Asakiyume mita

Yesterday

Yesterday morning in the woods I met a man dressed in bowhunters' garb, using a golf club as a cane as he limped along, accompanied by his lovely, friendly English setter. This man had a face well used to smiling, though he had very few teeth. Our greeting pleasantries were interrupted by snowmobiles, grooming the trail. The second snowmobile dragged a thing like a harrow, un-compacting the hardened snow.



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Today

In the Dunkin Donuts this morning, "I'm going to make a man out of you," from the movie Mulan, was blaring. How I smiled! This song is a favorite in our house. Another Disney song followed.

"Is this a . . . a cassette?" I asked the young woman at the counter. I was reaching for the word "CD" but "cassette"--a throwback to my own youth--was what came out.

"No, it's Pandora, on the Disney channel," she said, smiling sheepishly.

The day before yesterday

The first day of warm weather, the air full of melting snow. I walked to the supermarket. Ahead of me, a young mom with her small son. In the supermarket I passed them several times. After I paid, I walked out, only to find them ahead of me again on the sidewalk.

Cell phone photo from an old cell phone, so it's tiny and blurry



"We must have had about the same amount of shopping to do," I said as I passed them (you walk at a much more leisurely pace when you're with someone with tiny legs).

I went walking at dusk yesterday. The train whistle was sounding nearby. Clear the roads, clear the tracks, coming through. Coming through slowly. It was the Connecticut and Southern. I stepped off the trail and watched them go by--this pack was driven by slim young guys (sometimes it's fathers and young kids--but those packs are usually diurnal and travel on weekends) in complete snowmobile suits that made them look like Power Rangers. They waved as they went by, and I waved back, and thought of snowmobile legends.

Not my snowmobilers--these ones hail from Buffalo--but very like them.(Source)


Snowmobile Legends

Snowmobiler and Snow Woman

A beautiful young woman, wearing a white parka trimmed with white fur and a white knitted cap, is standing at the edge of the trail, watching the snowmobiles go by, and one stops, and the driver says, "Want a ride?" She smiles brightly and says "I'd love one!" And she gets on and wraps her winter-cold arms around the driver, and they go speeding through the woods. When at last, chilled to the bone, the driver stops and turns to ask if maybe she'd like to join him at the diner for some coffee, he finds there's no one there--just a drift of snow.

Fisher-Cat Selkie Snowmobiler

She snowmobiles down all the trails, searching out good-looking guys--maybe they're hunters, or maybe they're cutting wood, or maybe they're snowshoers. Or maybe they're just walking along the trail because they've lent their car to a friend and this is a shortcut home.

Anyway. She pulls up alongside and asks if they want a ride. She's got glinting black mustelid eyes and a knowing smile, and whatever guy she asks hops on willingly, and after zooming over snowy fields and across frozen ponds and streams, she asks her passenger if he'd like to come back to her place. She feeds him porcupine stew and leads him to her bed, which is covered by a blanket of stitched rabbit skins, and they exhaust themselves in lovemaking.

. . . And she doesn't eat him, and he doesn't find her fisher cat skin and steal it. No: she drives him back to town along the trails as the sun is rising the next morning.

"Maybe we can get together again sometime," he says, desperate and ardent, and she nods and says, "Yeah, maybe so," but it has never yet happened. She is always on the prowl for someone new.

Snowmobile highwaymen
In the winter of 1981, there were a string of thefts of convenience stores in northern New York and Vermont, and across the border in Quebec. The convenience stores were all near well-traveled snowmobile trails. The thieves would tie up the cashier and any hapless patrons or other staff, and make off on foot with rolls of scratch tickets and the contents of the cash register. They'd head straight for the snowmobile trail, and when a pack of no more than two or three snowmobiles came by, one member of the gang would flag them down. When they stopped, the other members of the gang would appear, guns in hand, push the riders from their seats, and commandeer the snowmobiles. Many miles later, presumably near their hideout, the thieves would jump off, sending the snowmobiles on, riderless, with a cord wrapped round the throttle to keep it down.

They were never caught.