Yesterday, I hiked and
then snowshoed through over two feet of snow to reach my cabin. Heavy snow fell for the whole time. The entire Rocky Mountain landscape around me—top
to bottom and side to side—was white and silent. Trees, mountains, and sky dissolved into the immediate
curtains of snowfall sweeping past me.
White is not exactly a color. Not in the same way as, say, yellow. Yellow has a specific wavelength—a naming
song, if you will. White, on the other
hand, is a compendium of all colors.
White is a mass of noise in that regard.
Yet, most of us perceive in
white a certain purity. Maybe that’s because
white can also be overwhelming. Consider
how you must sometimes shade your eyes when you enter a white room filled with white
light or open the door on a sunny snowscape.
Yesterday, white snowflakes
overwhelmed me as they sifted down from a white sky, waltzed through white
ghost trees and swept by me, white on white as I trudged on. The entire surround gone chill and soft and
utterly flat, if not beautiful, in perfectly diffused daylight. A kind of slow motion overtook the countryside. For the whole time, I heard but a single brief
sound. That, a soft murmur of running
water when I crossed the mostly snowed-over creek and finally saw my cabin
emerge from the snow.
--Mitchell
Hegman
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