On The Cold
It’s February first in Ontario, around the big lake, and it’s still the depths of winter. There are frozen lakes and chopped off thin-bare-trees-like-bones surrounding us. When it’s this cold and the doors to the van are opened and the engine is off and the heat is non-existent, we’re hardly people anymore. We’re bundles of idiosyncratic nerves, mumbling to ourselves, checking and double-checking our pockets for cell phones and keys and wallets not left behind on motel armours. The motels aren’t hotels or motor inns or chains, they’re lodgings, like their descriptions imply.
We get in the van and doors open and doors close, jackets become blankets, engines finally start, and the cold rush from the vents, eventually, warms up. Your feet thaw last, the little bits of toe on the end resisting their fleshy memories from just moments ago in lodgings that were warm fortresses against white-burned air.
On our first leg of the tour the Winter chased us and we stayed just ahead of it all the way to New York City where we rested and it finally settled around us and with us. Now I can imagine no other season but this pale one, this rigid one, this brittle one. Apparently there’s a storm chasing us again, worse than Winter but just as scary as December alone seemed at the end of November. I hope we can stay ahead of it long enough to reach the ferry to Newfoundland. The colder it gets the less personality I can find to express; the more my mouth is closed taught, the more my brain sticks to itself like a wad of instincts and irritants. I hope we can stay ahead of it until we can stay inside for hours, until it can rock our boat like the viking ship at the PNE, safe because our ship is designed for storms and for waves and for ice and for fog.
And there’s the strange feeling of the van or the furnace becoming hotter than the summer in the depths of winter and you have to shed your coat and your sweater and your jeans and long johns are uncomfortable and overdressed but they’ve gotta stay on because, what if someone opens the door again?
