By Peter Anderson
Mountain Time
Imagine this beginning: a molecule rides in your own exhale, water in the form of vapor, rising in a warmer stream of air to meet the cooler floor of a cloud, a cloud that the prevailing wind has nudged up against the western slope of a nearby mountain. Inside of the cloud, let’s say this molecule, once a part of your own being, bumps into a grain of a grain of a grain of sand. And let’s say some other water molecules mingling nearby drift into that same particle. Pretty soon, all those molecules, including your own, are linking up like star-to-the-right square dancers on a Saturday night.
Out in the valley, a trucker sits next to a window at Deb’s Roadside Café. He clears a circle of vapor, his own breath in part, to look out the window. Clouds are piling up on the mountain. The good news: he’s headed over the lowest pass headed out of the valley. The bad news: the curves are always in the shadows up there. “I hate hauling when it gets slick,” he says to the waitress. “What kind of pie d’you say you have?”
Out on a spread just north of town, a rancher in a flatbed rattles out over a frozen brown pasture hauling hay. He takes a pull off a Camel and blows out a puff of blue smoke while he listens to the snow advisory on radio. Bring it on, he says to himself. Then he recalls snow drifts over fences and his whole herd spread out from hell to breakfast down county road T. Just don’t bring it all at once.
Back up on the slope of the mountain the snow is falling. You see a doe nudging her two fawns toward the shelter of a piñon. Is it the wind chill of the gust that just caught you head-on or is the temperature falling fast? You find the answer on the black sleeve of your wool shirt. What were once pellets of hail only a few minutes ago are now six winged lattices, lovely translucent crystals. And they linger for as long it takes your exhaled breath to disappear.
