Relentlessly Beautiful

It's been snowing in Furubira for almost a week now. From time to time, the pace of it slows and the sun cracks through the clouds to set fire to the reflective white of it all. I'll go to bed with the last few flakes of the day drifting down, and I awake in the morning to a driving whiteout, what purchase I was able to effect by shoveling last night completely burried under all that's fallen as I slept.

All of the angles in this place have come to curves under the unrelenting accumulation. The solemn, standing stones in the haka have come to better resemble overiced cakes.

Poles have sprouted teetering white affros, and the trees are like molecules or solar systems: their boughs turned to bulbous white planetoids.

The snow piles up, vast and deep, like glaciers or continents on the slanted metal roofs of houses. As the kerosene stoves burn, heating up the houses, these continents of powder go sliding down the inclines and fall to the ground with whomps that you feel in your chest. I closed my closet door a little too forcefully the other day, and i could hear the impact of it echo in the breaking up and sliding of the snow on the roof above, felt the muffled whomps in my chest as it all cascaded down into the yard. While walking through town, you have to be careful not to walk too close to the buildings least you should be lost, burried utterly in one of these avalanches from above.

With the dwindling amounts of dark peeking out from under all of the white, it's like the world is slowly being erased, leaving only blank, white paper behind—the negative-space wet dream of some impressionistic artist.

For someone who loves snow as much as I do, this is some kind of freak Christmas miracle. For all my years living in Canada, I don't know that I've ever had the opportunity to witness this much snow. Riding into Yoichi today on a bus out of Sapporo, I almost missed my stop because the town had become so bulbous and white as to be alien. It makes me wonder as I prepare for the arrival of Craig and my father on Wednesday if their impression of Hokkaido might not be one of an Antarctic marshmallow land of snow. I wonder if, were they to return in the summer months, would they be able to recognize anything of this place from their first, snowy impression. Of course there would be the mountains and the ocean to orient them, but, with another possible 40cm of snow forecast for tonight, I wonder if it might not finally succeed in entombing the mountains and the ocean as well, turning this place into one undulating, uniformly fluffy sheet of white.

I took advantage of a break in the snow today to get out and take some photos of Furubira in the snow. I've included some of them here, but there are a few more in a new Flickr set.