Snow Memories

By Carson Bennett, 12-27-07

	Caption: AT-ATs battling Snowspeeders on Hoth (duh)

I’m visiting my family in Colorado Springs for Christmas. This morning I braved the cold and snow to walk about ten blocks from my mom’s house to the Dog Tooth Coffee shop where I sat down with my computer and a steaming cup of mountain roast and tried to write. Writer’s block set in almost instantly. I’m going skiing over New Year’s with two of my very best college friends up in Summit County, and my mind was elsewhere. I looked out the windows at the snow swirling through the intersection, checked the snow and ski reports repeatedly to see how much powder we can expect early next week, and memories of past snowy days distracted me.

Well, I got nostalgic, and thought I should share one of my favorite snow memories with you. I grew up in Black Forest, north of Colorado Springs, where I remember deep snow blanketing the forest every winter. I rode the school bus, of course, and in the winter I turned the snowy half mile walk home from the bus stop into a daily adventure. Oh, and I should mention, I was obsessed with Star Wars.

My memory: I have just landed on the surface. I am a four-legged Imperial AT-AT walker on the ice planet Hoth, searching for the rebel base. My giant metal legs stomp through the planet’s frozen crust. The entrance to an ice-cave appears on the horizon, and my temple-mounted laser turrets zero in on the target. Closer. Closer. Surprisingly, no snowspeeders have attacked me. I thought they would have detected me by now. The poor rebels have no idea that they are about to be trapped in a frozen underground tomb. I fire my lasers! Balls of fire and ice erupt from the entrance! The cave collapses! The Emperor will be pleased. I change course for the rendezvous point at the other end of this frozen wasteland and, keeping an eye open for a counter-attack, trudge into the distance.

If I were to watch my seven-year-old-The-Empire-Strikes-Back-obsessed-self construct this memory: A kid in a green coat and big blue Moon Boots bounces off a school bus that has just barely made it up an icy hill in the Colorado foothills. The snowplow had come earlier and pressed six inches of snow, ice and gravel into waist-deep piles in the ditches. The kid stares at the snow for a moment. The bus releases its brakes with a squeak and disappears down the hill. After adjusting the shoulder straps on his backpack, the kid clomps into the woods, picks up an armful of pinecones and, ignoring the easier path on the freshly cleared road, stomps through the mounds of snow in the ditches. A little farther up the hill, the plow has somehow created a shallow depression with a roof of ice in the snow bank. It is screened by icicles. When the kid sees it, he takes careful aim at this concave formation, throwing pinecones one after the other – p-CHOO! p-CHOO! p-CHOO! – until the icicles shatter and fall into the road. Satisfied, he stomps up the road with jerky, robotic movements, making sounds like motors straining to push a heavy vehicle.