The Sudden Weight of Snow (11 page)

I’d heard of Pilgrims Art Farm, we all had. It was fifteen kilometres from Sawmill Creek in one of the valleys that pooled between small peaks. Pilgrims Art Farm was in one of the narrow valleys that radiated out from Sawmill Creek, the mountains rising more sharply from the valley floor there. The farm informed our own perception of Sawmill Creek but most people tried not to acknowledge it. People from other places seemed more interested in what was going on out there than we did. People from the city, crews from small TV stations, artists who appeared in town with dark-rimmed glasses and black clothing, all of them looking around like they were on the set of a small town, like it couldn’t possibly be real. At the time, when I thought of Pilgrims Art Farm, I thought of women with hair knotted into crowns, the smell of blood and dirt, thin listless men with erections, children like feral wolves, dried herbs, thick dark oil.

We had convinced ourselves that everything would change after the night of the solstice – there would be a fraction more sunlight each day until June, the Sawmill Creek Loggers would win more hockey games, and we would go to Pilgrims Art Farm, discover something there, we were sure.

On that night, Krista and I had to work the Junior B hockey game at the arena. We had managed to get jobs there
for the busy season leading up to Christmas. Sometimes we were there for the games, sometimes just for public skate times. That a hockey game corresponded with the Solstice Fair worked out perfectly. We wouldn’t have to invent an alibi. There were two concessions inside the arena – one large counter from which you could buy hot things – dogs spun sweating in a case, burgers, nachos hidden under bright, gluelike sauce – and one small booth on the other side of the arena where you could buy pop, chips, candy. That was our domain. Krista and I were situated in a triangular booth that was propped in an upper corner of the arena, with a window looking out on to the rink, separated by Plexiglas. We doled out strips of licorice, face-pulling sour candies, and watered-down Orange Crush with equal indifference and then went back to sitting on the counter by the window, the game a backdrop for whatever personal dramas we wished we had. We were metres away from the similarly enclosed glass box that housed the arena organist, a young Pentecostal guy who drove in from Yankee Flats. He had confessed his love for me in a lengthy letter months before but never spoke to me at the arena. I might have thought the letter was a prank but he had included a tape of himself playing his favourite organ songs and I didn’t think just anyone could pull that off. He was acne-ridden and awkward and Krista and I mocked him in a way that would make me feel sad whenever I thought about him.

On that night, we were unable to sit still. We fidgeted with the radio dial, trying to find a frequency without static. The only station that came through in the arena was playing a commentary of the game, and we didn’t want to listen to that.
When people came by, we took their money quickly, shook the coins until they slid across each other on our palms, and repeatedly seemed to miscount change. The sports writer for the local paper, an attractive middle-aged man who was known to be a harmless pervert, came by and watched us bounce around behind the counter. “God, I wish women my age had your kind of energy,” he commented, one eyebrow raised, both eyes on Krista’s breasts. “It’s intoxicating, you know that, eh, girls?”

Krista stopped bouncing and looked at him. “Don’t you have a game to cover?”

“I like a little spunk,” the sports writer muttered, then smirked. “I definitely do like a little spunk,” he said again as he walked off.

We pulled down the metal door that closed the concession counter before the end of the third period and left early. No one was interested in sugar at the end of games, they were already thinking of beer and salty things to increase their thirst for more beer. Krista had her dad’s truck for the night. We wiped the snow off the hood and windshield with our jacketed arms and sat in the parking lot with the truck running, waiting for the engine to warm and heat the air coming from the vents. Krista leaned across me and opened the glove compartment, took out a pouch of Drum tobacco. “Where’d you get that?” I asked, sitting on my hands to warm them. She just winked and started to roll. I ripped tiny rectangles out of an empty pack of Mr. Delaney’s smokes and handed them to Krista for filters. Not a bad roll job, bulbous in places, baggy in others, but not bad. The cherry cracked against the paper and we licked our lips for the sweet taste of fresh tobacco.

When we had finished the smoke, Krista told me. “I added a bit of weed to those.”

“What?”

“Not much, just enough to loosen us up a bit.”

“Uh, yeah, okay. Thanks for telling me.”

“Relax, Harp, obviously it didn’t work.”

The railway tracks flanked the arena. If we drove around the building and up a block, we could come back down a street that met the tracks then dropped off immediately. A relatively small hill but one that could launch a vehicle, for a brief exhilarating moment, into the air. We circled the block and Krista accelerated despite the slip of snow beneath the tires, one last pump on the gas as we hit the tracks. The tires struck the line and then, nothing. Nothing but air under the truck; nothing under us as we left our seat for a brief moment. All in slow motion,
Dukes of Hazzard
style. Landing, the bench seat sprang up under us and, buoyant with excitement, Krista rounded the corner, fishtailing, and did the whole thing again – acceleration, jagged track, air, the spring of seats – faster. We did this three times, the third gaining so much momentum that we each hit our heads on the ceiling. The truck threatened to spin out completely when Krista lost the wheel but she somehow regained control as I doubled over with laughter. From somewhere, we heard sirens. They sounded like they were approaching so we left quickly and drove out to Pilgrims Art Farm, the feeling of air still underneath us.

Roads cut through fields around Sawmill Creek like a child’s drawing of a staircase, right angle after right angle. They would straighten out in narrow valleys or come up
against hills and switch back until they met logging roads and ascended into the forest. The volume of back roads spider-webbing the valleys astounded me. They seemed to have little purpose beyond meeting with other back roads. Roads as fences, locking our small towns into valleys. The highway passing us by.

Krista and I came down from the air we had caught over the tracks and everything seemed weighted and quiet with the recent snowfall. Cows plodded single file through fields, smoke rose in straight, lazy lines from chimneys then settled around houses and joined the smog from the mill. Fences were piled with snow in columns on each post. “God, this place is tragic,” Krista lamented. “Try to roll us some more smokes.”

In the valley around town, the land was barely flat and wide enough to graze animals. Farms were small and were called hobbies. People grew and raised odd things in the valley – ostriches and llamas, edible flowers, ginseng under taut black tarps that collected heat by summer and were taken down in winter leaving fields as canvases for snow. A hybrid of cows and buffalo called beefalo grazed at a farm, their free-range, steroid-free lifestyle attested to by large signs at the side of the road –
We are free range and drug free!
– as though they were the poster herd of bovines. The mill was the only thing that made money around Sawmill Creek and that just barely. As though resigned to this, people grew things out of curiosity, yet always with the hope of hitting a jackpot fuelled by the quirky desires of other people, far away. These people were rumoured to have insatiable appetites for large delicate fungi, healing herbs, the most organically derived meat. We’d all heard the stories of
people going into the bush around Sawmill, living in camps and spreading out into slash-burned areas to collect mushrooms. Mushrooms that were sent to Vancouver, later even Japan, and returned as gold.

No one had ever met anyone to whom this had happened but we believed the stories; they made our valley seem exotic. We wouldn’t have been able to tell a mushroom picker from the pickers who arrived each summer to pluck fruit from vines and branches, or the tree planters who arrived each spring looking as soft and grey as the last year’s windfalls. During the summer, the planters came in from the bush every ten days or so, dreadlocked and mac-jacketed, smelling of dirt, pine, and garlic, and went to the same bars the guys from the mill went to. We knew from the stories that sometimes the planters and the mill workers got along, found camaraderie in the commonality of livelihoods based on forms of tree and wood. Other times they didn’t, knocked blood out of each other in the parking lot until the cops broke them up. By the end of the summer, the planters would be tanned and muscular, lingering longer in town, trying to get away with more at the end of the season. Most of the girls in Sawmill would admit to a love of these late summer planters, all muscle and dirt. Admit to wanting to leave with them at the end of the season, climb in the back of four-by-fours with shovels and dogs and go wherever they went back to. But unlike the planters, who returned with the next season, we wouldn’t want to come back.

Pilgrims was sandwiched between hobby farms and a forest of trees perpetually ready to be cut down and planted up again, like thick gnarled lawns to logging companies. It started to
snow again. “Keep your eyes out for the sign, okay?” Krista said, leaning into the steering wheel, eyes on the windshield like it was going to reveal some kind of message. The wipers cleared the glass, the snow stuck to it again. There was no wind and even the sounds coming through the radio were slow, melancholic folk songs. “Do you feel like we’re time-warping, right now?” Krista asked.

“Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel. If I could save time in a freakin’ bottle you know the first thing I’d like to do? – break the thing open. Maybe we should just turn around and forget it.”

“Nah. What use would that be?”

I paused, tried to think of a use. Like we could distill our actions into something utilitarian, something we could hold, the grip of a shovel. “Yeah, okay. So, have you ever heard of anyone ever going to one of these? I mean, who goes to these things, anyways?”

“What do I look like, a Farmer’s Almanac? No one we know, but then, no one we know goes anywhere besides hockey games and lame parties. I don’t know – growers, people who hang out at the health food store. I think people from Kelowna and shit. Maybe even Vancouver. They’re into this kind of artsy stuff down there.”

Led by a sign to the Pilgrims Art Farm Solstice Fair, we turned off a back road onto two dirt depressions made by tires. They led into the bush, then opened to a field covered in tire tracks, where cars and trucks sat, parked like resting animals. When we got out of the truck, the field clicked and dripped with the sound of recently warm vehicles shedding snow.

We had no idea what we would find at the farm, but once
we walked through the gates and closer to some buildings, we could see small wooden signs nailed to things – trees, fences, posts that appeared to be erected for the sole purpose of displaying small wooden signs – as though put there just for people like us. We peered at them, hoping they would be some kind of directions – and some of them seemed to be. A couple of signs said Outhouse and Cookshack and pointed, seemingly randomly, into a cluster of buildings, a glow coming from the other side of them. Others were more cryptic and announced, we discovered with lighters held up,
Carpe diem
and
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked
. “Ah, shit,” Krista started. “Who wants to go to the bank naked?”

“Hi, uh, I’d like to withdraw a couple bucks. Need to get me some of them there clothes you all got on.”

We walked around a building, hoping we wouldn’t be late for whatever event was happening. We ended up in what appeared to be the centre of the farmyard where there was a large bonfire surrounded by bales of hay. Some people sat on these, others had gathered on the porch of one of the buildings. We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and walked past this group and into the building, looking at our feet until we got inside. It was clear that whatever craft fair had taken place earlier was over now. Long tables, like the ones in the basement of our church, were pushed up against the walls. At church, once a potluck was over, women would wash all the Corning and Tupperware before we could come down from all the Kool-Aid we had drunk. We’d go to the bathroom, almost expecting to pee lime green or cherry red, and would return to find the tables pushed aside, all the bowls and casserole dishes
displayed across the taut plastic tablecloths, ready to be picked up and taken home by whoever had filled them with potato and jellied salads. God helps those who help themselves, cleanliness a virtue, idle hands and something about the devil. At Pilgrims, food still clung to dishes and platters, crumbs and whole morsels all over the table, and there were things like candlesticks, small painted boxes, coarsely woven bags amongst the food, obviously left over from the craft fair.