Smudge Pots

Not to start off on a negative note, but during Monday’s snow storm a friend of mine slipped on an icy sidewalk and fractured his skull. He spent a couple of days in the hospital but he’s OK. Plus on that same day my daughter and ex-wife slid down a hill, the car turning sideways and ending up in a snow bank just short of coasting out into the middle of busy Route 138. On that morning just to get into my car I had to pull myself along the edge of the driveway by grabbing hold of bushes. Once I was got into the car there was no way I was going to get out and scrape the windshield so I backed blind into the street where I could “safely” get out and chop the ice. On the way into work that day I watched one guy slip coming off the curb and fall on his butt. It looked like it hurt. New Englanders seem to take a certain amount of pride in their ability to endure such conditions, and at the moments when I detect a minuscule glint of that boast I feel very far away; 3000 miles to be exact. Back with my homies where the coldest it ever got was when there was a little frost on the ground for a few hours in the early morning. To keep the oranges from freezing the citrus farmers used to light smudge pots, oil burning chimneys which burned with an open flame and cast a nasty black smoke which hovered over the orange groves, acting as a blanket to keep the frost from settling. By mid morning the cold was generally over and by afternoon you could go outside in a flannel shirt and throw around a foot ball.

No one was throwing around a football in China Town this morning as I picked my way over the deadly slick sidewalk on my way into work. I finally gave up on the side walk and climbed over the snow plow ridge and back into the street, preferring the risk of getting picked off by a moving car to the one of slipping and breaking my arm again. Plodding thru the briny slush it was startling to see one or two young people hurrying over the same treacherous sidewalk I’d just abandoned. What the hell is that about? Maybe it’s the tension I carry around in my posture and gait. All the friction’s in my head leaving less for my soles. 

So its my fault that I slipped and broke my arm? Actually there was a bit of stupidity involved. Note to self: never wear tennis shoes in an ice storm. But that’s frozen water never passing under the bridge. Actually, bridges freeze over faster than other surfaces because they’re exposed on two sides to the cold. These are bits of information I had never aspired to commit to memory.

A phalanx of trucks came toward me on the street and I was forced back up onto the side walk. At that moment the wind started to rip and I was buffeted from behind and for a second was actually skidding on the ice under wind power.  As the absurdity of the situation came upon me I was reminded of a camping trip I took in the Sierra’s during a late summer in the mid Seventies. It had looked like it might rain the night before so we slipped our sleeping bags into the plastic encasements, euphemistically called “tube tents”, which we brought on all such trips. I guess you could legitimately call them tubes, but as tents they were worse than useless and when you didn’t bother to string them up and actually make a tent out of them with a rope spine and anchored corners, they just sat inches above your body and created a miniature rainstorm out of the condensed moisture from your breathing. That bit of practical knowledge notwithstanding we had gone to sleep that night encased in tube tents in picturesque perfection next to an alpine lake. I remember shivering all night long, the goose down in my sleeping bag transformed into clumps leaving nothing to warm but its nylon casing and my unspeakably dirty long underwear. I remember that at around the break of dawn I was aware of a certain heaviness. As I loosed the bonds of my sleeping bag I could see that I had become part of a snow bank and that our entire campsite was blanketed in snow. Fortunately, that was the last day of our trip.

Did I mention I hate the cold? Actually it's not the cold. It's the ice. That's what I hate. I love the cold. Clears the head. Why the hell am I here? It’s too late to move! I live here in the icy cold with my friends and family. It’s often warm. But it’s often cold.