Snow Tomorrow.

The Japanese speak forecasts like they're a certainty. I guess that's partly because forecasts over here seem to be a bit more reliable than what passes back home. Where in Canada you'd get a "we're likely to see snow later this week, though it may just appear as rain showers."; in Japan it's more of an "it will snow Tuesday. In the morning. Approximately 8am."

...which is what I've been hearing from friends and co-workers since about last Wednesday or Thursday when the yuki mushi were really showing up in force. It's the kind of prediction I'd brush off at other times as being unreliable, but I've started to really believe this one. That's likely because I've got myself so wound up for snow this year. While the autumns in Hokkaido are mild and relatively rain free, they can hardly compare to the deep, fluffy, neverendingwhite of the winters.

Hell, I've been looking forward to the snow since some point in August. When I try to rationalize it, asking why I'm this wound up about it this year when I wasn't nearly so excited last year, all I can come up with is that now I know what to expect: a winter like nothing I've seen back home. Or maybe it's because back in January of last year I finally figured out how to enjoy the snow. I've loved snow since I was a kid and have always gone for long walks in it or burrowed tunnels through it, but I had last winter while riding a chair lift, alone, up Teine. I was staring out at the patchy blizzard blowing over the mountain, at the falling wisps of white that it shook free from the evergreens, and all of a sudden I was overwhelmed with the feeling that this had been what I was always looking for.

All of those long walks under street lamps made somehow more material in the cones of flakes they illuminated; all of that aimless lying in snow drifts in warm gear watching it fall around me: I had always been looking for a way to be out in the snow--looking for a reason to spend hours and hours bathed in it. Everything I'd done before had never seemed sufficient. Even skiing never gave me the right kind of immersion I was subconsciously craving. For some reason I can't explain, snowboarding does. Between the speed of the descent and the subtly clicking quiet of the lift; between the faceplants in snow banks and the barely landed "jumps" (if they can even be called that) off of low moguls; somewhere in the middle of all that I've found just the mix I never knew I was looking for.

Now that I've found that perfect way to be out in the blizzard; now that I found a place where it seems to snow more than I could ever imagine, all I want to do as the days get short and the nights get cold is to be able to take advantage of this coming winter, from its very beginning to its very end.

In that anticipation, all I can do is sit here and hope that all of those Japanese people who are so certain of snow tomorrow are right.

Yuki Mushi

The Yuki Mushi are thick in the air today.

Look at that. I say it like I'm some kind of expert; like Heather hadn't only just taught me what yuki mushi were.

Yuki Mushi (雪 虫): Snow. Fly. Insects with an indexical relationship to winter so precise and unwavering that they have become iconic of it: their tiny white filaments, their lazy, almost wind-blown flight path. The snow(adj) flies(n) are so iconic as to have become literal: "how long now unti snow(n) flies(v)?"

Though I never noticed them last year, now that I know about them, I see them everywhere--just like you do when you're a kid and you get your first dog, and all of a sudden you can't believe how many dogs you've been missing in your neighbourhood: like the bloody block is chock ablock with the mutts all looking to sniff your crotch and pee on your tree.

It's like that with the yuki mushi now. Where before they were fleeting glimpses, almost thought to be greying fruit flies at the corner of your eye, now the flurries of them hold my eyes ransom as I try to scan past the windows. With the grey clouds unbroken above, and the icy Hokkaido nights starting to crowd into the autumnal Hokkaido days, I am given to wonder if we might not just skip the interim this year: go straight from unseasonably warm summer into unbelievably siberian winter with only the meagrest of falls from one into the other.

That inbetween lingers just long enough to give rise to the snow flies: our harbinger of not long now 'til snow flies. That middle ground between sun and snow will fall away so suddenly that not even the yuki mushi will see it coming: fall from that perfect equilibrium that breeds and sustains them to a chitin-shaking cold to make their tiny corpses into first flakes as the dancing swarms of them fall, too. They will blanket the fields and the roads and the houses like their namesake. Like stubborn spectral soldiers, they will hold their ground in death; not able to melt away until the long months of this winter have come and gone.

And, even though we've hardly had a fall at all, I'm ready.