the shower into a heavy towel, slather my arms and legs and breasts with white Nivea, and pull on a flannel nightgown that caresses my curves.

I am elemental, I am of the dust from which my Father formed me, I am dependent on Him Who has, by His mercy, kept the cold outside.

It is winter that is my desert: Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.