The Snow Rope

At his farm, my grandfather had rigged what he called his “snow ropes”: hand-hold-by-hand-hold, the snow ropes prevent getting lost and wandering off in who knows what direction only to freeze and be found come spring. I’m interested in “snow ropes” and, well, mysticism and religious language. The mystic says, that “God is a blinding light.” But is God actually like a blizzard?

She said it reminded her of a blizzard from 1940. My mother, that November day in 1952, the day she talked to Jesus on the phone. He called and she answered. The phone number was listed, four digits only, 7122, rotary dial.

It came down hard and fast with minor warning. Enough of an early warning, though, to send the school buses out late morning with the farm kids. November damp then turning cold and winds from the northwest.

She was recalling the Armistice Day Blizzard, November 11, 1940, which started mildly enough. It was hunting season and duck hunters were on the lakes and rivers and sloughs. There was another a few months later, March 1941. People died, a “fair” number.

More white and then more white again and then such whiteness that every landmark disappears in the “white out.” Pipes freeze, farm animals suffer. Black and white pictures do it justice, more I believe than color which is less chilling, less dramatic.

At his farm, my grandfather had already rigged what he called his “snow ropes.” From the porch of the house he had rigged ropes attached to metal fence posts driven into the ground. Hand-holding the ropes, he could make his way along those spidery-web ropes to the garage, the barn, the chicken coup, the pig pen, and to the front road and the mail box. And back again like geometry.

If every usual landmark disappears in the “white out,” well, hand-hold-by-hand-hold the snow ropes prevent getting lost and wandering off in who knows what direction only to freeze and be found come spring. It’s happened. There are pictures and more pictures: drifts as high as telephone lines, a hump of snow on a road-way and underneath a car and inside, well….

It’s a farmer’s tip on how to survive a blizzard. The snow ropes and covering the windows at night with towels or rags stuffed in cracks underneath doors to conserve the heat. It works while outside wind blows and howls, and cracks its jowls.

On this day, then, those orange buses had left town with the school children, a good dozen buses or more out into the country with the school children grades 1-12, the buses beetling their way slowly along.  One-by-one the drivers on their usual routes and my own father one of the usual drivers and another, Russell. The country roads were already drifting; the front tires would hit a drift with a heavy “whumpf,” and more snow would fly. On his route, my father always remembered, a bundled mother or father would be standing at the end of the farm house lane, near the mail box, ready to collect children and herd them, like chicks, back to the farm house, hands clutching the snow rope.

And wind, 35 miles per hour or more, blowing horizontal snow, ground blizzards.

It’s an oddity, though: The term blizzard once meant cannon shots or musket fire, volley-after-volley. Except in Iowa, then, 1870 or so, an enterprising journalist used the term to describe a snow storm. Imagine, then, white powdery snow, dry snow that stings, and wind chill and, well, stay indoors, stay safe, silly not to.  Etymology, though, obscure, more or less onomatopoeic, sound imitative, a hard winter—blizzard, a hard-sounding word.

It dawns on me for the moment that I’ve been blundering along here—without knowing why. My imagination owns an interest in what I’ve been writing but the interest alone has not prevented the blundering, the wandering. It can be odd.

I’ve studied metaphysics, meta ta physika, “after the things of nature,” philosophy, theology, and as Aristotle referenced the business, “sometimes wisdom.” Hume, well, his occasional use of the term: “excessively subtle.” Kant? A priori speculation.

In this blundering, however, I’m not interested in reviewing classical philosophy or any kind of philosophy with words like “ontology.”

I’m interested in “snow ropes” and, well, mysticism and religious language. The mystic says, that “God is a blinding light.” Merely to say that “God is above” is interesting but does not help; “God is a desert,” on the other hand, well that sends us scurrying into the paradoxes of faith, or the mysteries of faith. God is like a blizzard? That might take study, and is fearfully apocalyptic.

It’s a metaphor, you see, a “snow rope,” and one feels intensely that it is so. And one feels we’re not talking nonsense, although the skeptic down the street might think so. The point here is that without this metaphorical experience we likely would be left with psychological curiosities.

About the blundering, though: Blundering into this metaphor is serious business; it’s survival of a kind. There’s something to it that discloses the nature of reality but if I handle it properly it can be revelatory. The picture, again, the image: white blinding snow, wind, cold, and a man or a woman grasping a “snow rope.”  Still blundering along, say, on the way to the the barn to toss down fodder to the milk cows, fodder stored in a hay mow, silage, too. Chores, you see. And then back to that farm house, warm and safe and even cheerful, a kitchen clock radio playing 1950s music, news on the hour, weather. But also a could have been, a could have been lost without that snow rope.

Metaphor as survival?

Russell was not only a bus driver but owned a service station, a gas station, and a bulk oil business.  He would drive those country farm roads with his truck and fill the fuel tanks for farmers, fuel oil to heat their homes, machine sheds. Business would boom during a blizzard and Russell would risk it, a samaritan sort of thing with just a bit more added to the bill, the surcharge, a little gouge.

A good man, though, not given to drink or swearing, and after the war, married, although not blessed with children.

One wonders about that: A child newly-born will reach out and grasp an extended finger, strength belying, holding on tight. Place a finger on an infant’s open palm and that child grasps and can almost be lifted up, that infant’s version of Chinese handcuffs. Fingers fan outward and then close. Instinct, the physician might say; it’s trust, the metaphysician might say. Both are strong, but instinct is too raw, too blunt, less capable, less dependable. I’ll take the metaphysics.

And so some lack of patience on his part that day, a desire to hurry along, back to town, and business, the surcharge. The child at the end of the driveway, the farm house barely in sight from the end of the driveway, a mere one-fifth of a mile but straight. Common sense and thus no need on Russell’s part to walk the child the distance; less his problem and more the problem of the child’s parents absent at the end of that driveway with no fault, minor absenteeism of mind.

He could have, though, he could have, the child’s mittened hand grasping his, strength belying, trust.

And so she blunders along and alone, red winter coat, muffler, snow boots, along and alone, thinkingly toward the farm house but the blizzard intensifies, more wind, more blowing snow, white-out, stinging face and eyes, and lost with no landmarks. How long she must have stood there before striking out in some direction.

And some time passes before that farm wife/mother looks out the kitchen window toward the country road and the one-fifth of a mile farm “lane.” She sees nothing but white, blowing snow, nothing. And dashes out herself into the blizzard, and cold, and despairing.

A call goes out and farm men and town men gather, including Russell. Trucks are parked incrementally along the country road as the men begin their search along the ditches and fence lines, calling out. At the farm place, they rope themselves together, twenty-five or so feet apart and search the farm woods, the boundaries, out into the fields, looking, hoping for some sign of that red winter coat. Calling out: “Anything?” While time passes desperately. What could be worse than this except a child fallen down an abandoned well?

And then back to the farm place and more searching the outbuildings, for someone lost, for someone then found. For all that time, huddled in the barn, a close corner, straw for a blanket, a pair of barn cats for company. My father found her. He said he reached out an ungloved hand. She grasped his finger, and it’s the same picture, but an opportunity offered.

Trust. Metaphysics. Metaphor as survival.

As it was, she, too, had blundered her way along, blundered into that snow rope connected to the farm house and the barn, had turned, though, to the barn and not the farm home. Even so….

I was six years old; the girl in the red winter coat a grade-school classmate. Something there was in that, however, that I could understand more personally, the farm girl seated at the desk just in front of mine, and Martha, her name. More personal then when the phone rang and my mother answered. Her shoulders sagged with relief and warm tears tracked their way down her cheeks. “Thank you,” she said, and hung up.

So, blizzards, a lost and a found farm child, Martha in a red snow coat, snow ropes and metaphors which we blunder into and if we hold on and handhold-by-handhold and trusting make our way along to safety, and when the phone rings we come to know who was on the phone, and a mother’s response that it was Jesus.

Coda:

SHRILL VOICES COUNTING

Under the hanging stars, Benny Hooper
Looks to hide, ready or not.
Like a bird in the chimney flue,
Trapped thing, he drops down the shaft;
Corked in the well, he lies still.

One might imagine a soul on its way to hell.
A fall into a vortex so frequent an image
In our dreams, one, two, three.
All the safety of a life of a sudden so changed!

At midnight the townsmen establish themselves.
Caffeine wrecks their nerves,
That and Benny Hooper fallen down the well,
Navigating the center of the earth,
Flowing from dark-to-dark.

The sheriff arrives.

It is a good tale, this, one that makes old men
Fresh for death, old women’s prayers run down.
Meanwhile it is not easy there in the well,
Where Benny Hooper remembers what the world
Looks like at dusk from above….

His mother holds the family’s great Bible,
Open to a page on suffering;
It could be any page—“Lo, I have gone far off,
Flying away; and I abide in the wilderness.”

The morning sun rises and Benny Hooper’s father
Sits on the running board of an old Ford;

He feels the summer heat and wonders of his grief.
So begins and ends this day
While men work, ready or not.

Tunnels and shafts into the earth.
Lord God I saw one man hauled aloft,
Ropes around his ankles, lowered head first
Down inside that shaft, a good strong man
With arms thick but shoulders too wide.
And then another, more slender but strong.

Lord God, it’s close in there but there is
An intimation of luck, a force against
Benny’s mother’s despair.

Put your hands to your face now and pray;
Benny Hooper can’t remain underground forever,
Feeling his lungs contract and his shoulders tire., corked.

Lord God, it’s early morning when Benny Hooper
Smells the freshening air high up from where he’s been.
Lord God we should insist on this,
A grace won from all that seems infernal.
Resurrected at last, free and purified,
Returning to safety, to the earth,
To humbleness and the biding of time.

The above is a chapter from a memoir in progress, “The Man Who Balanced A Tea Cup On His Head.”

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