In “City Under Snow” writer Phil Condon notes springs arrival and questions his own interest in the changes he sees. Can he hide from nature?
By Phil Condon
The snow’s gone again. And for good this time, this year, for now. Day by day spring falls across the valley and then onto our town, which is spiked into and paved over the valley’s rocky ground, building by building, street by street. Spring descends on a warm wind, leaving the high mountains above us still waist-deep in frozen white water.
A few feet from the alley behind our house in Missoula, asparagus bursts through the dark soil like the fingers of green men, buried in the garden. I imagine them there, waking beneath the surface—ferocious, resurrected. Raspberry runners leaf out in fat prickly corsages among the half-rotted leaves I covered these beds with last fall.
This winter in the city was wild. It escaped the reach of our adjectives, eluded our language. Its ten feet of snow intruded deep into our lives and minds. Snow stayed on this garden, stayed everywhere in Missoula, from early November until early April, one long, cold drift of a season.
Today I’m putting out the early garden: lettuce, chard, kale, spinach, carrots, beets, and radishes. In my hand lettuce seeds feel like grains of living sand. I drop them into a shallow groove I drew in the soil with an old broken pencil. A musty clay smell rises from the damp earth. A robin lands on a stump across the alley.
The two largest asparagus spears have been eaten off at ground level, and I’m pretty sure it’s deer work. All winter long deer used the yard as their own. At dawn they lay in the snow shadow of the blue spruce; in the afternoons they browsed for the dwindling mountain ash berries, often standing up on their back legs to reach the branches. Between periods of wind and new snow, they ate whatever cold berries blew down. Their single-file tracks crisscrossed the yard. Their circles of scat were smooth brown raisins in the snow.
This planting season, though, I hope the deer find plenty to eat up on the mountain. I’ll use my cayenne pepper and hope they don’t like it. Of course, on Mount Sentinel they have mountain lions to contend with, a euphemism, I guess, for trying to avoid getting killed on the run and eaten on the spot.
A crow crackles overhead, swooping between two weeping birches. The robin moves to a lilac bush. I hum to myself, planting and patting, grooving and seeding, smoothing the soil. I check the asparagus spears to see if they’ve moved, reached any closer to the sky.
Four high-school boys, their conversation a series of yells and guffaws, shuffle down the alley on their way back to school after lunch. Then a woman pushing a stroller pauses to turn her baby toward the garden.
“See the garden,” she says, gesturing my way. “Make pretty flowers,” she says to her baby, and we smile at each other. The baby in its carriage gurgles as if from underwater and points at a squirrel I hadn’t seen, low on a telephone pole, upside down.
My cat, Louie, ambles across the yard toward us, stretching, half crouching, as wordless and expressive as ever. He wears a bell because I think he kills too many birds. For a moment I imagine him, sans bell and big as a mountain lion, chasing deer from the neighborhood. I follow them in my mind, these deer and Big Louie. They disappear into a ravine at the base of the mountain and keep running, straight up the slope toward the frosty, fogged-in pine groves above.
The woman and baby move on. My back aches. I stand and stretch. I can’t resist the asparagus any longer. I break off the tallest, fattest green finger and eat the tip raw. It tastes like spring snow.
The changing climate is changing. It’s ironic how eager we are for the predictability of the kinds of change we like. Myself, I think weather fascinates precisely because it is change—hourly, daily, weekly. I know I need four, maybe twelve, distinct seasons for my soul or nervous system, or both. I always remember the years I spent in places with no snow, desert places with more subtle changes, as edgy, restless times. I wanted to travel without knowing where.
Living here in the northern Rockies is a trip to different countries each year, without going anywhere. From December to July, we’re an entirely different landscape. Time and space compress, and I travel through the calendar every time I walk through the door. Or I climb, and the elevation changes seasons in less than a day, transforms in only a few thousand footsteps.
Would I want to be able to predict the weather, the climate? To control either? Would you? Even whatever all these changes are that humans are inducing? It sounds boring to me, but I really mean much more than boring—I mean mechanistic, deathlike, unwild. It’s so easy to overlook: one of the essential characteristics of wildness, at least to me, is unpredictability. So if we wish to preserve the wild, or to let the wild preserve us, or both, how do we respond to the changing climate?
In the middle of the night, back from my sleepwalking, I snap on the all-night news to find yet another dreamworld—photos from an airplane, flying over Grand Forks, North Dakota, the streets brown canals, the water above the doortops, the downtown buildings ablaze. Disaster. Big change. Or maybe many small changes suddenly visible, like the poet Conrad Aiken’s single falling leaf, “the unseen and disastrous prelude/shaking the trivial act from the terrific action.” Today though, our global awareness shows us so clearly that the terrific disastrous happens all the time, minute by minute and village by village. Snow melts and rain falls. Bridges crumble and buildings float away.
In cold country we wait for spring each year, never truly knowing if it will come at all, the same way we don’t know whether we’ll wake tomorrow morning. We dream through storms and strokes in the brain, quakes and fibrillations of the heart. The seasons, just like the weather inside us, could change at any moment. The amazing thing is how much we actually do trust. We trust that tomorrow and next year will be as we’ve known them before, and how exquisitely we measure out that trust, day by day, stretching and reinterpreting the world’s essential uncertainty to somehow fit into or over our manageable lifetimes.
Meanwhile, the floodwaters lap at firestorms in North Dakota, Bangladesh, Mexico City, Moldavia. I picture the oceans, lapping like tongues at the edges of our continents, seven big islands on fire with the same blaze of progress. I see the thousands of thunderstorms, rolling over the planet each minute of every day and night.
Hide from wildness? I don’t think we can. It will always find us. It may even be playing with us, like the adults who knew our childhood hideaways but pretended not to—out of what? Love? Playfulness? Or did they perhaps just want to let us feel alone and independent, to feel it’s even possible to be alone and independent—that particular strain of pride, and fear—for just a few more moments?
The weather finds us. The body locates us. And the ever-changing metabolisms of the world work our lives like water weathers stone.
Excerpted from Phil Condon’s book Montana Surround: Land, Water, Nature, and Place with Permission from Johnson Books, a division of Big Earth Publishing.
“There’s a future. It may not be like the past. But there’s a future. It’s out there.”—Mayor of Grand Forks, North Dakota, April 1997
