BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 91

JANUARY 2013

DAVID

Winter doesn't get deeper than this. Not here. Thirty-two below, but the sun is shining and the wind is providentially absent. The light glancing off the solid snow floor forces one layer of clothing off and then another. 'Downright balmy', someone is wryly saying somewhere nearby, the warmth afforded by the sun a defiant retort to the frozen air.

You can play with sound in air this crisp, step on a snowdrift and hear it echo for what seems like an extended time, skipping across the frozen ground like a flat stone on water. Last night the train rumbled through loudly, making me wonder what desert-dwellers in the horse era once felt when the Mackay train went through in the night. A back-up beeper rings from across the river on the Reservation, a loader working on a gravel pit some miles away. If I breathe deeply, my lungs hurt and I cough almost nonstop, start gasping, reminding me of mornings feeding the dairy herd as a child. It reminds me, too, of wandering out in the sagebrush on a full moon night, following an owl to a power pole and asking for an omen, a sign about Kali—but getting none.

That was an anguish I can easily draw forth, as easily as coughing grain dust from my lungs and with a similar result: distaste. I am sure Henri Bergson was trying to convey this impression about time and how it subjectively feels, how memories, or moments, inhabit an internal place not necessarily sequenced, so that an experience from ten years ago might be right beside one from thirty years past, accessed as near rather than distant.

We have exchanged phone calls, Kali and I. Making peace, I suppose. Kali's mother died before Christmas and she left shortly after. Our conversations contain trivia, might seem as formal as an Austen character's, but we have catching up to do. Not just about the time since our involvement but before—both of us agree that those threads we failed to connect allowed our parting to take place.

I don't believe breathing techniques have any remarkable, mystical power but deep breaths are useful, I have found, to still the mind. I suppose any sort of tic might serve equally well, any comforting object might provide calm—maybe gun lovers just need an object to focus on, maybe we all should conceal and carry our security blanket. And so I breathe, short and shallow inhalations, because the still, brutal cold threads back to that encounter with the owl, that moment itself an instance of remembrance which I was trying to run from: Kali.

Coming here was such a mistake. All the little reminders were bad enough, but endurable. Seeing her is crippling, and while I run no risk of returning to drink to escape (only because I know it won't work), I would take a pill, many pills, if it worked to bring me some equilibrium.

A vehicle comes into hearing range, probably on the gravel road, the compressed snow a better conductor of sound than the ice on the pavement. Maybe Hoaglands feeding cows, it's that time of day. Maybe a retiree, enamored as I am by the frozen atmosphere, risking a ride on the backroads through the stillness.

I will have to re-read Bergson to see what he says about the position of futures. The buried gold holds a place in my mind much like a memory does, seems a portal toward something but I cannot get further than two or three steps into where it might lead—it has the approximate life of my conversations with John, which might mean that I just can't finish things; maybe it means I lack an imagination, or cannot plan, or maybe it means absolutely nothing, is just another wall that the mind can't break through.

What would money solve? What would Kali solve?

© 2025 Ralph Thurston