Читать книгу Areas of Fog - Will Dowd - Страница 17

GENESIS

IT’S BEEN A winter of naming. Every week the weather-industrial complex introduces and circulates a new buzzword for a weather phenomenon that has always existed (“Bombogenesis” is having its moment), while The Weather Channel has gone rogue and begun naming blizzards. They’re not even proceeding through the alphabet. It’s chaos.

But is it surprising?

Sooner or later, winter was bound to be branded, or at least hashtagged, relabeled and resold by the paranoid-delusional 24-hour news cycle as yet another sign of the Apocalypse, which itself has an impressive catalog of names—Doomsday, Armageddon, End Times, Eschaton, Ragnarök.

That last one, Ragnarök, refers to a climactic contretemps between Norse gods, a clash to be preceded by a mighty winter and a wolf swallowing the sun. It’s all described in a 13th-century compilation of Icelandic poetry, and, according to one group of Viking experts, it’s scheduled to occur this weekend.

Yet despite the media’s best effort to trademark various aspects of the season, we still lack a basic wintry vocabulary.

We still have no name for the first labored swipe of windshield wipers over morning frost.

We still have no name for the mist that rises off the shoulders of melting snowmen like their departing souls.

We still have no name for the evening snow that falls like Pompeian ash, redly illuminated by the brake lights of infinite traffic on your commute home.

We still have no name for the desolate winter rain that fell on Wednesday, the kind that would be depicted as thin vertical lines in a Japanese woodblock, nor for the sideways, abacus-like sliding of freezing raindrops across the brim of an open umbrella.

And still, still we have no name for a balmy February afternoon, such as the one we had on Thursday, when the sun comes back to you like a lost dog from childhood and lays its golden paw on your chest.