The snow on Monday afternoon and a slippery expedition to the North Main Street I.G.A. for salmon and potatoes for a scalloped supper on Monday night put me in mind of a style of walking I learned back in the years when I lived in Canada. It’s a technique for walking across ice, snow, and slush so that, when you inevitably slip, you avoid whipping backward and cracking open your skull.
People in Nova Scotia — where we lived when the kids were small enough to inquire earnestly if Santa was coming every time it snowed, and it still snowed surprisingly often in Nova Scotia in the 2010s — said this technique originated with the Inuit. As I write this, that Inuit claim seems dubious. The Nova Scotians who told me this about the Inuit probably heard this ice-walking tip on a health-and-wellness segment on the “Your Morning” television show on CTV Atlantic. But anyway. To avoid seasonal head injury, you have to tilt your body weight forward over your toes, tilting into the wind and weather, as the Inuit supposedly do. In my mind’s eye, the experienced ice-walker would achieve this forward-tilting posture by leaning their entire mass ahead like a board, hinging at the ankle, but in my own performance of the frozen-weather walk, I find I cannot tilt my body mass forward without bending my knees and creasing at the axis of my hip bones, resulting in a posture that looks like I am a cartoon hunter slowly sneaking up on a wildcat.
It seems likely the art of ice-walking will be lost before the end of the decade, what with the demise of ice and snow. Only the old folks will retain the arcane knowledge of the tilting walk. You will be old, old, old if you remember how to safely walk in the snow. It will be like remembering how to install a ribbon into a typewriter, or whip cream with only a whisk, or the words a driver called out to oxen pulling a heavy cart (“gee” and “haw”).
I wonder if any climate scientists today are tabulating an increase in the number of citizens slipping and falling in the snow and ice and cracking their skulls open now that we so seldom have snow and ice.
The brief interlude of winter weather on Monday was enough — winter-deprived as we’ve been lately — to inspire all sorts of ponderings and musings about this forward-tilting weather dance.
In dry climates, do citizens walk more stiff and upright?
In tropical climes, do people tend to have a looser-limbed ramble, rolling back on their heels? I feel like that may be likely, and that someone could do a dissertation on the subject, or choreograph an avant-garde dance project. I’d pay $5 to see “The Weather Dance” performed as a ballet.
We left Nova Scotia 10 years ago last month. My memories of Nova Scotia are indeed snowy and white, and the winter indeed did feel like it lasted seven or eight long granite-gray months, an endless monolith of a season from October through April — even though that province is not actually colder than, for example, Rhode Island. Indeed, the Nova Scotia winter is so comparatively mild, in the Canadian context, that Canadians sometimes say it lies in “the Banana Belt.” (Canadians also sometimes call the relatively balmy Vancouver Island “the Banana Belt,” and southern Ontario, too. I think — ? — they are being jocular.)
But even with the not-exactly subarctic temperatures of Nova Scotia, spring and autumn in the Canadian Maritimes were barely an abbreviated blip on the calendar in my experience. We stumbled quickly right over spring, our toe catching quickly on the crack in the sidewalk of June, and went almost directly from never-ending cloudy gray winter to a brief three-month interlude of summer. My time in Nova Scotia is represented in memory as a photo scrapbook of snow tires on the minivan, toddlers in puffy red snowsuits, ice-skating pageants, steam rising from a double-double coffee (two cream, two sugar) in the minivan in the drive-through at Tim Hortons . . . and then a brief blaze of orange popsicles and lake swimming, your bare feet sinking into squishy lake mud — mud dating back to the Carboniferous Period when Nova Scotia hung geologically down by the tropical Equator — as you stood there and wondered if you would see any loons.
The further snowy winters recede into the past of another century, the more magical the snow becomes. Does it not? We hardly got an inch this Monday afternoon, but the mere paltry inch set the associations dancing in my head like so many flecks of silvery mica swirling inside a vintage snow globe.
Tolstoy said that artists only sully the magnificence of natural creation when they describe the natural world in prose by comparing it in simile to man-made things (the moon like a white volleyball in the black winter night sky, the creak of the poplar tree in the January wind like the weight of a boot on the staircase in the dark). But while I agree with Tolstoy in theory — and indeed agree with Tolstoy in most things, a few cuckoo views on women not included — I cannot resist the urge to compare the unaccustomed treat of a snowy landscape, meager as the snow is this week, to the childhood delight of sweet-shop candies and bakery goods. The snow lies upon the earth like confectioners sugar.
Is the snow not like white fondant icing tonight?