Walking in Snow

Light snow fell. It was seven in the morning on a Thursday.

Half a world away, Russian paratroopers were dropping into Ukraine and most likely in the snow. The invasion was on. Paratroopers? Was it 1944?

I wanted to get out in the snow. You don’t get all that many chances in a lifetime of living in Western Oregon to walk leisurely in falling snow. I remember almost all of them. The ones on the beaches remain the most memorable because there is simply no word to describe accurately the experience of seeing snow land on the ocean and disappear.

Sometimes I think that might be a good way to leave this life, when the time comes.

I donned the trusty pea coat and 50-year old stocking cap from my junior high days that I’d recently entombed. I felt alive. My mind shook with vigorous creative imagination. I started thinking about an idea for next season’s Christmas tale. Something about a sanctimonious man who loses it all via a scandal of some kind and heads to the Oregon Coast to escape the stoning on social media. There, he rents a house for a week to get it together and meets….? Maybe some men living down by a river and ready to cook a Christmas Day turkey in a garbage can in hole in the ground.

An older man across the street captured my attention. He lifted the the door of the canopy on his mid 90s Chevy pickup, took out a green bottle of something from the bed and started belting it down. It was either beer or wine or Pernod. He just stood there in the snow and drank.

It didn’t surprise me. I’d seen the same old man drinking from the back of his pickup in the morning at least a dozen times over the last year. Then I’d watch him walk up the stairs into his home that’s probably worth $750,000 but also has a 200-year old orange Camaro with flat tires in his driveway.

I kept moving. I picked up the pace. I paralleled the creek and admired the ducks. The homeless encampment was dead ahead. I cruised through it and saw a man emerge from a RV wearing a backpack and wielding a flashlight. A woman near him was inside a shattered sedan and trying to move things around. On the hood of the sedan rested four full 24-ounce bottles of Coke.

The noise of heavy traffic from a nearby boulevard filled the air. I hit the park and took the path among the oaks and conifers that bordered the boulevard. A train passed. Then another.

Down the path, a hundred or so yards away, I saw a man bundled up in a heavy coat walking his bicycle. He wore a backpack. It all evinced the unmistakable aura of a homeless man walking in the snow.

I figured I’d catch up to the man and we might have an opportunity to talk. A few seconds later, the man stopped near a stately oak tree, took off his backpack, leaned his bike against the trunk and sat down.

A minute or so later I would meet the man and we would talk, for almost half an hour. And what a conversation we had. Certainly the most fascinating one of my life that occurred while snow fell.

And you can read what happened at https://mattlove.substack.com/