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These days, the snow is a misery, a crusty, frozen coating of sweat, overwork, and strained muscles at a job that pushes far too hard and rewards far too little, but this was not always so. There was a time when signs of impending snow raised the fine hairs on the back of the neck, the curl of fingers anticipating the steering wheel, the Mona Lisa grin of imagining something wonderful, just around the bend.
I had a Sonett back then, or rather I still have one, if the rust-ravaged carcass balanced delicately on blocks in the backyard serves to invoke anything beyond the simple reinforcement of my redneck side. It was, in point of fact, a Swedish sports car; a thing so rare as to defy proper description. Derived from Saab's heavily-engineered but charmingly awkward sedans with virtually no mechanical changes, the Sonett was an odd combination of front-wheel-drive, absurdly large wheels for a tiny sports car, and styling that merged Italian flair with scandinavian pragmatism, neatly rendered in paper-thin fiberglass bodywork. Even the name was a quirk, not an allusion to poetry, but rather a derivation of a Swedish exclamation, "Så nätt den är," which translates roughly to "how neat they are!"
Mine was also a lurid, Kermit-the-frog green, and the resemblance was striking whenever the heavy, mechanical flip-up headlights were raised, sitting up in googly splendor over the puppet-like snout of the thing.
As a sports car, it was what such things are, a combination of cramped, awkward seating and a sightline just even with the bolts on the wheels of a semi, and it did what it did with typical nordic reserve and competence, except when it snowed. When it snowed, it came alive, those oversized front wheels coupling mystically with the ground they barely touched, pulling the thing endlessly forward without reservation or remorse. When it snowed, when it really, really snowed, when everyone with sense stayed indoors, drinking hot chocolate and watching old movies on TV, it was truly the only thing on the road; a little swedish frog, tap-dancing on a wedding cake.
My road-farming buddies were all on call, at the ready, when the time came, and we'd climb aboard and head out, diving into the snow in twilight, when it's all lit up in shades of sodium orange and mercury blues from all the humming streetlights, and chugging northward, outward, and into the lesser-traveled ways. We'd plunge through the untouched lanes that ran through the prison, riding the crown of the road with no thought of yellow lines and traffic laws, undisturbed by the police in their lumbering rear-wheel-drive Caprices and Crown Victorias or the populace in whatever a populace drives, just whipping 'round the bends at wild speeds.
You'd grip the wheel, feeling the way it'd fight you in the rising and falling drifts of snow, pushing into the corners at speed until the front wheels would stop being wheels and start working like skate blades, and the car would plow into the corners with a spray of white, then take purchase on asphalt again in a grinding whirl of gravel. In the in-between instants, the fragments of time you experience just as your eyelids are snapping closed in a blink, it'd all stop, every snowflake, suspended in the glare of headlights, every one just there, individual and as separate as we all are from each other, just frozen in that rush of non-time you come to doubt ever happened almost as soon as you witness its appearance.
Rounding the switchbacks and hairpins of Ellicott City, own our local version of some tiny Italian hillside town, it was all unlimited, unbound, like all things are every once in a while, when the whole world fades into that impossible drift of whirling static, where it's only you, and only me, and only two of us at the center of everything, charging through the rising and falling geography of somewhere else. In the end, it really becomes that somewhere else, so rare and joyous that you forget the land around you, and forget the barriers and boundaries and everything else but that—right there, right then, the way you carve that flowing pathway through the waves of a frozen sea, the way it all just comes together, the touch, the play, the roar of the engine and the sound of you two laughing and talking, the presence of action without action.
One more bend and you'd dodge the last vestiges of city lights, heading west, out into the counties, away from the glare, and it'd get quieter, simpler, more perfect, just the snowflakes lit by two lonely beams of light, in that instant before a blink, when they'd just turn to stars, constellations only you would ever know.
Flick the wheel, plow through the corner, skid through the perfect silence.
You knew then that you'd live forever, and already had.
The snow comes, goes, melts away, but you remember, even after all these years, even after a little Swedish frog turns to rust, oxides of friendly metals, and powdery, crumbling plastic, what that dance was, back then, what it felt like, what you saw, and how close the impossible worlds are to this one. The snow comes and it is magical, even still, even as an antagonist, and though you'll never drive that path again, it is always there, just around the next bend, waiting for you and a friend and a night a lot like this one, to remind you once again what it all was for.
I had a Sonett back then, or rather I still have one, if the rust-ravaged carcass balanced delicately on blocks in the backyard serves to invoke anything beyond the simple reinforcement of my redneck side. It was, in point of fact, a Swedish sports car; a thing so rare as to defy proper description. Derived from Saab's heavily-engineered but charmingly awkward sedans with virtually no mechanical changes, the Sonett was an odd combination of front-wheel-drive, absurdly large wheels for a tiny sports car, and styling that merged Italian flair with scandinavian pragmatism, neatly rendered in paper-thin fiberglass bodywork. Even the name was a quirk, not an allusion to poetry, but rather a derivation of a Swedish exclamation, "Så nätt den är," which translates roughly to "how neat they are!"
Mine was also a lurid, Kermit-the-frog green, and the resemblance was striking whenever the heavy, mechanical flip-up headlights were raised, sitting up in googly splendor over the puppet-like snout of the thing.
As a sports car, it was what such things are, a combination of cramped, awkward seating and a sightline just even with the bolts on the wheels of a semi, and it did what it did with typical nordic reserve and competence, except when it snowed. When it snowed, it came alive, those oversized front wheels coupling mystically with the ground they barely touched, pulling the thing endlessly forward without reservation or remorse. When it snowed, when it really, really snowed, when everyone with sense stayed indoors, drinking hot chocolate and watching old movies on TV, it was truly the only thing on the road; a little swedish frog, tap-dancing on a wedding cake.
My road-farming buddies were all on call, at the ready, when the time came, and we'd climb aboard and head out, diving into the snow in twilight, when it's all lit up in shades of sodium orange and mercury blues from all the humming streetlights, and chugging northward, outward, and into the lesser-traveled ways. We'd plunge through the untouched lanes that ran through the prison, riding the crown of the road with no thought of yellow lines and traffic laws, undisturbed by the police in their lumbering rear-wheel-drive Caprices and Crown Victorias or the populace in whatever a populace drives, just whipping 'round the bends at wild speeds.
You'd grip the wheel, feeling the way it'd fight you in the rising and falling drifts of snow, pushing into the corners at speed until the front wheels would stop being wheels and start working like skate blades, and the car would plow into the corners with a spray of white, then take purchase on asphalt again in a grinding whirl of gravel. In the in-between instants, the fragments of time you experience just as your eyelids are snapping closed in a blink, it'd all stop, every snowflake, suspended in the glare of headlights, every one just there, individual and as separate as we all are from each other, just frozen in that rush of non-time you come to doubt ever happened almost as soon as you witness its appearance.
Rounding the switchbacks and hairpins of Ellicott City, own our local version of some tiny Italian hillside town, it was all unlimited, unbound, like all things are every once in a while, when the whole world fades into that impossible drift of whirling static, where it's only you, and only me, and only two of us at the center of everything, charging through the rising and falling geography of somewhere else. In the end, it really becomes that somewhere else, so rare and joyous that you forget the land around you, and forget the barriers and boundaries and everything else but that—right there, right then, the way you carve that flowing pathway through the waves of a frozen sea, the way it all just comes together, the touch, the play, the roar of the engine and the sound of you two laughing and talking, the presence of action without action.
One more bend and you'd dodge the last vestiges of city lights, heading west, out into the counties, away from the glare, and it'd get quieter, simpler, more perfect, just the snowflakes lit by two lonely beams of light, in that instant before a blink, when they'd just turn to stars, constellations only you would ever know.
Flick the wheel, plow through the corner, skid through the perfect silence.
You knew then that you'd live forever, and already had.
The snow comes, goes, melts away, but you remember, even after all these years, even after a little Swedish frog turns to rust, oxides of friendly metals, and powdery, crumbling plastic, what that dance was, back then, what it felt like, what you saw, and how close the impossible worlds are to this one. The snow comes and it is magical, even still, even as an antagonist, and though you'll never drive that path again, it is always there, just around the next bend, waiting for you and a friend and a night a lot like this one, to remind you once again what it all was for.
