THE SANTA BARBARA/KAMCHATKA DICHOTOMY

Seems like the snow this year opted to fall in February and March, for some reason eschewing the springlike December and the mild January, reserving itself for heavy snowfalls every few days thereafter, just as we in the igloos were expecting outdoors to drop the icy act and not require so much firewood of us who are already making garden moves and re-stacking shiitake logs in our minds.

But as I’ve mentioned occasionally in these weathered musings, oftentimes it’s blizzarding here and beachweather only a kilometer away, which makes things interesting. Yesterday we drove into Kyoto for some shopping and a stop at the YWCA (where I exchange paperbacks now and then); it was sort of like leaving Kamchatka and a few moments later arriving in Santa Barbara.

This morning down at the train station after another night’s snowfall, as I stood looking around in the early sunlight under a clear cold sky, the lake blue, the mountains crisp white, patterned in geometric patches of lumbered areas, some of them almost vertical - I can’t imagine lumbering an almost vertical landscape - the view went on until blue of water and white of mountains met a sky-high curtain of dark-silver silk, strung across the lake: the shifting border of snow country. Beyond it the snow was falling heavily, obscuring everything; I was right at the edge of the high-pressure area; the border could shift this way any minute, and I’d be in the heart of a blizzard.

It probably will shift a couple of times before the day is out, putting us in and out of Siberia by its massive whim; maybe tonight it will swing north for good and we’ll be in Santa Barbara as of tomorrow, instead of Kamchatka.

SNOWGLOBE

The other day it was snowing and blowing fiercely, the new snow already stacked up several inches atop the old, and Echo had to go into the city and do a couple other things on the way, but because of the snow and threats of bigger snow later in the day, she decided to take the train rather than drive, so I drove her to the next big station, three stations down the line.

About halfway there, as though god had snapped her fingers we emerged from heavy snowfall into a land of blue skies and tweeting birds, people were walking here and there unhunched, wearing shorts and flip-flops or sunbathing-- ok I'm exaggerating a bit but that's how it felt in the mind, the sudden transition from Yukon to Miami. The weather had just broken into tiny pieces of winter that melted on the road behind us. Long live the summer.

Later, on my way back home in the birdsong sunshine, about halfway there I saw not far ahead a roiling white carpet hanging from the sky, a pale wall into which the world and its road disappeared. Winter was right where we had driven out of it a half hour before, it had not moved or weakened, it was waiting, the great wall of white, hanging there like a veil before another world, the gateway to Snow Country.

I rolled up the windows and wished I hadn't hallucinated into shorts and flip-flops. I hit the big drift and the bright world disappeared, I could see maybe 2 meters to any side in the multicurrents of the snowstream, drove slowly back to our village and up the mountain a teeny-tiny person in a teeny-tiny red car at the heart of the way-biggest snow globe I'd ever been in.