"Well, I have never been hit so startlingly and hard. Suddenly I was the most bewildered and relaxed person in France. My legs buckled and folded beneath me and my arms grew so independently lively that I managed to smack myself in the face with my elbows." – Bill Bryson, from the Road to Dribbling


The skies in Wisconsin for the last two weeks haven't offered much of anything interesting to follow except for a few final patterns of geese that have seemingly digested the fact that indeed there is to be a real winter here and that it might be time, just this last moment, to tune that compass south where, at the least, you know things are going to be a little more lively this time of year.  The season becomes a little more excruciating up here in the farther northern climes of the continent when neither sun nor snow shines, which leaves the outdoor enthusiast will little more to look foward to than anything white that might form on any surface, somewhere...anything is better than the monotonous jigsaw pattern of leaves that now create a kind of tired canvas we might call seasonal limbo. Well, by Christmas day, we got a little bit of everything to take its place, in spades.  Last week might have peaked by temperature to, say, 45 (hard to keep track of highs these days, really), but we now received a plummeted temperature of negative 10, accompanied by slight dustings of enough snow to offer a little white wash over the blasé canvas and that the waterways had begun to spin their crystalline webs and surfaces now exist where only brown water had been. Now we're gettin somewhere. And so it had become time, we hoped, to "get outside!" again after a good heavy handful of limbo weeks as the citizenry had taken on gradually the glum monotony of this new season. My middle daughter and I chose a close and usually very choice hike up along one of the ridge lines of a bluff near the house we lived previous to where we live now, but same city of Onalaska. This is old farm field and meadow that rises to the standard woodland that turns birch and poplar up around the rockiness. The wind had stirred up, pushing that brand new and very pushable light layer of snow into certain kinds of snow devils. We rose up through the meadow losing our foot grip on the hardened tundra-like path, still dirt, but like rock now, and lined by packed ice. Most every inch of our bodies were covered either by pant or scarf, but if there was a last millimeter still exposed, this was the kind of cold that would sniff it out, lay a trap for it, I'm sure, like a hunter and attack. And attack it did. There is also something far more vicious about the paradisically sunny day that is also the coldest yet of the year, or for the rest of the year for that matter. The mind wants nothing more than to bask; it remembers the residue of boredom from the previous month, and perhaps it is the ancient complexion of the retinue comes to crave like the artist a set of bright watercolors over the gray hues. It is enthusiastic, it is determined to walk up to the very source of it and hug that old sun at the top of the ridge and look down upon the valleys in all their clarity and vividness. We began to spring from tree to tree for cover. Our gloves simply weren't fit for the exercise. The wind was laughing inside our hoods and even our ears, under fine hats, were beginning to tell stories of what it will be like to get back inside to the solitude of the condo as soon as possible. "I feel like my eyeballs are cocktail ice cubes," I said, for that is exactly what I thought of at that moment, "all you'd have to do is slightly pop the back of my head and they might very well pop out frozen. We could use them later for Christmas drinks." As we ran a little faster up to the grand rock formation of the ridge, one of those odd balanced rocks that had been carved by the wind over millions of years, we wondered too if this rock was at one point another man with such dreams as to reach the sunshine on an Arctic day, lost all of his clothes and got stuck there for a very long time. He protected us from the wind for a moment, just long enough to begin to remember what it was like to have skin over rock of bone. Another gust whipped our eyes something like a wet kitchen towel. We looked at each other, shook our heads, then ran down the slender trail as quick as possible. A moment later, I heard barely through the three inches of padding over my ears a slight kadunk, and there was my middle daughter flat on her back. She had slipped on thinly serrated soles and, as she was falling reached out for the only branch available to stabilize her fall – and lo and behold, it was, of course, a thorn vine, of which its spikes and easily found vulnerability in the thin cloth fingers of this particular pair of gloves. She thought she should say ouch – for likely there was a thorn in some finger – but of course there was nothing there to feel, and so had to wait a couple of hours back home after a bath to yelp out loud. "Look at though, outside, it's sunny!"