The Dismal View From Here

The view from here is baleful with a green hue. Cold splinters drip from the sunshade. The snow is back but the memories of soft edges are long gone. Now the snow is bitter and remorseless, scything on a slanted wind like with the force of a catapult in the hands of a spiteful child.

Yesterday I sat on a porch in shirt sleeves; today I am under covers.



The tiredness of too much ice is on me. There winter seems to have lasted a year. I wonder at the fate of the early daffodils in the botanic gardens. Now the sunny weekends seem like a quirk and a mockery and notions of spring are deferred. It makes me wonder about places that cling to the Arctic Circle; about people who carve a half life in the half light on the ice flows.

Baffinland - it's a tad chilly and the tapas bars aren't the best

There's a madness to the snow, a blindness that makes us want to wander until we white out in the great overexposed. We are snow blind to possibilities and trapped behind walls.


My grandfather told me once about the day he went to Murmansk. It was 97 years ago or thereabouts. There was a small war in Russia at the weary end of the big war and the army of the whites had been send to avenge the reds. My recollections are hazy here and mixed with notions of Dr. Zhivago and the hunger that overcame love. Somewhere out there in the white wastes there was a train with a red star, stamped like an ugly welt on its hideous black boiler. There was a one way trip north to the camps where the ice never melted.


The seasons eventually turn around, but there are places that remain always in the cold.