Powder Day

I love this snowy December light. I’ve been imagining snapping on my skis and heading out across a field, or skiing down slopes with a pool of shade at the base of fir trees, a place you wouldn’t want to end up in. Sunk up to your hips in snow. I’ve been watching one of the many mindless television shows I watch on one of the streaming services. It’s in Italian. A whole bunch of people are stranded in a beautiful inn in the Dolomites after first an earthquake, and then an avalanche. They’re a pampered bunch, except for the workers at the inn and a doctor who is being chased by a killer. It’s just one of the places my mind has been wandering in this winter light. The snow in the center of Philadelphia where I live has melted too much to ski on. I wasn’t fast enough to catch a few runs around the ball fields at the bottom of the street.

The Guardian has been filling my brain with images of doom for the Arctic. I fell in love with Finnmark in northern Norway when I young and almost moved there. The Arctic is warming at a much faster rate than anywhere on earth.Some stories are not so bad, a polar bear adopting an abandoned cub, or how polar bears might just adapt to the changing climate after all. But some scenarios depend, I think, too much on the good will of shipping companies to adapt their ships, for example, into quiet vessels. Jenn Thornhill Verma writes, “The delicate clicks and whistles of narwhals carry through Tasiujaq, locally known as Eclipse Sound, at the eastern Arctic entrance of the Northwest Passage.” The narwhals, whales that seem with their long narrow tusk invented by a wizard, stop singing when “the Nordic Odyssey, a 225-metre ice-class bulk carrier servicing the nearby iron ore mine, approaches, its low engine rumble gives way to a wall of sound created by millions of collapsing bubbles from its propeller.”