What Lies Beneath...

... thoughts on icy layers, and people

The dog is snoring by the door after his quick post-prandial potty outing. Quick because the layer of snow over the layer of ice over the layer of gasping grass is frozen hard. At 100 lbs, this big goofy dog left few paw prints. It’s very solid snow out there.

goofy dog photo by R. Bruff

The snow began falling Tuesday night, but not until a couple of inches of sleet had already formed a thick, solid sheet of ice over everything. The temperature plunged, the snow fell, and now, three days later, here in the southernmost tip of subtropical South Carolina, the dog and I are ready for these icy layers to melt. Or sublimate. Just go away.

Yesterday, the oldest of the neighborhood kids and his mom came by. He asked if he could shovel the drive for me. He’s raising money for a class trip next spring, he said. Good for you, I said. Go for it, I said, but it’s frozen solid so if you change your mind, no problem.

It was like using a child’s sand shovel to dismantle an ice hockey rink. But to his credit, (and his mom’s) after a couple of hours of chipping and scraping and banging, he’d moved some icy snow, and in a few spots, you could even see the concrete. But mostly, it’s still a nasty, thick sheet of ice.

When Tom and I moved to SC in 2017, in January, we were sure we’d won the climate lottery. 74° and sunny for the next four months. We walked the beach, rode bikes, played tennis, worked from the back deck, and savored this ideal landscape of marsh grasses and countless birds and glorious springtime sunshine and butterflies.

The next January, the day after we moved from the rental house to the "forever house, 4" of snow joined us. What? We laughed and took pictures of the icicles hanging from the palm trees and the dog rolling in the snow. We laughed and made snowballs and snow angels and later went inside and made chili and cornbread. We figured out how to use the old fireplace, the one we said we’d never use because who needs a fireplace in South Carolina? We snuggled when we went to bed, and in the morning we brought our coffee back to bed and opened the curtains and wondered at the snow-covered lawn and the way the early morning sun illuminated the glistening frozen Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks. It was magical, and it was fun, and a few days later, it was gone, and we had our four months of gentle spring.

This time is like that, only different. It’s colder and the snow is icy instead of soft and fluffy. The light on the Spanish moss is still magical, and icicles on palm fronds still seem incongruous. The fireplace is easier to operate now. The dog is older and less interested in playing out in the cold. We’re going to be housebound another day.

It’s quieter this time. I miss the laughter. I miss the snuggling and the rocks/paper/scissors to see who goes to get the second cups of coffee and bring them back to bed. I miss the delight of sharing the delight and the wonder of sharing the wonder.

Those icy layers of sleet and ice and snow won’t last much longer. Today’s sunshine and higher temperatures will move some of it, so what has been frozen on the ground will thaw, some will lift into the atmosphere, and some will seep into the ground below. The hard freeze, ironically, may have protected some of the deep roots of the grass, and the philodendron and the azalias and the Farfugium japonicum (Tom’s favorite) and the shrubs under the back windows where the cardinals hunker down.

The icy layers appear to change everything at least for a few days, but in reality, they’re infinitesimal relative to all the other layers of the planet.

Our planet’s outer layer, the crust, is the thinnest layer by far, only 3-5 miles under the oceans and approximately 25 miles thick under the continents. Think of it as the skin of an apple.

The next layer, the upper mantle, is around 400 miles thick. And the layer below that, the lower mantle? It’s the big one, over 1600 miles.

And then, deep deep deep, the hot hot hot inner and outer core, where the things get interesting, is over 2100 miles thick.

That outer core, between 8000°F and up to 9932° F, is liquid, an unimaginably hot soup of liquid iron and nickel.

The inner core, the very center of the earth, four thousand miles from here (think of driving from Vancouver to Quito) is 9392°F and while it’s plenty hot, it’s under too much pressure to be liquid. The hot center of the earth is solid because of all it bears, all those miles and miles of outer core and lower and upper mantles and even that itty bitty apple-skin crust. The center is solid.

And now I’m thinking of you and me and every person ever, the ones who came before and all of us now, and everyone who will follow, and aren’t we like that too?

Layers.

The thin fragile skin under whatever icy or sunny shell or facade we wear, the mantles of experience and dna and culture and evolution and geography, all those things we might or might not be able to excavate and make a little sense of now and then, and below that the molten messy churning hot energy of our lives and our loves and our losses and our dreams. So deep that we really don’t know what’s going on, so full of hot power, dangerous and wild, and so full of potential shape-shifting and eruption and formative force.

And then, deep deep deep, at the very core: the solid fact of each one of us. Made solid by the pressure, solid and hidden, solid and dark and impenetrable.

As these unexpected icicles melt, I wonder. Maybe the hidden layers suggest a hidden possibility?

Maybe somehow, paradoxically, the unseen and the unknown help us love each other a little more?

Maybe knowing how much we can’t know about ourselves gentles us to the other? Maybe this is the beginning of compassion? Maybe this is the seed of solidarity, this distant hidden unknowing?

Watching the ice thaw a bit today, I give thanks for sunshine, and I wonder at the glorious disastrous beautiful wounded wondrous gift. All of it.

All of it.