A dry cold day in mid-January. 23 degrees at 11 a.m. The weather satellite photo shows a circular mass of frozen precipitation filling the bowl of Cape Cod Bay and spilling over its rim. All morning sea snow has been falling, blowing and swirling over the cracked and warped surface of the deck outside my study. It looks like something organic, something alive – but not quite.
Dry snow – so light – so very light, lighter than feathers, lighter than dust. The flakes buzz and twirl like soundless insects. They act like a cloud, or like smoke, with the lightness of smoke, but with true substance, true individuality of particles. The loosely consolidated aggregations of flakes careen down and crash soundlessly onto the deck, shattering and scattering apart, like a silent movie of a silent war. A gust of wind randomly gathers together the scattered flakes and whips them into a small white pile, then instantly changes its mind, dispersing them again into new groups, dissolving them upwards into the air.
What fascinates me most about dry snow is its instant responsiveness to the vagaries of the wind, its total lack of adhesiveness to any surface, the tentativeness of its resting anywhere. It slithers and slides, its only lubrication its own weightlessness. It has no will of its own, no inertia or energy, but it is a perfect record of the wind that moves it. It is the inanimate mimicking the animate – mimicking, in fact, perfect animation, the soul, or spirit, without the drag of the body or the clumsiness of passion.
A friend once told me of going to collect the ashes of a loved one and how they accidentally spilled out of the urn onto the lawyer’s desk, and how their attempts to gather them just scattered them further. That is what these dry snow flakes are most like: the ashes of the dead, wandering the earth endlessly, alighting nowhere.
Later that afternoon, curious to see how this dry snow behaved on the beach, I bundled up and went for a walk at Cahoon Hollow. A dry river of light, sparkling snow swirled around me and rolled down the beach, driven by a fierce north wind. At times the swirls of snow surged up the cliff face, like protoplasmic extensions of gigantic waves, not quite reaching the top. They looked like a racing, transparent veil, a ghost river with no mass, just velocity.
Nothing inanimate - not rivers, not lava, not blown leaves, not even the crashing surf itself, seems as alive as these wraiths of dry snow blown by the wind. Watching this phenomenon, I think it must have been the inspiration for certain cinematic effects, such as the transparent, avenging spirits in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the soul-sucking Dementers in the Harry Potter movies. Like them, these wraiths of dry snow embody the notion of restless, damned souls racing to and fro, seeking something they know not what. They come, trace the contours of what they move over like demons in search of a home, and then move on, leaving no mark, only the memory of fragile, unearthly beauty.
