There are no more seasons, as Thing would say. The day before Easter, on the basketball court of the neighboring school, gloves were needed to dribble and shoot baskets. The day before, we had been treated to a blazing sun which made us miss the protective palette of the cap stored for the winter. And a few days earlier, I was treading on the thick, virgin snow of a mountainside in Estrie for my first snowshoe outing of the winter, to take advantage of what I believed to be the last snowfall of the season. And for once, the south of Quebec, by chance of the movements of air masses on the map, had particularly tasted it.
We begin to appreciate the quality of the coat deposited during the night by removing snow from the car with the scraper broom. I too moan when the first melting flakes have frozen solid on the windshield which they cover with a stubborn crust hidden under a layer of softer snow, and which we must now attack with gnashing of teeth and scraper . That morning, in terms of consistency, we were dealing with something light and airy. Each sweep of the broom caused a surge, raising a cloud.
There is the dazzling landscapes. The highway corridor is rather sad, compared to the vast immaculate fields, the dark blue rivers and the checkerboard of farm woodlands interspersed with commercial fir forests that spread a little further away. In the corn fields covered with powder, where the grains escaped from the harvest lie dormant, it is not uncommon to see the troops venturing out into the open of wild fauna hostile to suburbanites and city dwellers: invading deer and ferocious turkeys.
Past the place where I leave the car, while, at the foot of the mountain, snowshoes under my arm, I advance under an impeccable blue sky, a small pick-up shows up behind me and comes stop at my height. Instead of the expected bit of local chatter over the window of the door, I hear: need a lift ?
Needed, not really. But in this sector, good neighborly relations are not to be disdained. The path I walk on is named after the driver of this pickup. He has frequented this forest for more than sixty years, is able to remember a time when the small muddy dirt road that I have just followed to reach the foothills of the massif was nothing other than a path where ” the branches on both sides rubbed against the doors of the tank.”
I throw my snowshoes and backpack onto the bed of the vehicle and sit next to him. His plan was to go heat the stove in the old sugar shack that he converted into a winter camp up there, then go back down to get his four-wheeler equipped with a shovel and go back up to clear the snow. the section of path which separates his camp from the few chalets grouped around a pond at the end of the section already cleared. It must be half a kilometer. The storm of the day before had spread a virginal sheet there.
If he had been present, my father-in-law could have given you the make and model of my driver’s vehicle, and casually added the number of horsepower peeping under the hood. The only thing I can say is that four-wheel drive was not a luxury that day.
He dropped me off in front of his lair and, thinking of the fire in his stove and the few hundred meters of path to clear snow, this 87-year-old man, the patriarch of these lands, nodded and said to me :
I think this is going to be my day.
At the beginning of winter, I surprised him reading, sitting in his pickup in the same place, a novel by Ken Follett while a good pile of maple logs warmed his “camp”.
After the sugar shack, the snow was deep and I put on snowshoes. So on this mountainside, nothing left but the sound of my breathing and the crunch of the wild snow. It was so fresh that its smooth surface, in front of me, was not disturbed by the slightest print. If it had not been for the delicate chattering of the titmice and the goldfinches, the alarm cry of the jay and the hoarse questions of the master crow, I might have believed that I was surveying a world as dead as it was sparkling, inanimate and cold as space.
As I traced my own trail, I sometimes had to stop to breathe, attentive, in this thickness of things, to the dull thumps of my heart, to the heat of the blood under my skin. An old hit by Elton John, an earworm, echoed in my skull.
Rocket Man / Burning out his fuse up here alone
And it seemed appropriate, because what was the snow under my feet if not thick stardust taking the form of an incalculable and yet finite quantity of flakes, all different, like the stars in the universe?
The song dates from 1972. The lyricist of this Sir Elton hit, Bernie Taupin, inspired by a short story by Ray Bradbury which tells of the solitary daily life of a space traveler, transformed the latter into an allegory of a completely different kind of trip. The fuel was good and the “Tôton jaune” cosmonaut (as one of my brothers mischievously nicknamed him) had left on a nasty trip.
It’s my turn to divert its meaning, my only drug, on this cushioned height of white powder, being 21% pure oxygen.
Arriving at the cabin, higher in the mountain, I lit a fire in the sow and was unwrapping my sandwich when, suddenly, there was a knock at the door. I wouldn’t have been more surprised if I had heard a moose singing Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting. But it was another snowshoer, moving, like me, on a cloud, as silent as a hare in this whiteness.
Glad to see someone beat the trailwhich he threw at me.
You’re welcome, friend. I too will have opened a path in my day.