The snow ended while I was on my walk, turning to a light rain that rapidly diminished to an almost imperceptible drizzle. It ended while I was in the center of town. Five inches of snow, and the bank was still open - perhaps because it was noontime on a Friday. One of the tellers said they would be closing early. The prediction had said the snow would turn to a continuous rain turning back to a 'wintry mix' tonight. It included the possibility of as much as half an inch of glaze ice. But now that I'm back at the computer, the radar shows that most of the continuous precipitation has passed off to the north and east. A patch of sleet may still hit us, but the worst seems to be over.
            Crossing the bridge from the South Side, while the snow was still falling, I had that timeless sense of softness in the visuals. Even the city is susceptible to the persuasions of the snow, something that, in my youth, I thought was characteristic of the country. I always associated the city in winter storms with snow falling into black, moving waters. Where the image came from is not clear. Here, the river commonly turns an immensely seductive jade green in winter, except when swollen by rains and melt, as it is now. Now it holds a hybrid muddy light green, a slightly yellowish brown green.
            I walk out through the center of town, a small city, but contiguous with a second small city and only a slight distance from a third, all in a matrix of suburbs extending out at least ten or fifteen miles in most directions. A handful of tall buildings and a few blocks of relatively dense commercial, but the rest of the city is tight residential. I walk down Market Street, past the old mansions converted to apartments, down toward the last bridge in town. Back across the river, perhaps fifteen or twenty acres of the old steel mill have been leveled and site prepped for a new casino. Today, I saw structural steel for the first time. I had observed the pouring of an immense retaining wall between the two levels on the site - a drop of perhaps as much as twenty feet on the back end of the site toward the river. It was also clear that they were pouring footers on the upper level, but a little hard to see from my vantage. I don't cross the bridge. It's a long bridge, originally spanning the mill as well as the river. About a quarter of the way across, I descend four flights of stairs wrapped around a concrete monolith, dropping down to the towpath on the north side of the river. I walk back on the towpath, perhaps a mile and a half or more, to the central bridge in the city, where I re-cross to the South Side.
            The cross-country skiers had already left a path. But there were also the half-paths of  a surprising number of walkers. I first walked the towpath nearly forty years ago, when parts of it were radically untended and much of the canal was empty. A year or two ago, and almost no one would have ventured out on it with this much snow, apart from the snowmobilers at night - motorized vehicles being illegal.
            The skiers may have kicked me into the nostalgic frame, but that would have been a circuitous route, and largely unconscious. What prompted it specifically was awareness of my feet, because of the slight slog, and then the mind traveled on to the six inch boots I was wearing. It's not the first time I've had the thought. Country boots are eight inch boots. Six inch boots are city boots. But these boots resemble the first serious pair of eight inch boots that I owned.
            I grew up in the country on a farm. But my father was a professional mathematician. And my mother grew up in New York City and was a summa cum laude at Smith. Neither of them had a clue. They drove out every morning. I walked out the quarter mile lane to the bus. We had a winter where there were at least ten sub-zero days. I finally scrounged an old pair of faded brown corduroys and wore them over my regular school pants.
            Those eight inch boots served me well. I was nearly thirty when I bought them, at a sporting goods store, in that unique confluence where hippies transitioning into commune and country mode crossed paths with the hunting and outdoor crowd. At the time, it was not that strange to me. I'd grown up on a farm with rifles and shotguns in the house. I've done my share of blood sport. So long glass-topped counters with pistols and glass-faced wall cabinets filled with rifles don't put me off. But that's where we were. That outdoor / country edge was what we wanted.
            I remember the boots because that was when I was doing wood heat. The ashes and chokecherries were dying on the back fence line at the farm. I don't even remember whose chainsaw I was working with. All I remember is that it wasn't mine. So I was dropping the dead and dying trees, a good part of the wood already pre-cured on the vine, so to speak. But I was also in that rhythm of stacking one winter for use in the next.
            We wanted self-sufficiency. And I think a lot of us wanted it for reasons like mine - because we thought we had something else, something more important to do, and that we could establish self-sufficiency on a low enough level of work-required so that we would have ample time for 'this other thing'. Today, I don't know if there was any viability to that thought process. I don't know of anyone for whom it worked.
            But it was also a question of escaping the middle class mindset. And, for me at least, there was very little 'political' about it. Stacking wood one winter for use the next is somehow the antithesis of nine-to-five in the office. Chain-sawing a tree and splitting tough, fibrous wood like ash is a world away from academe. I learned to drive truck for the same reason. That, and the survival stipend that the state supplied while I did it. I had no intention of driving a rig for a living. But, afterward, when the big chief program director decided personally to do inventory on the success of his program, I couldn't get him to understand why learning to do it was enough.
            Walking on the towpath, I can look across at the blast furnaces - still standing after all the other demolition. My welfare room is gone. The offices are gone. I spent the better part of a year there, learning something about working in a crew, learning about heavy industry - learning, for example, why somebody might be satisfied to spend thirty years manifesting the art of the shovel. I'm not being ironic here. Bourgeois intellectuals project their own ennui all over the world. The only antidote is to go and look for yourself.
            The skiers take me back to Yosemite - the only time I tried to learn cross-country skiing, with an old girlfriend and her husband. The husband kept talking to me about how I had to get into my body, so I couldn't get into my body and learn the necessary damned sense of the body, the necessary balance. I still think it was backhanded resentment on his part. But that's where we were. Others decided for shoes instead of skis. The idea was that we were going to get back to nature. But it was a deep hunger for something else, something missing in our lives.
            I still see me out in the snow on the farm, wearing those boots, stripped down to a thermal, a tee shirt and a woolen shirt, maybe the sun shining and the snow beginning to melt. In that softened snow, the boots slip a little and then grab.
            Even the six inch boots are good, if they can bring back that kind of memory.

- Jeremy