Today is a day filled (so far) with sunshine. It is bright and dare I say, even warm. It is helping stoke the fires of early spring. I miss the firepit, the smell of fresh cut grass and I miss my flowerbed. All these things are simply dormant, I know this, but with these really warm days in the forecast, I’m going to be in full-on spring fever mode before February is even finished.
That’s going to be tough when Valentine’s Day hasn’t even happened. It will slap me back into reality with a few days of snowfall and temperatures back in the 20s by the end of the third week of February. For me, though, the damage will be done.
I’ll mentally have moved on towards greener pastures, or browner ones as is always the case with spring, here.
Anyway, I enjoyed the Winterfest firepit in Whiteside Park and the crisp walks through the corridor of snow carvings. I always like them because, for me, they’ve become an annual example of what can be achieved by removing just the right amount of solid matter to reveal the subject hiding in plain sight all along.
This is exactly how I carve fish decoys and folk art animal fishing decoys. I simply remove what doesn’t belong. We both start with blocks or chunks of split wood in my case.
They are carvings, not sculptures. Not put together so much as revealed. I use a carving axe, saws, sharp knives and sandpaper to achieve this with wood. They use shovels, saws, rakes, handmade tools and curry combs with ladders for the assist on the tall snow blocks.
Underneath these smooth, rough or even flat surfaces lie secrets that wait.
When I began carving, and I imagine the same is true for many of the snow carvers, I didn’t have the skills necessary to uncover some of my visions.
Therefore, those remained locked in blocks of wood, split pieces of white cedar, waiting on my shelves. As I got better in my technique and trusted my knife strokes more and more, I was able to deliver on those revelations and free those creations that had been waiting to swim under the ice for so long.
So I enjoy those few days in Whiteside Park when the space is full of giant, non-descript blocks of white snow. I really enjoy that. I look at their size, their potential and their locations in the sun and under the cover of darkness. I like to imagine what could be there after the teams of carvers finish. I like to imagine their tools making first strokes and the first chunks falling to the ground. When I’m carving wood, these are simultaneously the scariest and most exciting cuts… I have begun, as some of you might have guessed, to look at winters here in Ely with a similar eye. We gradually or not so gradually get colder as the year heads into November. Eventually we are frozen and the lakes are frozen in and the snow begins to fall, making us one giant misshapen block of snow. What lies underneath? What do we have the potential to transform into by the time summer arrives? Will we emerge unchanged, just as we were last fall?
Or, will we achieve some of that unclaimed, gestating potential?
I have faith that we can. Every winter I do. I believe that, like the red-backed voles in the subnivean zone all winter, we don’t lie dormant.
We are not simply waiting for the snow and ice to retreat. We may have a little sloth and slumber slip into our lives due to darkness arriving at four o’clock and the overall lack of sun rays permeating our blanketed selves.
Perhaps some of us even more than others given our time spent in dark houses out spearing for pike. Overall, though, we are biding our time and conserving our energy like cocooned caterpillars. I have faith that wings are being grown under all this cold.
Wings that are meant to raise us up to new heights. How about you? Maybe I’ll see around the fire in the meantime.
