Asakiyume mita

Many people know the story of faithful Hachiko, the dog who always went to Shibuya station in Tokyo to greet his master after work, and who continued to go there every day to wait for him for nine years after the man died. There's a bronze statue of Hachiko by Shibuya station now.

Well, on February 5, Tokyo got snow that--unusually for Tokyo--stuck. And in Shibuya station, someone made a friend for Hachiko:

Photo by Tokyo photographer 清水哲朗; gobiguma on Twitter (original tweet here)


This photo courtesy of Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper


We can imagine the statue and the snow dog came alive in the wee hours of the morning and romped and played, dark dog and pale one. I'm sure the spirit of actual Hachiko is pleased.

It snowed!

I knocked the snow off the clothesline and it fell all at once, from the entire length of the clothesline, a rope of snow hitting the ground.

I'm back from my dad's house, but while I was there, I found a tiny nature preserve that has been set up across the street from my high school. It's on low-lying land unsuitable for development: a land conservancy has bought it and made it into a preserve, so high school students can learn about wetlands and local people can go for walks.

Because it's a wetland, there are sections with plank walkways to keep you above the water. For one of them, the beams are laid out lengthwise, and when you walk on them, it's musical, like a marimba (you have to turn your sound up to hear; it's a not-great 10-second phone video):



The creator signed it:


The other walkways have the planks laid out crosswise--they don't give the same music (but are fine for walking on!)


I saw an odd but funny and entertaining movie on Netflix, Army of Thieves (2021). In it, a young German bank clerk who has been mastering safecracking in his spare time is recruited to break into a series of bank vaults designed by a master locksmith and themed on Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung operas. (The vaults are named Reingold, Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.) For each vault, the guy tells the story of that opera, and the music plays in the background, and then you get an image of all the gears and tumblers moving as he goes into a trance, listening to the clicks and slides and whirs. So cool! And the rest of the gang are hilarious characters. I feel like sartorias would enjoy it.

Weirdly, the movie is a prequel to a zombie film, Army of the Dead. This film is not a zombie film at all! Is this a thing that happens often? A prequel that's a totally different genre from the original film? The only way zombies figure in Army of Thieves is that you hear news stories about this zombie outbreak in Nevada, and sometimes the hero has bad dreams about zombies. I think he's the only carryover from one film to the other...

My attempt to influence the wind's snow sculpting didn't work super well, but I do have a few photos to share.

Here are a couple of before shots. One was of a mound of snow from shoveling...



You can see behind it a piece of wood and a lawn sign. Those were my other ventures. The piece of wood didn't do much of anything, but the lawn sign worked a little. Here's a close-up before shot of the lawn sign:



And here's an after shot, taken this morning, of the same sign.



If you click through and enlarge, you can see a little ridge on the right side of the sign, and two hollows on the left side ... although I think that bigger hollow is maybe just one of my footprints, all smoothed and shaped, and not caused by the sign at all...

Here's an after shot of the mound. The high-contrast sun-and-shadow situation makes it a little hard to see how it's been smoothed over, but...



And lastly, even though I didn't take a before shot of this, here's another case where you can see a lot better how a sign interfered with how the wind shaped the snow:

I've photographed this before, but I keep doing it because I keep being fascinated by the image: the snow that's pushed up by the sidewalk snowplow casts shadows that look like marvelous city skylines. This one seems to have a dome in the center--a mosque or Eastern Orthodox church:



And this one has some impressive spires and minarets:



We went on a hike on Mt. Tom late this afternoon (there is another mountain called Mt. Toby ... it feels like a rather-too-familiar naming convention? I prefer mountains to be named things like Sugarloaf or Norwottuck... which, indeed, are names of other nearby mountains). The ruins of an old 19th century hotel, the Eyrie House, look out on the Oxbow, a feature of the Connecticut River that the Hudson River Valley painter Thomas Cole painted in 1836:



The Eyrie House has its own entry in Atlas Obscura--it has an aura of tragedy, and indeed, so does Mt. Tom generally--a B-17 bomber crashed into the mountain in 1946, killing the 21 people on board. ... And people keep on needing rescuing, for some reason, from it. A woman was rescued from the summit in September this year, and someone else in November. Go figure!

I am happy to report we enjoyed our hike without incident. The evening light was beautiful.

At 6:30, this windstorm knocked out the power, and I freaked out, picturing us without power for days in the well-below-freezing temperatures. The pipes would surely freeze and burst and then cost extravagant amounts to fix, and anyway we wouldn't be able to fix them right away because everyone else's pipes would have burst too, and so the helper-fixer people would be in short supply.

I went to the supermarket to get milk and maybe another candle. In the parking lot, I met Wakanomori, who'd just gotten off the bus; he said the town to the west had power. I knew from the gossip in the supermarket that the town to the east didn't.

"We'll just have to sleep in one huge bundle in the living room under coats and blankets to keep warm," I said as we drove home. Without street lights or house lights, it was deeply dark everywhere.

As we were about to turn in at our driveway, our headlights illuminated a huge and unearthly creature, the color of smoke and about as corporeal, standing where we usually park. It was a deer--standing in the middle of the driveway. It stared at us a moment, then ceded us the parking space and walked away down the slope into our neighbor's backyard accompanied by a friend who'd been standing by our apple tree.

"National Grid estimates the power will be back by 11 pm," the healing angel reported, once we were inside.

"Please let it be so," I prayed.

And a minute later, the lights came on.

I think it was a blessing from the deer.

Snow clams burrow into the snow the way other clams burrow in sand, and like other clams, they have air holes.

See them? This would be a good place to dig for snow clams, though they'd probably be tiny.

I wish it weren't so hard for me to post now. It's as if I've lost the knack. How can something that was once natural become no longer natural? Because that's what it feels like: like there was a fluidity and ease before, and now there's not. I have some theories on the why of this, but they're not very coherent.

Meanwhile, I had photos stored up on my camera. Some evanescent things, like my neighbor's pussy willows, already transitioning from shiny grey buds to delicate, fringed, minute flowers:



And a minor snow (on the day that dumped more of the stuff on Boston), melting away, shielded by the shade of the lattice on our porch:



And I built a cake from pancakes for the tall one, whose birthday was the other day. Here are the pancakes, being made.



I layered them with whipped cream and frozen strawberries**, then covered the whole thing with whipped cream. It formed this impressive hulk:



Cutting into it was fun--there were all these tiny layers, like sedimentary rock, or like something from an actual cake shop (in spite of amateurish exterior). It was pretty good, except for the aftertaste from the strawberries.

**Unfortunately, without noticing, I'd bought "lite" strawberries. I realized this when I took a swipe of the syrup and tasted that unmistakable aftertaste of artificial sweetener. In the past few months I've accidentally bought zero-calorie yogurt and "lite" jam, both times only realizing it when I taste that telltale taste. Behind mango, apricot, and strawberry, there it is. The moral of the story is, be very, very careful about the item you reach for on the shelf.

Here is mist, sifted through a screen:



And here is mist, unmediated:



Today, on the other hand, is bright and sunny. The sun makes the snow sparkle and the crow's wings shine:

The other day I made a small footpath to the snowmobile trail. I'm so grateful I did: today, by comparison, I struck out from the street toward another section of snowmobile trail, across open field. It was exhausting, each footstep an effort as it plunged through layers of snow, compacted to different degrees by wind and cold. I made very slow, lurching progress until at last I reached the snowmobile trail--and then I positively floated along.

(I did see these lovely, light foot- and wingprints as I staggered along, though)
( two photos )

This got me thinking of our phrase "off the beaten track," and about how hard it is to go off the beaten track. Beaten tracks make things easier. Beaten tracks go where people want to go--that's how beaten tracks get made. But beaten tracks are restrictive, too. ... We know all this. We talk about taking the road less traveled, or striking out on our own--this being metaphor for any number of things in life--and although we acknowledge it can be hard, I think sometimes we fail to acknowledge that it can be killingly hard. Actually-literally, if we're talking about hiking, and devastatingly, if not lethally, when we're talking metaphorically. At least in life one's given the chance to recover.

I'm not saying one shouldn't strike out, off the beaten track--not at all. Not only do I like doing it on trails and things, but I've been thinking about it in terms of bigger things--changing my habits, changing how I think or what I do in situations. That's hard though--habits and patterns of thought are pretty firmly entrenched tracks. So how can I change them? So then I go back to the analogy.

If you're going off the beaten track and trekking across a field of snow, it helps if you have snowshoes--that makes it a lot easier. So: equip yourself. If you're in a snowmobile (snowmobiles make beaten tracks, but they can also go off them--funny!) and you're going off the beaten track (like these teen snowmobilers, who went missing near the hilariously named Devil's Den Road and Black Cat Road--thanks to Liz Hand for that story!) survival training definitely helps.

In other words, just flailing off on your own is going to predispose you to failure more than practice, planning, etc.

Sometimes I tell myself stories when I'm out walking, but sometimes I muse on things, and today I was musing, and behold: the above were my musings.

Here's a pretty scene to drive musings from my, and your, mind:

We know this is a water world, three-fourths covered in water, and we know the waters can drink up more land--rains can cause rivers to lap up flood plains, climate change can make oceans gulp down shores. And in winter, in the north, dry land becomes flooded, and the floodwaters stand. Right now my world is covered in nearly three feet of water--in the form of snow. And Boston is flooded by some six feet and more.

Here are some more photos of the waves....