I leave the book on the shelf, unread.
Out in front of the library, students walk, hair messy from bed, in giant sweaters, heads down against the new cold in the wind. Mingle not with those you do not love, Plato warns, or you will be condemned to wander the earth nine thousand years without wisdom.
15
Winter break comes like an open grave in winter, a dark cold slot after the fall term’s last snowy days.
The first time I try to die I am on a mountain, near my aunt’s house, and I’ve decided to go on an overnight camp just before an ice storm comes through. The Friendship Mountain Range sits on the border of Canada, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine near where I am visiting my aunt in Rangeley, Maine, a place she’s lived for twenty-five years as a librarian. I haven’t planned this too far in advance, but, after Christmas concluded in a pile of nonrecyclable paper and satin ribbons, and as I again pack up the art materials that I regularly get every year for Christmas, the trip, as it was suggested to me then, seemed “a perfect opportunity to lose myself.” A pattern of literalism that continues to this day.
I am up here ostensibly to paint and sketch. The storm has been forecast for days but previous to it are days candled by the sun to a painterly brightness, and the only shadows possible, between sun, clear sky, and snow, hide under my feet. My aunt Pat, my mother’s younger sister, is concerned and has asked repeatedly that I not go out. She has recently divorced, and is dating again, happy, as if her new divorce has shucked off a parasite that had eaten her entire youth. She now seems resupplied, her face colors itself, her hair soft again. On the morning I make my effort, I reorganize her kitchen shelves as I stock my bag out of her pantry. If you get the idea to buy cooking lard or cinnamon, I say, indicating the things I have found in large supply, Don’t. She has the habit of purchasing things she can’t find, a permanent shopping list in her brain: frozen bagels and cream cheese, cinnamon, lard, microwave popcorn and canned beans, always there. As if she will always be safe with these, no matter what.
I wish you’d wait a few days to see if the storm will pass, she says, brushing her pants. She has just come in from the woodshed, to add logs to the three woodstoves that heat her reconditioned farmhouse. She is built like my mother, and has about her a similar tightness to her movements that gives no indication of her actual strength. She runs a hand through her hair. I’ll feel stupid calling your mother to tell her you died of exposure, she laughs.
If I die I’ll call her myself, I promise. And then I heave the pack on my back.
You have enough gas, she calls from the door, as I settle onto a snowmachine I rented that morning.
I do, I reply.
All right then, she says, and then she may have said something else but it disappears in the roar as the machine runs under the choke. She steps back in.
Ice storms appear first as rain, and then sleet, neither of which is an ice storm.
Even as I head down the trails, the machine banging over the hard-pack snow, I don’t think of it then. I think of nothing. January-thick white snow is everywhere. The new year is under way, and the snow makes everything seem perfected, cleaned off and put away until the spring. The evergreens are the suggestion or the idea of a tree, a green shadow helmeted in white. And the bare trees, arterial, reach out as if they give up something of the earth to the air above.
I reach what I decide is to be my campsite, situate my tent, and dig a pit to hide my food. I settle in for what turns out to be a long meditation in a quiet so vast my heart and breath make a racket. I bank a firepit and build a fire.
The sky becomes an ink wash, black scattered by water. And then light again. The sun lights down where it can, as if trying to grab hold. Help me, the sun seems to be saying to the little fire at my feet. I am now to be on the side of the cold and as the ice begins to come I am glad. The sun has every other day to hold us. Now is the storm’s turn. I let my fire go out, stay where I sit, the cold rising across me.
The storm is a glazier. Then fog passes through, touches the cold trees to add to the ice already there. Here the wind spins glass from the water it has stolen off the sea and the lakes, off the hair on my head and the breath out of my mouth, the storm takes the water from us all everywhere, to make of a mountain range a stained-glass depiction of a saint no one knows. A cathedral for cold January, a place for this gray bitter month, that everyone hates, to come and hide and pray for mercy, to pray to stay, when everyone else wants it to leave.
I walk down to the edge of the lake, picking my way through the dark woods. The ice here is relatively new. I set out on it, praying it will break. It’s a coward’s way, asking the lake to take me, but I decide that’s how it should be. There’s an island out about a half mile from the shore and I head for it. Death by exposure seems easy to achieve: to lie down in the snow during the storm was a time-honored Inuit passage to the other side of life. The blue expanse of the winter night would wrap you and you would become simply part of the blue, as easy as that. But it requires a patience for the journey, I can see.
When the ice breaks, I forget what I came to do. My left leg slips through snapping ice. My face slams hard as my leg goes through, cold and then warm again. I curse and roll and as I roll, my legs whipping up through the air, I can feel the ice cut me open.
I tear off a piece of my T-shirt and wrap my shin. And I crawl on all fours for the first thirty yards back, limp the rest. I laugh in the cold dark.
Back at my tent, I see red in my fire coals. I add wood, blow on it. Fire again leaps off the bark. The sky now the blue of the underside of a flame, as if above us heaven burned. Some part of me hopes it is true. That Peter is there, spreading fire as he walks from cloud to cloud.
The next morning the trees split from the cold. The water freezing inside the trees tears the fibers of the wood, and the wind pulls them apart. On the drive back, everywhere I look, sharpened sticks instead of trees. Back at school, Coe asks about the bruise on the side of my face and I show him the cut on my leg as well. You’re crazy, he says.
Yes, I say. That’s about right.
16
It was perhaps my drawing master who made me a ceramics major, but it never matters who makes you, ultimately, only that you are made. In any case he helped me find what would end up being the way I would choose to live, for which I am grateful. He was a visiting professor from Germany and as our final assignment we were to do drawings, ten in a series. A tall man who walked like a limping horse and spoke through a gentle voice a broken patter of English and German, he was often seen walking under the trees and looking up through their branches in just about any part of campus. I could be anywhere from a Ph.D. carrel in the library to a friend’s dorm room and there he would be, striding confidently, intent, but of course with the limp that seemed almost a choice, and it would have been suspicious if there weren’t any sign anywhere of him spying. He was entirely internally preoccupied and it mattered not at all what was going on around him unless it had something to do with something he was drawing. I once saw him leaving the cafeteria with a paper towel stretched between his hands, seven strips of cooked bacon balanced there. He saw me and said, I’m drawing them, don’t worry. You can come later and eat them if you like.