I watched the snow pass through the lights that hovered
above us. Followed as it went back and forth
through a long line of yellow cones that disappeared
somewhere out there in the distance, that waited for us in
the same way that we waited for the storm to calm down
and allow us free passage through the night.
They had followed us since we first set out, hovering above
us like a shield that cradled us in a protective sphere where
the sun and the moon and the stars were disregarded and
left out of the equation.
We had passed through cities like this. Some that lay bathed in lights of their own while others lay hidden in the dark, making it hard to tell if they were different cities or the same as the identical houses became a haze that kept slowly rushing by.
After a while the cities turned into towns and then the towns turned into scattered houses that became few and far apart and ever so often they would muster into small towns again that seemed to have been given up a long time ago and were waiting to move on themselves.
There where lights in the windows of the houses that we passed and I imagined that they marked the dwelling of som stubborn old man refusing to abandon what had once been a home. Maybe he had raised a family in there, celebrated holidays and birthdays, witnessed the birth and loss of loved ones, finally being abandoned himself. I forgot about him and his house as soon as they disappeared behind us and returned to my protective sphere again where the shield had grown weaker and the night lingered until the sun set again in the early hours of the afternoon.
When the snow started coming down we were forced to stop
and wait for the plows to come through and open up the
road so that we could move on again.
We waited throughout the evening and into the night for the
snowfall to stop while watching the yellow cones that
flickered with the snow that kept changing direction.
The wind would pick up and then momentarily die down
allowing the snowflakes to quietly fall to the ground before
throwing them around again, making it difficult to know if it
was still snowing or not.
We continued our journey in silence after the passing plows
had pulled us out of our comforting sphere of headlights and
warmth, where the outside world and its ever dropping
temperatures seemed distant and unimportant, moving
slower than before as the road started going back and forth
instead of straight ahead, climbing and descending until it
was hard to say which direction we were headed.
Then the road narrowed before it started going up through a
timberclad valley were we climbed higher up in the sides of
the mountains until we could see houses again on each side
of the road. These houses were grey with dark windows and
later I would come to know that they were occupied by
people who had been forced to settle down in a world that
had grown small around them. They had been free once, free to wander through the forests, burning it as they went along to sow their crops in the ashes of the cooling remnants of the conifers, the remains of their mother who they loved and feared as any child would, as well as depended upon. Their roots were the roots of these trees and in death they
would hang from the top of the evergreens with their arms
stretched out to greet the sun, welcoming the crows and the
ravens to take part in the communion as they decayed in the
wind and the sun until they fell to the ground. Finally
merging with the earth they had once crawled out of.
When the world came calling to tear into their mother they
voiced their anguish and despair only to be ridiculed as
inferior beings, a breed of people to be hated and pitied all
the same as they retreated, hoping to be left alone to their
ancient ways of rituals and worship, silently opposing the
invasion while the forest was cut down around them and the
shafts of the mines were dug below them.
Side by side with their abusers they continued their lives,
secretly holding on to their rites and thriving in their
ignorance as progress slowly came to a halt. Then the
mines closed and the miners started leaving, heading to
new mines and other industries and the few that remained
did so by holding on to the hope that one day the mines
would open up again and life would return to normal in their
valley at the end of the world.
As we moved higher up the valley became shallow and the
road sought down to a river that we followed upstream until
we reached a small mountain town consisting of identical
houses laid out side by side in a perfectly symmetrical grid,
protected by the statue of an awkward looking bear that
seemed to serve as gatekeeper to this abandoned
community. Behind it lay the mines who were sunk deep into the heart of
the mountains where their veins were filled with water and their entrances boarded up since decades past.
Their presence seemed ominous as if they at any moment would
release the hordes of the underworld and at the same time
they looked feeble and useless. None of them were of any
use to this world, the mine or her people. They had all been
suffocated by profit margins and the cost of living and then
drowned as the groundwater seeped back in.
Both deceased yet still present.
