Snow, The Road, and Trout... It'll Make Sense... Kinda

Saint Francis is not amused
That's it. I'm calling my congressman.

There's no excuse for this weather--this SNOW!

It's SPRING! Spring is supposed to be a time for... SPRINGING! Bunnies shouldn't be bouncing around doing bunny things. Surrounded by the early signs of vegetation and growth.

Instead, the rabbits are battling with the squirrels over scraps falling from garbage trucks. And nothing is growing, because it's all frozen under a foot of snow.

OK, it could be worse. Not all that long ago, my class on apocalyptic literature finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Sweet, merciful...

This is my second time reading this novel, and I wept again when I reached the final page. It is at the same time bleak and beautiful. It's a father/son story at its core. But it's also so much more. Or less. It is a novel about absence, about what a world looks like when there is literally nothing but ash. No culture, no color, no order, no life, no divinity, no morality. Just a father and son who commit themselves to being "keepers of the light."

When the story finally resolves, McCarthy has this as the final paragraph. I'm still thinking about it.

 Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. 
There is something curiously brilliant about selecting a brook trout as the emblem for creation. If you have ever done any fly fishing, it make sense. Otherwise, this might seem random. There is both strength and fragility in the body of a trout. On the end of your line, you feel its strength, its will to live. But the conscientious angler takes time to gently carry the fish out of the water, to remove the barbless hook, and to return it back home.

So it should be with creation, writ large. Alas...

I guess all of this thinking about imagined worlds way worse than this one should make me more tolerant of the spring snow. Should.  

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