Between the Facts

I could see it coming long before it reached me. Off in the distance, beyond the ridge behind me, the sky was concrete. No, not concrete. Something softer, wispier. It was the quick scribbled pull of a charcoal stick across the canvas of the sky. Downward strokes fingering to the ground. The unmistakable sign of precipitation falling.

The wind was picking up as well, pounding suddenly against my back as I peered through my scope, counting grouse on Onion Flat. And so I knew, despite the blue sky overhead and the sun blinding me through the lens of the scope, that the snow was coming.

So I prepared. I pulled up my hood, draped an extra jacket over the scope, stuffed the empty cases for the scope and tripod into my pack, slipped my datasheets into the plastic sheet-cover. Then I waited for it to come.

It came with surprising speed, those charcoal clouds buffeting toward me at the insistant urging of the wind. The sun was tucked away and the pressure on my eyes eased, a shadow passing over then encasing the lek, making counts easier. I turned into the pummeling wind between counts and waited for the snow to fall. The clouds blew forward, and forward, and beyond them already the blue skies were spreading quickly toward me.

It wasn’t until the clouds were passing onward, the clear blue beginning to stretch out again overhead, that the first weightless flakes began to drift down. I laughed aloud. How ironic! How wonderful, this curious delay, this slow slow decent of the flakes that allowed the clouds to pass before they alit on the earth, giving the eerie impression that those glistening specks of snow were born not from the clouds but from the bare pristine sky instead. How marvelous!

The snow began soft and light, then grew heavier, more numerous. Staring through the scope I became dizzy with the white spots streaming in nearly horizontal trajectories across my view, obscuring the grouse hunkered on the clearing below. Then the clouds passed and the sun peaked through once more.

For a few moments more I had the odd experience of standing in the blinding rays of the sun as the snow continued to drift down upon me. For just a few moments. Then it was gone. The grouse lifted from their hunkers, meandered slowly back to the lek from whence some had retreated. The sun bore down in a spotless sky and there was no sign, no sign at all, that it had ever snowed.