Blog From A Hermit Dot Com

A few years back I rented the DVD Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1997) a rather dark, mystery thriller based on the book by Danish author Peter Hoag. The female protagonist, Smilla (played by Julia Ormond), is a half-Inuit woman and snow researcher. When a young boy from her apartment building falls from the roof, the police rule the death an accident. Smilla can tell by the boy’s tracks in the snow that he was chased off the roof.

I’ve been thinking about that movie a lot the last several weeks – not about the resolution of the mystery, but about the many vagaries of snow – the varieties, moisture content; how it falls, lands, rests, melts, refreezes, compacts; how snow impacts what it rests upon and a lot of other variables I have not previously had the opportunity to observe.

I’m not a big snow sports person (too many people funneled into a small area). What skiing I have done involved a series of cross-country day trips; and although the quality of snow, terrain and potential avalanche danger made big differences in my cross-country pleasure (or lack thereof), I was always unfamiliar with areas I was traversing, so I was more focused on getting from point A to point B, less consciously focused on the snow itself.

My newly developed sense of snow comes from watching it and shoveling it (repeatedly) on this landscape which I know very well in all seasons. It’s been a sometimes arduous, but revealing adventure – a new opportunity to learn something about nature by being in it.

We still have 5 inches of snow in open areas with some potential for more this evening before warm temps and solid rain move in to send us back to normal.

It will take the plow piles a week or more to dissolve. Many of our non-indigenous shrubs are emerging from the snow weight looking worse for the experience. But now we get to watch (and maybe help) the recovery.

And as much as a sunny respite appeals right now, I’ve actually been reminded of why I make a lousy tourist.  It’s more than just my reclusive nature. I’m not a person who enjoys hitting the highlights of a locale – seeing the stationary thing you’re supposed to see and moving on to the next thing you’re supposed to see.  I prefer to stay, work, play – even reside in an environment – long enough to observe and attempt to understand  – to, in some way, become a part of the process.