Page 78 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

on the cabin porch.

This excerpt from my journal, kept while I lived in a one-room cabin in the hills of Vermont in the

winter of 1992, documents a classic January thaw, several consecutive days of above-freezing

temperatures in the midst of winter. In Vermont, winter typically begins in November and ends in

April. In recent years, the dramatic fall and rise in temperatures has mellowed as the climate has

warmed. I feel winter’s identity shifting, and my own changing along with it.

Last winter, in mid-February, my 15-

year-old nephew Kyle and I attended an

art exhibit at

Vermont’s Shelburne Museum, entitled

“32 Degrees: The Art of Winter.” The

curator brought this mixed media

collection together to explore the

identities of snow and ice and to pique

viewers’ nostalgia for the season.

Included in the exhibit were large snow

globes with darkly comic tableaux, a

snow music video game, Monet’s

“Haystacks, Snow Effect,” and three

large digital images of tiny fishing

shanties set in the center of landscapes

of white by photographer Scott

Peterman. The loss of winter due to global warming across the planet was the unifying message

coming through the work of each artist.

Inside the snow globes, children and adults in street clothes soared off the edges of icebergs with

smiles on their faces, a woodcutter wielding an axe chopped a tree with black birds seated on every

limb, and wolves surrounded a man perched on stilts. Outside on the museum grounds, we explored

a village of fanciful fishing shanties, the work of several craftsmen paying homage to an age-old

winter activity. On the field of greening grass, these tiny houses looked marooned and odd as space

ships. It was 55 degrees Fahrenheit, a day of high clouds and intermittent sun. January’s snowfall