EDITOR'S NOTE: Peter Meinke just keeps piling up the laurels. The Poet Laureate of St. Petersburg until January 2016, he has now been selected by Gov. Rick Scott to be Florida Poet Laureate, a four-year honorary position established last year by the state Legislature. Congrats, Peter!
One sunny afternoon I decided to walk back to school. Because this was mid-January and we lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, the path was tunneled through an embankment of snow. There’d been a record-breaking snowfall, and I felt I was walking along a bobsled run. The sun bounced off the whiteness without warming.
No one was in sight, but suddenly I heard a familiar voice crying a faint “Help!” Squinting around in the glare, I saw our 5-year-old son Pete half buried in the snow. Of course I scrambled my way through and pulled out the remarkably calm but very cold youngster. Pete had been going to visit a friend but, already showing a preference for the path less traveled by, had decided to walk on the crusty top of the snow, which soon caved in; he had gotten stuck.
This is by now a family tale (what if I hadn’t decided to go back to school? etc.). One reason we were walking is that our car was also stuck, buried in snow in front of our house. The car was safest that way.
Shortly before our grad-school odyssey, a relative got us a deal we couldn’t refuse on a newish used car: a ferociously finned pink-and-white 1957 Dodge Custom Royal Sedan with electric windows, which we sailed like Cleopatra’s barge — that “burnished throne” — through the university towns of Ann Arbor and Saint Paul. It was so unlike us, it’s a marvel we didn’t break out in spots.
By the time Pete fell through the snow, we’d been through four Minnesota winters, and our massive vehicle hadn’t survived well. We had no garage, and its underbody was rusting out: we could see the road through a hole in the passenger-side flooring. The back right electric window had died in the open position. The local Kroger Supermarket had helpful bagboys, and when one was carrying out some bags we told him to put them in the trunk, as the back seat was full of snow; he laughed, thinking we were joking.
A larger problem was, before the city’s snowplows buried it, on cold days our car seldom started anyway. I had an early morning class in Minneapolis on Saturdays; to start it, I usually had to walk a block to a friend’s house, open his garage, pop the hood of his car, remove the glowing light bulb he kept on the battery to give it some heat, drive down the street to ours, attach the jumper cables, start the car, detach the cables, drive back, put the bulb back on the battery, and then run like hell back to our Dodge before it stalled again.
This was our wintry way of life. We seldom talked about it — it was just what we did — but when friends announced that they’d bought a Dodge Dart, I told them, well, we had a Dodge, but it wasn’t exactly a Dart.
When we left for the flat but sunny landscape of Florida, we told everyone that we’d warm up for a few years and then return to civilization — but we never looked back.
—Both quotes from “The Snow Man,” by Wallace Stevens (in The Palm at the End of the Mind, Vintage Books, 1972)
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2015.