"The silence that bludgeons you dumb"

My friend asked me what -15 degrees feels like in an email recently, although it's been more like -20 the last couple weeks.

It's painful. It hurts. My face hurts. I left my gloves at the twins' preschool and when I went to pick them up again, my hand felt like it was going to stick to the metal of the door handle. It's COLD!

And yet, it is so beautiful. Sometimes, I like to lie down near a window and look up at the trees outside, where several inches of snow balance lithely on each branch and twig. We went sledding down at Kincaid and stayed until dusk, when no one else was there. I sledded down to the bottom of the hill and just sat there for several minutes in the silence. It is such a unique experience for a former big-city girl and a busy mother to ever experience that level of silence. It is utterly peaceful.

The kids do well with it. The baby seems to love it most of all. She is thrilled to be outside in her triple layers of clothing: a onesie, a warm full-body fuzzy set of pj's, and then a thick snowsuit. But stick her in the jogger stroller and she will not make a peep. She simply loves it. She outlasts me, that's for sure.

I'm reading a book called Arctic Schoolteacher and it's confirming a bug I can now publicly admit to: I have a longing to get out further into Alaska. The book quotes a Robert Service poem which danced on the page:

The strong life that never knows harness,
The wilds where the caribou call,
The freshness, the freedom, the farness,
Oh God how I'm stuck on it all.
"The Spell of the Yukon"

It is in these "further out" places that the weather gets so much more desperately cold... -40 is perfectly normal this time of year. It is sparsely populated and with not nearly as many of the comforts of modern life. But still.

I love that line: "The freshness, the freedom, the farness." Here are some more Robert Service poems, just for fun. I've never spent much time reading him (although I think an old friend told me he wrote a lot of limericks). Here is the next stanza of that poem:

The winter! the brightness that blinds you,
The white land locked tight as a drum,
The cold fear that follows and finds you,
The silence that bludgeons you dumb.
The snows that are older than history,
The woods where the weird shadows slant;
The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,
I've bade 'em good-by -- but I can't.

He then goes on to write about the "land where the mountains are nameless/And the rivers all run God knows where..." When my friend Kari came up and visited, we took a drive out to Matanuska Glacier, which took us a good three and a half hours or longer (me being pregnant at the time and having three kids in the car). We must have passed a hundred mountains and three dozen rivers. That is no exaggeration. They truly are "nameless" and "run God knows where." And when I looked at a map at the end of it all, the tiny little fraction of a fraction of Alaska that we had seen that day was laughable. I think it was a circle no bigger than the letter O on the map of the state! I felt floored at the magnitude of the land. How many mountains could possibly be pushed up into one place? Too many to count on just that drive. Here's a picture of the boys climbing on the glacier. Flickr's acting up but I'll try to get more up on another day.