On Intla: Snow that has Drifted Indoors

On Intla: Snow that has Drifted Indoors Kathryn Winograd (bio) I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss. —Wallace Stevens “Sunday Morning” I can’t get past it. The word intla is supposedly one of the fifty, or even a hundred, of the words the Inuit of the Arctic use for snow. I recited them once to my mother, ill and sad on the eve of a winter solstice. How we marveled at the beauty of these words, their corporeality, the very fleshiness of snow we said we could feel again against our tongues—those far Ohio snows, winters with my father and brother and sister, how young we all were, the blades of our skates scouring the dark ice of our winter pond as we made great loops again and again beneath the gray world, snow in the air glittering, in our hair glittering: klin—remembered snow; naklin—forgotten snow; snow that blinds you —krotla. Last winter, I drove through freezing fog to reach our mountain cabin, a great slick of it settled over Highway 24 through Ute Pass toward Divide. There was no ontla yet, no snow on objects, but atmospheric [End Page 89] icing, water droplets in the air freezing on everything they touched. And then the rime formed—hard or soft, I don’t know—ice, it seemed, encasing everything this winter fog touched, the white tufts of it battened to every frail stem I drove past, every last hanging leaf of the past year, as if some merciful god I could believe in had dipped the pillaged world into bridal white, even the gas tank at the gas station covered in a bearded frost—hiryla, snow in beards—on its windward side. You see, it was the day the two French terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo, or the day two thousand Nigerians were slaughtered by a militant extremist group that kidnaps schoolgirls. I drove past Pikes Peak where ancient Ute Indians once migrated, the oldest migration in history, ten thousand years of migration, over and over again to reach this mountain they called Ta-Wa-ah-Gath, Sun Mountain Sitting Big, and believed to be the nascent world—their Great Spirit, they said, out of a hole in the sky, showering down enough snow and ice, tlapinti, snow that falls quickly, for a whole new glittering world that I, too, wanted. Of course, the EPA had come out with its annual report, too, Climate Change Indicators in the United States, 2014, and it looked grim. The report looks at conditions in the environment of a specific area over a span of time that seem to indicate enduring climate changes. The indicators include the predictable, like greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures, ocean heat, but lesser-known ones, too, ones that surprised me, like Lyme disease, ragweed pollen, bird wintering ranges, and leaf and bloom dates. And, of course, snow: the fall and breadth and depth of it. Certainly, according to this report, not enough for that new world. Wallace Stevens said, “One must have a mind of winter” and “have been cold a long time” not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves. This spring, I am to speak on a writer’s panel about the spiritual memoir, and I’m wondering how cold I am. We’ll ask ourselves: “Do we [End Page 90] build or blow up bridges between the faith community and the private realm of the spiritual?” Or: “What craft choices do we make, especially describing the exposition of insight and the drama of awakening?” And: “Are we ‘spiritualized’ by writing these books, especially when we, the ex-religious ones”—or me, the never religious one—“attempt the peril of translating ineffable experience into narrative and essay?” My husband Leonard, when I tell him of my spring quest, has, of course, something to say. “You and the ‘spiritual’?” He pauses to savor the moment. “Kind of a complete contradiction, no?” Ineffable experience. I do wonder what that means. Exactly. Is it when I think of my father, as Leonard reminds me I am ought to do, left behind in that...

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