While many Dutch people go on winter sports for fun, I read Edith Wharton’s tragic love story Ethan Frome (1918) about snow. It falls steadily straight down in soft gusts that resemble “an increasingly dense darkness, as if the winter night itself were descending upon us layer by layer.”
I’ve never understood why people refer to days spent cooped up in snowy mountains as a ‘vacation’. Have they never read a book, for example that magnificent Wharton? Enter lumberjack Ethan and his wife’s niece with whom he has fallen head over heels in love — in Starkfield, Massachusetts, Starkfield for heaven’s sake, so the ‘unapproachable field’. They have nowhere to go.
Or let’s face it, our modern snowgoers don’t even watch the latest season of the HBO series True Detective? This takes place in the fictitious village of Ennis in the all-too-real Alaska, where madness takes hold of lonely, isolated inhabitants. Snow and ice bring the characters face to face with their worst nightmares. Anyone who sees this will not think about it worry even just one foot in one ski boat to slide.
Take that last, recently aired episode. It was night for six weeks. And cold, freezing cold, so cold that the characters could barely move. There was not a moment of sunshine. The story was intriguing: scientists at a research base died because, bizarrely, they ran naked into an ice field. Two detectives have to solve the case. The key question seemed to be what exactly was hiding in the permafrost, an ancient monster or something? The answer turned out to be too banal for words. However, the realm. Constant shivering. People falling through the ice. Corpses dumped in the ‘sea’ because nothing ever thaws here. Frozen limbs to pieces if you so much as touch them. The writing is on the wall: in no episode did I see people après skiing.
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Your life is not secure
In the snow you are not sure of your life. Ask Miss Smilla. It is she who is in Smilla’s sense of snowPeter Høeg’s worldwide bestseller from 1992, is in mortal danger from the moment the boy falls from a roof and snow trails become the first clues to all kinds of dark machinations.
Even such a tough McReady, a John Wayne to be clear, can at the end of the snow story – John Carpenter’s film The Thing (1982) — doing nothing but saying, let’s just sit here in the cold for a while and see what happens. While ‘the thing’, a thawed alien creature that threatens to destroy the entire world, is still lurking somewhere in the snow.
Yet thousands of people voluntarily take to the snow every year. The more remote the destination, the better. These people don’t read newspapers. So they miss articles that include things like “a man trapped in a car in the frozen mountains of Colorado where his phone has no reception” (The Guardianabout the new film Cold Meata title that says everything about the stereotypical winter holiday sight of hundreds of people wanting to hit the blue slopes at the same time).
Or maybe people are reading selectively, and their eyes fall on this report in the same newspaper: “Experience: I sort the mail in Antarctica.” In it, a young woman tells how she took a job as a postmaster there and now shares the Port Lockroy harbor area with five other people — and one thousand Gentoo penguins. These ‘Gentoo Penguins’ are the third largest penguin species on Earth. When they make a sound they ‘trumpet’. Apparently they are cute, but I would never trust such an appearance.
As that story shows, people want to get away from their own gray world, they want to experience the ‘pure’ of the white world with new layers of snow every day. That is understandable, also from winter sports enthusiasts. People want a view heap when they wrap those Kaiser rolls with thick layers of butter, close the door of the chalet behind them and tie down the slats a little later.
But then I give them the deranged penguin by Werner Herzog. In his documentary Encounters at the End of the World (2007), he shows a group of penguins waddling towards the open water on the right of the screen. Except one. It continues straight ahead, towards the mountains. “With five thousand kilometers in front of him,” comes Herzog’s voice, “this crazy penguin faces certain death.”
All that white causes madness
There you have it: all that white causes madness. Herzog and penguin know better than anyone that it is hopeless, that snow only brings the “increasing darkness” of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Ethan Frome, a man trapped in a physically and mentally frozen landscape, a man so desperate that together he decides to finally get out with his young, illegal lover by zooming down the mountain on a sled (‘winter sports’!) just as long as they hit a tree at full speed.
With this doomsday story I certainly don’t want to deprive anyone of any fun these days, but really: winter sports holiday? All together like a colony of penguins up and down in the snow? While you Ethan Frome have read and True Detective have seen? On the other hand, of all the penguins that Herzog shows in his film, there is only one that does not participate, one that loses its way.