In October 2013 a woman walked up the drive that leads to my apartment building. She was being neighborly, introduced herself and told me that streets were to be blocked off by the Irvington Halloween Festival. She said that she lived in the house behind “the big cedar.” I didn’t think I knew what a cedar looked like, but I watched her go home past a great evergreen. I was reminded of a book I had read and then had a heightened awareness of a coming misery.
The winter of 2013-2014, according to most accounts, was the worst in many years for the Indianapolis area. Winter, for all of its jingling bells, driven snow and sledding, has all of the things I dislike the most: snow, ice and cold. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Penn., a place anointed with the nastiness of winter, but I lived eight warm and wonderful years in California. I’ll take the warm over the winter any day. Despite my aversion to all things winter, I have three books on my bookshelves that have snow, ice and cold as backdrops to the actions of the characters and which have been made into movies that capture the beauty and misery of winter.
I saw Smilla’s Sense Of Snow, by Peter Høeg, before I read the book, but as with most of the movies that I have enjoyed, I wanted to know what the writer had to say on the original pages. Smilla Jasperson, whose nomadic Greenlander Eskimo mother married a wealthy Danish anesthesiologist, has a “relationship” with snow that enables her to help the Copenhagen police solve the murder of her 6-year-old neighbor, Isaiah, with whom she had developed an unusual friendship. Ultimately, it is Smilla’s unique understanding of the properties of snow and ice that leads to a solution to a murder, for “ice and life are related in many ways.”
The Shipping News, by E. Annie Proulx, and Snow Falling On Cedars, by David Guterson are linked by more than bad weather. The protagonists of both books are journalists, and at some point in both narratives are chroniclers of the passage of ships through ports.
Ishmael Chambers is in love with Hatsue Imada, a Japanese American, but the soft growl of racism in San Piedro, Washington rises to a full bay after the events of December 7th, 1941, and their childhood spent meeting inside the hollow trunk ends. Hatsue is sent to an internment camp and Ishmael goes off to war. The two come together again while Ishmael, a reporter, is covering the trial of Hatuse’s husband. As the trial begins, “snow had covered all the island roads,” and “the branches of the cedars were loaded down” with it.
Quoyle, the protagonist in The Shipping News, is abandoned by his wife, Bunny and retires to Newfoundland with his two daughters. He joins his aunt at the family home, on a barren point of land called Quoyle’s Point. “The house was lashed with cable to iron rings set in the rock.” He works for “The Gammy Bird,” a local newspaper in an area where “the harbors (were) still locked in ice,” and his damaged aunt remembers “a frozen pond in October,” and where “the glare of ice (erases) dimension, distance…”
As I type these words the temperature outside my building is 9º. But for all of the misery I suffer during winter, I remember the beauty in the pages of those books, and when I walk to the end of my gravel driveway, I have a moment of wonder when I see the snow weighing down the branches of the big cedar.