Stormy Weather

From outside our window, it’s a winter wonderland; stuck inside our shoes, it’s the nightmare after Christmas. Snow! We yell, no matter how many times we’ve seen it before. Snow, we moan, no matter how many mornings we’ve spent shoveling it out of our way. Below, six writers consider the many enigmatic, idiosyncratic, mysterious experiences of snow.

This resemblance to space exploration was recently played up by Burton’s design for the American snowboarding team at the 2018 Winter Olympics. Their NASA-inspired gear promised to deflect snow, light, and sound—Burton undersold the snowsuit’s scientific banishment of sorrow, monotony, and failure, but then again, feelings are harder to empirically quantify.

The Burton suits, with their Team USA labels spelled out in NASA font, were unavoidably kitsch, a welcome distraction from the gloom of winter. The heyday of snowsuit fashion came in the 1980s and 90s, when the apparel was sported by everyone from Princess Diana in the Alps to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. To wear one now is to be protected by the golden warmth of memory.

Look no further than Mariah Carey, whose definitive take on holiday cheer rises like Christ each year to top the December music charts. For a modern generation, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” evokes nostalgia for 90s pop, but the key to the song’s timelessness is its own nostalgia, the inspiration it draws from years of listening to The Ronettes’ space-age show of holiday longing. For the 1994 music video, Mariah wore her snowsuit in red.

Even with the queen of Christmas in the mix, perhaps the most famous snowsuit was the one worn by little brother Randy in the 1983 film, A Christmas Story. In the movie, Randy’s snowsuit is his shame—his mother has wrapped him so completely in fabric and feathers that his arms aren’t strong enough to hold down the suit’s downy pouf. Trapped in a fight with older, meaner, bigger boys, Randy falls and he can’t get up. The snowsuit has made him immobile and helpless, a child among children.

In the movie, it’s an image of humiliation, but watching A Christmas Story as an adult I thought: what’s so bad about being swaddled? How nice it is to feel something other than grim determination to weather the cold. How funny to look in the mirror, after all that 2020 brought, and be reminded of what it felt like to be a child.

Teo Bugbee is a full-time union organizer and sometimes-writer based in New York City.

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My father was about five, waging a snowball fight in Scarsdale with an Episcopalian priest the family used to call Little Willy, and had taken shelter behind a tree to catch his breath and mitten at his ammunition when, looking to spy his nemesis, he popped his head back out and thunk—a cold hit right in the eye. The sharpshooter was the priest; years later, he would be consecrated as a bishop.

Intentionality is impossible to prove in a snowball fight, but my dad did have a crush on the priest’s daughter, Bonnie, and maybe, maybe Little Willy just meant to hit him in the face. With a body wrapped in flannel and fleece, with gloves, snow pants, and a strangling scarf, the face stares out of the winter-human bundle like a bullseye.

Just the word—snowball—sparks iconographic imagery: kids in earflapped or tasseled hats, dazzling cut-breath mornings, the mousy squeak of extra cold snow—but also sparked in the mind (my mind, at least): a snowball missiled right into my face, ice down my collar, a double-socked foot coming out of my snowsunk boot, the shivery weight of stretched-wet cotton and aching fingers fumbling at a zipper. I remember one wintry playground day when a wolfpack of youngsters began hurling slabs of ice that resembled chunks of asphalt at the new kid, me, trying desperately, without appearing to be desperate, to veer the rapidly crescendoing antics back towards the supposed harmless cheer of lightly tossed snow.

But that’s not how snowball fights go; they narrow the line between hilarity and cruelty: a flirtatious little chuck followed by a “mis”-aimed hurl, and then the sudden release of the inarticulable, instinctual capacity to… to kill, really, or at least to go for the face—and then all that frigid antagonism is met with, just like a poorly packed snowball, our own pathetic inconsequence. In this way the snowball fight is much like Twitter. It is testing, exploring, even courting the moment when mirth turns mean. It is the over-exposed cold cousin of the pillow-fight—which also reveals underlying animosity in the shift from playful, bed-bouncing slow-gravitational joy to savage feathered swings for the face—but has none of warmth or sensuality.

My initial online search about the history of snow fighting first turned up references to a massive snowy brawl staged by Confederate soldiers, and, next, a “jolt of pure joy”—a 1897 public pelting filmed by the Lumière brothers in France. I for one can’t get into the seasonal spirit of stalwart slavers having a jolly, or, as seen in the early French snowball flick, top-hatted strangers ruthlessly attacking a passing bicyclist with powdery ammunition.

On winter walks my father (life lessons from Little Willy?) and I would typically start with target practice against stop signs (the wonderful soft-sonic thump of nailing the stop)—but would then inevitably descend, within minutes, to internecine hurling. A snowball fight is like a Greek tragedy, with melting consequences. Avoid it unless you’re comfortable exhibiting your true feelings.

John Washington writes about immigration and border politics, as well as prisons, foreign policy, beer, and hats for various publications. He is a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine and The Intercept. His first book, The Dispossessed —a narrative take on asylum policy and ancient history—was published this month by Verso Books. Find him at @jbwashing.

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Rattling around in the door of my fridge is always a bottle of vermouth, half-drunk. I like to buy the good stuff—not the fanciest model but the kind you can drink neat and think, Well, this is delicious. It’s chic, vermouth. Of course it goes in cocktails, too, which makes it a pragmatic luxury in a way. I’ll need this eventually. When lazy I’ll dash some into a glass of seltzer and blindly call it a capital-d Drink. Dry vermouth feels dainty—maybe it’s just the connotation of a gin martini—and the sweet stuff tastes like full-on grown-up juice.

Recently I’ve most wanted to make a bamboo, something I learned about from a friend of mine who knows plenty more about drinking and is often wearing a blazer. We’d meet at our favorite bar and gossip about work, and one time he was drinking a bamboo, and it was not yet gauche to share drinks, so I tried his and fell in love. It’s basically a sherry martini—some sherry, some vermouth, sometimes some bitters. His first and his second were different animals: one leaner, one rounder and tart, both served up in a coupe, sippable and gentle.

This, I’ve been thinking, would be the perfect thing to put in a flask. I like that the bamboo, for us amateurs, is just a concept to play with: go to the store, buy two bottles, and see how they get along. Sherry is similar to vermouth in that there are a zillion different personalities to explore, and it’s just another kind of fortified wine, treated differently. It’s good splashed into seltzer; it’s good rattling around in the fridge; it’s a great thing to play with, like we’re doing here. And it straddles a wide range from bone-dry (fino) to dessert-sweet (Pedro Ximenez): a bottle for every mood.

There are many modern bamboo recipes kicking around the internet: it’s a drink that was lost to prohibition and dug up around 2007, when the vaunted Death & Co. in Manhattan started serving it. Their recipe calls for equal parts fino sherry and blanc vermouth, finished with simple syrup, orange bitters, and angostura bitters. Others skew more complicated, or cuter; a bamboo with sweet vermouth is called, adorably, an Adonis. Flaskifying a bamboo is easy: stir it well with some ice, then funnel it into your flask. Do your best to keep it cold—toss it in a snowbank when you find one.

Marian Bull is a writer and ceramicist who lives in Brooklyn.

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There are just some things that automatically stir the soul to absolute horn. For me: a certain frequency of bassline, the slightest whiff of Malibu, a good swollen sky bursting into an afternoon of storms. The bassline (activating thumps) and the Malibu (desire to revisit college heaux days), and thunderstorms (too many readings of high school readings of Wuthering Heights, and part of it is probably using Heathcliff as masturbation fuel).

For Mary Ruefle, it’s a snow day. I revisited her poem “Snow”, and honestly, I’ve never vibed harder with the opening line of a poem: "Every time it starts to snow, I would like to have/sex".

I might be primed (see: storms = horn) but it just made sense. Of course the best way to spend a snow day is fucking. Immediately.

When flurries start to fall, it’s carte blanche (ha, ha) to immediately stop doing what you’re doing, to fling aside responsibilities as soon as possible, so you have time to address the most basic, limbic system-category needs before you get snowed in. Maybe it’ll be just flurries, but we agree to look the other way, and communally come to the conclusion that 2 inches could easily turn into 12.

There’s something hedonistic about that agreement: you're home when you shouldn’t be, succumbing to stillness when you should be busy. You can watch 27 movies in a row, eat all the comfort food, take long sips of amber whiskey.

Ruefle has this line I loved. She mentions how, as she watches the snow fall, she imagines her lover, unprompted by her, realizing the aphrodisiacal properties of the snow, and running home to hop right in the sack. How hot to be so independently turned on by the same thing. You can’t help but collide; as if there are magnets stuck to your genitals!

So if we’re already there: transgressive and in tune with our cozy, carnal urges, cozy inside… what sounds better than sex? Certainly not a game of Clue. You better believe the next time flurries start to fall, I will turn to whomever I am with and repeat Ruefle’s iconic peace-out: It is snowing now and I must go have sex, goodbye.

Allison P. Davis is a features writer at New York Magazine. Her favorite erotic thriller is In The Cut.

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There is a fine line between comfort and claustrophobia––nothing explains this better than a snow day. The cozy reprieve from the outside world can quickly turn into feeling shut out from the outside world, and alone with others or––even more terrifying––yourself.

No film encapsulates this truth better than Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining. Jack (Jack Nicholson), his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their small child are hired as winter caretakers for the Overlook Hotel. Over the course of the season and the weather that comes with it, the family starts to lose touch with reality, culminating in a mythical finale: Jack freezes to death as his family escapes the clutches of the (haunted?) hotel.

The filming of The Shining has become a horror tale in its own right: over the course of the grueling shoot at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, England, delays were constant, sets burned, Kubrick’s demands on Shelley Duvall amounted to harassment. This on-set dysfunction was captured by Kubrick’s daughter Vivian, the then-eighteen-year-old who filmed day-to-day life on set and used her footage to create a twenty-minute long documentary called “Making The Shining” for the BBC. We see the large crew crammed into the tiny hallways of the Overlook Hotel sets––the in-fighting, the discomfort, and the sly remarks from Nicholson to the off-screen Vivian.

The conflicts we see in Vivian’s documentary parallel The Shining itself: the group in the Overlook Hotel is kept in a pressure cooker away from the outside world, fighting and slowly going mad. Shelley Duvall explained: “Jack Nicholson’s character had to be crazy and angry all the time. And in my character I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week. I was there a year and a month… there must be something to Primal Scream therapy.”

The sensibility she describes permeates every scene: the anonymous furniture of the Overlook, Nicholson’s quietly demented expression, the warnings of winter-induced insanity that lurk around every corner. Vivian films the set as if it were a maze like the topiary version that led to Jack’s death, and through the small and anxious expressions she captures, we see that the Kubricks, Nicholson, and Duvall are trying to find a way out.

I have come to realize that this film is just the manifestation of a terrible snow day in all of its quarantined, maddening hell. The captive family sits in their own wreckage and their anger, at each other and themselves, feeling the magnetic pull of the house. The snowed-in families of the past and their similarly grim legacies roam the halls. Our snow days are not all horror films, but as we approach another winter and another round of quarantining, this question continues to hang in my mind: how do we behave when we’re left to our own devices, when we’re separated by our worlds from a mountain of snow?

Madeleine Seidel is a curator and writer based in Brooklyn. She has previously worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Atlanta Contemporary. Her writing on film, performance, and the art of the American South has been published in Art Papers, frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, and others.

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The first snow I ever saw was at Ski Dubai, and it hurt me. Ice powder, artificially generated, packed down to sharpness. We were visiting from Oman, and my aunt and uncle generously took us, this bevy of sticky children, to Ski Dubai, a shocking Narnia-like world accessed through some banal security doors, complete with a 280-foot mountain encased within the Mall of the Emirates. It had sleds, toboggans, the world’s first indoor black diamond run. I fell on my face—I don’t remember how—and it left a bruise. My cousin got in trouble for eating too many Cinnabons.

My sister and I were country mice in Dubai. Our life in Oman was humbler, stricter, more governed by doing without. Still, I didn’t feel the wonder I expected. I remember my throbbing cheek, and the abrasive snow melting into my palm as we returned to the desert’s hot bright air. Snow in storybooks had seemed different somehow, more redolent of magic. I promised myself: one day I would see the real thing.

Because I did not grow up with the cold, my rituals around winter—a feature only of my life post-migration—are invented ones. Walking by the ocean’s roar on the first day of the new year. Oiling my hair and face against the dry icy air. Making sugo, a labor of love that produces the greatest pasta sauce on record. In my Bed-Stuy apartment, Bessie Smith and Count Basie play on vinyl and I make Omani karak. Cardamom and black tea, cloves and cinnamon, crushed ginger and key emoji canned sweetened condensed milk meld into something that tastes so good it is obscene. I wrap myself in robe and wooly socks and read. With my phone in another room, its blinks and buzzes ignored. Every year since immigrating, without fail, I walk outside in the first real snow, the blanketing of the city in white nothing, the slowing of this world.

I turned seventeen during my first winter in this country. Two days before, my grandfather died. We could not justify four international plane tickets. My father went back alone to India for his father’s funeral, which happened to be on my birthday. He did not cry, not that I saw. We were renting a small townhouse in Illinois that seemed so extravagantly ugly to me it took my breath away. My room had a hole cut into its side, loft-style, so anyone sitting in the living room could look up and see what I was doing, and as a teen I experienced this as a torture worthy of notifying the Geneva Convention.
We were so sad. My mother, my sister, and I stayed in our rooms that day, my father an ocean away. We didn’t turn the lights on until eight at night to scrounge up some dinner and my mother, beholding me in the kitchen doorway said, with a sheepish air, oh, happy birthday.

For me winter can be a time of loss anticipatory and not, of deep secret joys. I feel hungrier in winter: for good food, my people, comfort, love. I feel vulnerability: my own and that of others, most now. In my gratitude for the slowing of my year, I think about all the people whose relationship to labor means that this is the hardest or busiest time for them, from Amazon warehouse workers to USPS drivers. In this pandemic winter, food pantries and mutual aid groups are stretched thin to meet community need—need formed by the overwhelming grid of exploitation that has made our world. In the blankness and blanketing of this season, I try to imagine something better, a way of being that is a fraction more humane.

By the time the landline rang on my uncelebrated seventeenth birthday, I had cried twice, two separate fits of baroque self-pity. I felt no great desire to answer it. My mother beckoned me over, and I heard a familiar voice, saw a Canadian area code. My bestie Alexandra was calling me, long-distance from Mississauga, Ontario. Happy birthday baby love, she cried, and then added immediately after, did you check the mail?

I had not. Go outside! she yelled. Go outside right now! I didn’t spend an hour timing this to arrive exactly today for nothing!

I will after I talk to you, I began to protest, but I was overruled. In my house slippers and my mother’s corduroy coat, I slip-slid my way to the honeycomb of mailboxes at the end of the street, ripped the mailer covered in Alex’s bouncy writing open.

A moonstone necklace slid into my palm. A letter, many pages long, from her. I don’t remember everything it said. It was a long time ago, long enough to take away any true memory of the day’s sting. What I do recall is bursting into tears, clutching her gift to my chest. Thinking: someone remembered. Which at the time felt like: someone loves me. The February snow around me was yellowed near-ice, but the moonstone itself looked like all first snowfall does to me—opaline white, shadowed by gray, shot through with iridescence.

In my kitchen, my partner is filling jars with homemade granola for friends and family. My friend Hanna, regular renaissance woman, has procured a loom with my partner’s help, and is making us the gift of a hand-woven blanket. When I consider winter, I return to that crescendo of feeling by the mailboxes in suburban Chicago. The feeling that tore through me and told me everything. That refuge exists, that I am luckier than I know, that death and sorrow are part of the way of things, and that somewhere out there someone loves me.

Sarah Thankam Mathews is a writer based in Brooklyn and the founder of the mutual aid network Bed-Stuy Strong. Her novel All This Could Be Different is forthcoming from Viking.