Tree Snow

Blue skies and when the sun came up the snow started falling from the trees in cascades. 10 below zero this morning. I left a pot of grits cooking on a trivet when I went bed, hot and filling with a hand full of raisins. Reread The Snow Leopard, while watching the snow stream off the branches. It's lovely. Got up to twenty today, forty tomorrow and the next thaw begins. It's going to be a mess for the next few weeks, a lot of frost to get out of the ground. My house is going to look like a pig-sty. Nothing for it at this point, forge through the last difficult couple of weeks and start thinking about morels. TR called from town, to see how I was faring. Said that Portsmouth had been hammered. Barnhart got stuck in town because of a 'new' music event at the college. Don't know when I'll get out. I thought I'd gotten rid of all the mice, but I left a piece of cornbread out, and the remaining little fuckers had destroyed it and shit all over everything. Later, I find myself making warm mouse on toasted befouled cornbread for the crows. I like doing it, it connects me but doesn't involve domestication. Provides a reciprocity too, that they show me the way home, when I might be a little turned around. Being lost can be a very good thing. My best research is usually a tangent off a tangent, wave action led to dune formation, the random firings of the brain, Leopard Frogs, Dixie under the bleachers. Reading Matthiessen means digging out a dozen or so other books during the course of the day, religious text, some of the same text I'd been reading about world-wide trade in 6,000 BC, geography, mining technology, Hesiod, and several dictionaries. Books at the island and books all over the sofa. It actually seemed like a rather full day. I spent an hour with a great map, a polar projection of the Arctic, ate left-overs with toasted biscuits, then it got dark. I switched over to fiction and read a couple of the Harrison novellas, a form he's made his own. Sleep is fitful, dreams of falling. I consider buying a full set of ice hockey pads and wearing them all the time. Starting to drip now, so tomorrow will be a day of minor flooding, still, if I get down to the Jeep, to get the other bottle of whiskey, I might as well go to town, or at least as far as the Marina Diary-Mart for a foot-long hot dog and an order of onion rings. That's only 11 miles away and town is 17. I need some fat and animal parts. Also I want to try the soybeans in a soup with greens and salt-pork, and I don't have the greens and salt-pork. I vow to clean the house, go through the pantry, and throw away anything that's ten years out of date. I ate something that didn't agree with me, canned eel? water chestnuts? squid? I'm actually kind of famous for being able to eat anything, willing to eat anything. Roasted crickets aren't bad, if you flick off the legs. The dripping is getting louder and I think we'll have great sliding slabs of snow off the roof, this afternoon or tomorrow. Something to start about. It shakes the house. It's kind of grand, in a way. Not having electricity, on the Vineyard, it didn't matter if the power was out, since we didn't have any, now I depend on it more; I have to wean myself of that. The library calls and they've got some books for me. Maybe I could hike out two days in a row, one to carry in supplies, and the other to carry in books. Basho and his gunny sack. I had thought to break trail and go in tomorrow but I might revise that. The library will hold the books for three days, and they're not open on Sunday. Clearly, go get the books, even if I have to leave them in the Jeep for a couple of days, while I figure out the fox, the chicken, and the grain problem. It's amusing, but serious. I get sidetracked by Nansen and the "Fram", a boat designed to get caught in the ice and explore polar drift; she had a round-bottom, an aggregate hull thickness of four feet, iron bracing, and insulation. I'd like to see the plans for that boat. 128 feet long and wide in the beam. A very small crew, which is sensible when you think about carrying supplies for two or three years. I have to go dig out (but I do find it) Chichester's Gipsy Moth Circles The World, because he gives a line-item breakdown of food and drink supplies he took around the world. Trying to get a handle on the larder. The logistics involved. Moving easily and lightly, around the fringes of the ice (between Asia and America), living off the land, might not have been all that difficult for someone used to the life. The same is true for the north Atlantic. Pretty soon I'm reading an essay about Narwhale tusks and wondering what it was I was looking up in the first place. Something about bronze and running out of tin. I have no idea how one thing led to another. I get caught up in this, turning from one reference to another. It's still dripping when I go to sleep. My foray out, tomorrow, will be exhausting, breaking trail in rotten snow, but I only have to trek two-thirds of a mile and only the last half is difficult. Occupying high ground means you're always walking up hill.