Snowy Road Quotes

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift, The road is forlorn all day, Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift, And the hoof-prints vanish away. The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee, Expend their bloom in vain. Come over the hills and far with me, And be my love in the rain.

I had spent many nights in the jungle looking for game, but this was the first time I had ever spent a night looking for a man-eater. The length of road immediately in front of me was brilliantly lit by the moon, but to right and left the overhanging trees cast dark shadows, and when the night wind agitated the branches and the shadows moved, I saw a dozen tigers advancing on me, and bitterly regretted the impulse that had induced me to place myself at the man-eater's mercy. I lacked the courage to return to the village and admit I was too frightened to carry out my self-imposed task, and with teeth chattering, as much from fear as from cold, I sat out the long night. As the grey dawn was lighting up the snowy range which I was facing, I rested my head on my drawn-up knees, and it was in this position my men an hour later found me fast asleep; of the tiger I had neither heard nor seen anything.

When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.

The "Avenue," so called by the Newbridge people, was a stretch of road four or five hundred yards long, completely arched over with huge, wide-spreading apple-trees, planted years ago by an eccentric old farmer. Overhead was one long canopy of snowy fragrant bloom. Below the boughs the air was full of a purple twilight and far ahead a glimpse of painted sunset sky shone like a great rose window at the end of a cathedral aisle.

Whilst I viewed those mountains, I felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the--heretofore conceived--boundless Missouri. But when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific Ocean, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and the party in them, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy I had felt in the first moments in which I gazed on them. But, as I have always held it little short of criminality to anticipate evils, I will allow it to be a good, comfortable road until I am compelled to believe otherwise. (William Clark)

-i was "far and away"-riding my motorcycle along an american back road, skiing through the snowy Quebec woods, or lying awake in a backwater motel. the theme i was grappling with was nothing less than the Meaning of Life, and i was pretty sure i had defined it: love and respect. love and respect, love and respect-i have been carrying those words around with me for two years, daring to consider that perhaps they convey the real meaning of life. beyond basic survival needs, everybody wants to be loved and respected. and neither is any good without the other. love without respect can be as cold as pity; respect without love can be as grim as fear. love and respect are the values in life that most contribute to "the pursuit of happiness"-and after, they are the greatest legacy we can leave behind. it's an elegy you'd like to hear with your own ears: "you were loved and respected." if even one person can say that about you, it's a worthy achievement, and if you can multiply that many times-well, that is true success. among materialists, a certain bumper sticker is emblematic: "he who dies with the most toys wins!" well, no-he or she who dies with the most love and respect wins... then there's love and respect for oneself-equally hard to achieve and maintain. most of us, deep down, are not as proud of ourselves as we might pretend, and the goal of bettering ourselves-at least partly by earning the love and respect of others-is a lifelong struggle. Philo of Alexandria gave us that generous principle that we have somehow succeeded in mostly ignoring for 2,000 years: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the while raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy. Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he road with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold.

During those snowy New England winters, besides learning to rise at five to study calculus and trudge two miles through the drifts for breakfast down the road, he had suppressed some tremendous element in himself that took form in a prudish virginity. While his life was impeccable on the surface, he felt he was behind glass: moving through the world in a separate compartment, touching no one else.

Imagine that you're an extremely modern car, equipped with a greater number of options and functions than most cars. You're faster and higher performance. You're very lucky. But it's not easy. Because no one knows exactly the number of options you have or what they enable you to do. Only you can know. And speed can be dangerous. Like when you're eight, you don't know how to drive. There are many things you have to learn: how to drive when it's wet, when it's snowy, to look out for other cars and respect them, to rest when you've been driving for too long. That's what it means to be a grown up.' I'm thirteen and I can see that I'm not managing to grow up in the right way: I can't understand the road signs, I'm not in control of my vehicle, I keep taking the wrong turnings and most of the time I feel like I'm stuck on the dodgems rather than on a race track.

While they drove past the garden the shadows of the bare trees often fell across the road and hid the brilliant moonlight, but as soon as they were past the fence, the snowy plain bathed in moonlight and motionless spread out before them glittering like diamonds and dappled with bluish shadows.

Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom- apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals. In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the 'Mittel Land' ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the hillside like tongues of flame. The road was rugged, but still we seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste. I could not understand then what the haste meant, but the driver was evidently bent on losing no time in reaching Borgo Prund. I was told that this road is in summertime excellent, but that it had not been put in order after the winter snows. In this respect it is different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadors would not repair them, lest the Turks should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point. Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colors of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water.

The "Avenue," so called by the Newbridge people, was a stretch of road four or five hundred yards long, completely arched over with huge, wide-spreading apple-trees, planted years ago by an eccentric old farmer. Overhead was one long canopy of snowy fragrant bloom. Below the boughs the air was full of a purple twilight and far ahead a glimpse of painted sunset sky shone like a great rose window at the end of a cathedral aisle. Its beauty seemed to strike the child dumb. She leaned back in the buggy, her thin hands clasped before her, her face lifted rapturously to the white splendor above. Even when they had passed out and were driving down the long slope to Newbridge she never moved or spoke. Still with rapt face she gazed afar into the sunset west, with eyes that saw visions trooping splendidly across that glowing background. Through Newbridge, a bustling little village where dogs barked at them and small boys hooted and curious faces peered from the windows, they drove, still in silence. When three more miles had dropped away behind them the child had not spoken. She could keep silence, it was evident, as energetically as she could talk.

No end of blessings from heaven and earth. As we climb up out of the Moab valley and reach the high tableland stretching northward, traces of snow flying across the road, the sun emerges clear of the overcast, burning free on the very edge of the horizon. For a few minutes the whole region from the canyon of the Colorado to the Book Cliffs—crag, mesa, turret, dome, canyon wall, plain, swale and dune—glows with a vivid amber light against the darkness on the east. At the same time I see a mountain peak rising clear of the clouds, old Tukuhnikivats fierce as the Matterhorn, snowy as Everest, invincible. “Ferris, stop this car. Let’s go back.” But he only steps harder on the gas. “No,” he says, “you’ve got a train to catch.” He sees me craning my neck to stare backward. “Don’t worry,” he adds, “it’ll all still be here next spring.” The

Although I have afflicted you, . . . I will afflict you no more. (Nahum 1:12) There is a limit to our affliction. God sends it and then removes it. Do you complain, saying, “When will this end?” May we quietly wait and patiently endure the will of the Lord till He comes. Our Father takes away the rod when His purpose in using it is fully accomplished. If the affliction is sent to test us so that our words would glorify God, it will only end once He has caused us to testify to His praise and honor. In fact, we would not want the difficulty to depart until God has removed from us all the honor we can yield to Him. Today things may become “completely calm” (Matt. 8:26). Who knows how soon these raging waves will give way to a sea of glass with seagulls sitting on the gentle swells? After a long ordeal, the threshing tool is on its hook, and the wheat has been gathered into the barn. Before much time has passed, we may be just as happy as we are sorrowful now. It is not difficult for the Lord to turn night into day. He who sends the clouds can just as easily clear the skies. Let us be encouraged—things are better down the road. Let us sing God’s praises in anticipation of things to come. Charles H. Spurgeon “The Lord of the harvest” (Luke 10:2) is not always threshing us. His trials are only for a season, and the showers soon pass. “Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning” (Ps. 30:5). “Our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor. 4:17). Trials do serve their purpose. Even the fact that we face a trial proves there is something very precious to our Lord in us, or else He would not spend so much time and energy on us. Christ would not test us if He did not see the precious metal of faith mingled with the rocky core of our nature, and it is to refine us into purity and beauty that He forces us through the fiery ordeal. Be patient, O sufferer! The result of the Refiner’s fire will more than compensate for our trials, once we see the “eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” Just to hear His commendation, “Well done” (Matt. 25:21); to be honored before the holy angels; to be glorified in Christ, so that I may reflect His glory back to Him—ah! that will be more than enough reward for all my trials. from Tried by Fire Just as the weights of a grandfather clock, or the stabilizers in a ship, are necessary for them to work properly, so are troubles to the soul. The sweetest perfumes are obtained only through tremendous pressure, the fairest flowers grow on the most isolated and snowy peaks, the most beautiful gems are those that have suffered the longest at the jeweler’s wheel, and the most magnificent statues have endured the most blows from the chisel. All of these, however, are subject to God’s law. Nothing happens that has not been appointed with consummate care and foresight. from Daily Devotional Commentary

For the life of us all—whether we be star or starfish—is made of four ingredients, ingredients that can be found in the recipe to Alice’s hot-milk cake. Those ingredients are earth, fire, air, and water. But as Theo walked down the snowy vein of Cockle Cove Road and into the arctic air that surrounded the sea, he sensed that fifth element, which poets and religions and pregnant women and jazz musicians point to—that fifth element of spirit. He sensed that fifth ingredient with the cat. Surely, she is knowing. Surely, she has a soul. As the snowflakes dropped onto his pea coat, Theo thought that this was not only the snow descending upon the mantel of his coat, but the sacred ephemerals that he, like Ahanu and Reverend Cummings, believed ran through all living things. It was the fifth element of which the great masters—Moses, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, and Big Thunder—spoke. The Sacral Spirit. We were put on this magical planet, not to dominate and consume her, but to care for her and love her. To harrow gently. To harvest gratefully. To build reasonably.

A shadow appeared on the awnings further up the land, gliding across each rectangle of canvas towards my table, sinking in the sag, rising again at the edge, and moving on to the next with a flicker of dislocation, then gliding onwards. As it crossed the stripe of sunlight between two awnings, it threaded the crimson beak of a stork through the air, a few inches above the gap; then came a long white neck, the swell of snowy breast feathers and the six-foot motionless span of its white wings and the tips of the black flight feathers upturned and separated as fingers in the lift of the air current. The white belly followed, tapering, and then, trailing behind, the fan of its tail and long parallel legs of crimson lacquer, the toes of each of them closed and streamlined, but the whole shape flattening, when the band of sunlight was crossed, into a two-dimensional shadow once more, enormously displayed across the rectangle of cloth, as distinct and nearly as immobile, so languid was its flight, as an emblematic bird on a sail; then sliding across it and along the nearly still corridor of air between the invisible eaves and the chimneys, dipping along the curl of the lane like a sigh of wonder, and, at last, a furlong away slowly pivoting, at a gradual tilt, out of sight. A bird of passage like the rest of us.

HEXAGON Snowflakes descend purposefully or wistfully but, surrounded by their tiny peers, each is confident they together will soon hide the meadows, driveways, roofs, fences, the stripped gardens. A speck of dust or pollen lofted to the top of the sky encountered a water drop that in the celestial cold adhered and froze, forming an ice crystal which, now weightier than the air it floated on, began to waft downwards, adding water particles as it traveled, six spikes or arms creating a filigree all its own as it passed through differing temperatures and amounts of dampness. Its delicate white intricacy, though, contains an inner space also unique. One offers a forest of snowy evergreens where, as afternoon light dims, a man wearing a homespun hooded garment and bent under a sack thrown over a shoulder plods along a footpath winding uphill between firs and pines. With each step, his breath appears like smoke until he and his burden are lost from view, and a chill wind sways the thin twigs of bushes emerging from drifts beside the track. In that flake is preserved an era in which the body endures and welcomes the simple opposites: icy cold against face skin and eventually a fire’s warmth, sodden feet and, at last, these dried once more, while the eye registers an omnipresent starkness —white fields, white roads, white trees— which, like a minor key, can please the mind. Here is the past returned to Earth by the water that changes form but does not die. In this vision, each frozen tuft among the millions that lower to the ground is a memento mori that affirms: No life is useless or pointless, since each in its turn advances the future. Yet all are swiftly forgotten in the beauty of the falling snow.

We then reached a fork in the valley. Should we go left or right? Dad called it left. I had a very powerful intuition that right was the choice we should make. Dad insisted left. I insisted right. It was a fifty-fifty call and he relented. Within two hundred yards we stumbled across a snowy track through the woods and followed it excitedly. Within a mile it came out on a mountain road, and within ten minutes we had flagged down a lift from a car heading up the hill in the darkness. We had found salvation, and I was beat. The car dropped us off at the gates of the garrison thirty minutes later. It was, by then, late into the night, but I was suddenly buzzing with energy and excitement. The fatigue had gone. Dad knew that I had made the right call up there--if we had chosen left we would still be trudging into the unknown. I felt so proud. In truth it was probably luck, but I learned another valuable lesson that night: Listen to the quiet voice inside. Intuition is the noise of the mind. As we tromped back through the barracks, though, we noticed there was an unusual amount of activity for the early hours of a weekday morning. It soon became very clear why. First a sergeant appeared, followed by another soldier, and then we were ushered into the senior officers’ block. There was my uncle, standing in uniform looking both tired and serious. I started to break out into a big smile. So did Dad. Well, I was excited. We had cheated a slow, lingering hypothermic death, lost together in the mountains. We were alive. Our enthusiasm was countered by the immortal words from my uncle, the brigadier, saying: “I wouldn’t smile if I was you…” He continued, “The entire army mountain rescue team is currently out scouring the mountains for you, on foot and in the air with the search-and-rescue helicopter. I hope you have a good explanation.” We didn’t, of course, save that we had been careless, and we had got lucky; but that’s life sometimes. And the phrase: “I wouldn’t smile if I was you,” has gone down into Grylls family folklore.

For many years, Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy.

John Vernall lifted up his head, the milk locks that had given him his nickname stirring in the third floor winds, and stared with pale grey eyes out over Lambeth, over London. Snowy's dad had once explained to him and his young sister Thursa how by altering one's altitude, one's level on the upright axis of this seemingly three-planed existence, it was possible to catch a glimpse of the elusive fourth plane, the fourth axis, which was time. Or was at any rate, at least in Snowy's understanding of their father's Bedlam lectures, what most people saw as time from the perspective of a world impermanent and fragile, vanished into nothingness and made anew from nothing with each passing instant, all its substance disappeared into a past that was invisible from their new angle and which thus appeared no longer to be there. For the majority of people, Snowy realised, the previous hour was gone forever and the next did not exist yet. They-were trapped in their thin, moving pane of Now: a filmy membrane that might fatally disintegrate at any moment, stretched between two dreadful absences. This view of life and being as frail, flimsy things that were soon ended did not match in any way with Snowy Vernall's own, especially not from a glorious vantage like his current one, mucky nativity below and only reefs of hurtling cloud above. His increased elevation had proportionately shrunken and reduced the landscape, squashing down the buildings so that if he were by some means to rise higher still, he knew that all the houses, churches and hotels would be eventually compressed in only two dimensions, flattened to a street map or a plan, a smouldering mosaic where the roads and lanes were cobbled silver lines binding factory-black ceramic chips in a Miltonic tableau. From the roof-ridge where he perched, soles angled inwards gripping the damp tiles, the rolling Thames was motionless, a seam of iron amongst the city's dusty strata. He could see from here a river, not just shifting liquid in a stupefying volume. He could see the watercourse's history bound in its form, its snaking path of least resistance through a valley made by the collapse of a great chalk fault somewhere to the south behind him, white scarps crashing in white billows a few hundred feet uphill and a few million years ago. The bulge of Waterloo, off to his north, was simply where the slide of rock and mud had stopped and hardened, mammoth-trodden to a pasture where a thousand chimneys had eventually blossomed, tarry-throated tubeworms gathering around the warm miasma of the railway station. Snowy saw the thumbprint of a giant mathematic power, untold generations caught up in the magnet-pattern of its loops and whorls. On the loose-shoelace stream's far side was banked the scorched metropolis, its edifices rising floor by floor into a different kind of time, the more enduring continuity of architecture, markedly distinct from the clock-governed scurry of humanity occurring on the ground. In London's variously styled and weathered spires or bridges there were interrupted conversations with the dead, with Trinovantes, Romans, Saxons, Normans, their forgotten and obscure agendas told in stone. In celebrated landmarks Snowy heard the lonely, self-infatuated monologues of kings and queens, fraught with anxieties concerning their significance, lives squandered in pursuit of legacy, an optical illusion of the temporary world which they inhabited. The avenues and monuments he overlooked were barricades' against oblivion, ornate breastwork flung up to defer a future in which both the glorious structures and the memories of those who'd founded them did not exist.

In the last hour, highway turns to snowy country roads and the GPS system shuts down because you’re in a part of the world that Toyota doesn’t recognize (and the feeling is mutual). We always pull up carefully, making sure not to run over any outdoor cats. (One of the best-kept secrets of “country life” is that people accidentally crush their own pets a lot.) The house is cozy warm from the wood-burning heater. There are hugs and kisses and pies and soup and ham and biscuits and a continuous flow of Maxwell House coffee with nondairy creamer. We City Folk can pretend that we prefer the rotgut from Starcorps with skim milk and Splenda, but who are we kidding? Maxwell House with French vanilla corn syrup cannot be beat.

Several times, I woke to the sound of him tapping his grey nails against the steering wheel.  When I opened my eyes to look at him, I could see his elongated canines.  At those times, I wanted to reach over and pat his leg, but I held myself back. When I woke to see his ears pointed too, I quietly studied him for a few minutes.  I knew I was the cause of his agitation.  He’d sensed my withdrawal.  I hadn’t wanted him to see my confusion.  I wanted to talk to Sam first, before saying anything to Clay.  But my approach obviously wasn’t the right one.  Clay had stuck by me through everything.  I needed to trust that he wouldn’t turn away from me after I revealed what had happened. “Clay...” He paused his tapping. “Could you pull over for a minute?” He glanced at me, lifted a concerned brow, but did as I asked.  The tires crunched on the snowy shoulder.  He stopped the car then turned toward me. A sad smile lifted my lips.  I hated to see him like this.  I tapped my lips.  I needed affirmation that we still had our connection, and he needed assurance I was fine. His tight grip on the steering wheel loosened, and he shook his head in amusement.  I held my breath as he leaned toward me. Clay cradled my face in his hands and kissed me tenderly.  I clutched his shirt, dragging him closer.  When he opened his mouth to nip my bottom lip, I groaned and willingly let him in.  We steamed the windows.  My lungs burned for air.  Finally, I had to pull away to catch my breath.  He wrapped his arms around me and placed small gentle kisses on the top of my head. His neck hovered in my line of sight.  I could give him what he wanted.  A quick bite and I wouldn’t need to worry about other potential Mates.  I could Claim him as my own.  But I didn’t want to hurt him anymore.  Physically or emotionally.  I pulled back from our make-out session. Clay gave me one last kiss on the lips then put the car in drive.  The smooth, tan skin of his very human ears called my attention, as did his clean, pink nails.  He looked content, no longer tapping his fingers while he stared ahead at the snow-covered roads. I

The Church and the World walked far apart on the changing shore of time; The World was singing a giddy song, the Church a hymn sublime. "Come give me your hand," said the merry World, "and walk with me this way," But the good Church hid her snowy hand, and solemnly answered, "Nay; I will not give you my hand at all, and I will not walk with you; Your way is the way of eternal death, and your words are all untrue." "Nay, walk with me a little space," said the World with a kindly air, The road I walk is a pleasant road, and the sun shines always there. Your way is narrow and thorny and rough, while mine is flowery and smooth; Your lot is sad with reproach and toil, but in rounds of joy I move. My way, you can see, is a broad, fair one, and my gate is high and wide; There is room enough for you and me, and we'll travel side by side." Half shyly the Church approached the World, and gave him her hand of snow; And the false World grasped it, and walked along, and whispered in accents low, "Your dress is too simple to please my taste; I have gold and pearls to wear; Rich velvets and silks for your graceful form, and diamonds to deck your hair." The Church looked down at her plain white robes, and then at the dazzling World, And blushed as she saw his handsome lip with a smile contemptuous curled; "I will change my dress for a costlier one," said the Church with a smile of grace; Then her pure white garments drifted away, and the World gave in their place Beautiful satins, and fashionable silks, and roses and gems and pearls; And over her forehead her bright hair fell, and waved in a thousand curls. So they of the Church and they of the World . journeyed closely, hand and heart, And none but the Master, who knows all, could discern the two apart. Then the Church sat down at her ease and said, "I am rich and in goods increased; I have need of nothing, and naught to do, But to laugh and dance and feast.

agency, where she’d filled seemingly endless paperwork despite all the forms she’d already filled out online, and was now in proud possession of the keys to a Honda Civic. It was nine o’clock in the morning, and the sky outside was as gray as pewter, with mean little flakes of snow, not the fluffy, festive kind, drifting down on a muted grey landscape of concrete and leafless trees. Claire dumped her bag in the trunk—or the boot, she supposed, someone in England would call it. Claire had always loved her godmother Ruth’s English accent, and when she was a kid she’d quizzed Ruth on all the different British words. Pavement for sidewalk. Jumper for sweater. Rubber for eraser. The last one, of course, had caused eleven-year-old Claire to burst into muffled giggles of embarrassment and mirth. Ruth had just smiled, her eyes twinkling, sharing the admittedly immature joke. Slowly, very conscious she was driving on the other side of the road, Claire pulled onto the road, and then followed signs for the M62 and York. An hour and a half later, those mean little flakes of snow had turned thick and fluffy and white. They were beautiful, but her little car was not handling the snowy roads all that

...on a road seldom crossed except by people who are lost...

POEMS “Song of the Open Road”—Walt Whitman “The Tyger”—William Blake “I Thought of You”—Sara Teasdale “Sonnet 140”—William Shakespeare “A Clear Midnight”—Walt Whitman “Something Left Undone”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “A Prayer for My Daughter”—William Butler Yeats “My Little March Girl”—Paul Laurence Dunbar “The Mountain Sat Upon the Plain”—Emily Dickinson “The Song of Wandering Aengus”—William Butler Yeats “Jabberwocky”—Lewis Carroll “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—Robert Frost “Continent’s End”—Robinson Jeffers “Forgiveness”—George MacDonald “O Me! O Life!”—Walt Whitman “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”—Robert Herrick “In Memoriam A.H.H.”—Alfred Lord Tennyson “i like my body when it is with your”—E. E. Cummings “A Psalm of Life”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”—William Butler Yeats “Three Marching Songs”—William Butler Yeats “Song of Myself”—Walt Whitman “in the rain”—E. E. Cummings “When All Is Done”—Paul Laurence Dunbar “The Wanderings of Oisin”—William Butler Yeats “The Cloud-Islands”—Clark Ashton Smith “love is more thicker than forget”—E. E. Cummings “Hymn to the North Star”—William Cullen Bryant “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun”—Walt Whitman “The Young Man’s Song”—William Butler Yeats “If”—Rudyard Kipling “Character of the Happy Warrior”—William Wordsworth

The road is long, it is snowy, the road is dangerous, the road is stony, the road is dented! Shut up man, shut up! Shut up and go! Believe in yourself, trust your abilities and start off! All roads reward courage!

The Snowy Road and Other Stories edited by Hyun-jae Yee Sallee “What is a prayer? It is a heart without any lies” -Yean-hee Ching, Balloon Proverb “Undoubtedly a pine caterpillar lives properly by eating pine leaves only.” Ick-suh Yoo, Purchased Bridegroom “...One tends not to appreciate many things while he strives madly to cope with misfortune befalling him. Is it because misfortune makes one see things differently?” - Ick-suh Yoo, Purchased Bridegroom “Nak-dong river duck in your arms!... What I mean is that you have assumed the role of poor mother hen for your wife.” Ick-suh Yoo, Purchased Bridegroom “When one happens to find out that a treasure previously deemed to be precious is actually fake, one’s disgust is about to be measured by how dearly that treasure was cherished. Immediately casting away such a false treasure could make one happy for the time being.” - Chung-joon Yee, The Snowy Road

What is a prayer? It is a heart without any lies” -Yean-hee Chung, Balloon Proverb “Undoubtedly a pine caterpillar lives properly by eating pine leaves only.” Ick-suh Yoo, Purchased Bridegroom “...One tends not to appreciate many things while he strives madly to cope with misfortune befalling him. Is it because misfortune makes one see things differently?” - Ick-suh Yoo, Purchased Bridegroom “Nak-dong river duck in your arms!... What I mean is that you have assumed the role of poor mother hen for your wife.” Ick-suh Yoo, Purchased Bridegroom “When one happens to find out that a treasure previously deemed to be precious is actually fake, one’s disgust is about to be measured by how dearly that treasure was cherished. Immediately casting away such a false treasure could make one happy for the time being.” - Chung-joon Yee, The Snowy Road

At ten past two on the afternoon of 28 December 1836, Constable Samuel Pegler, 104‘S’, was patrolling his beat down the east side of a snowy Edgware Road when he heard panic-stricken shouts of ‘Police! Police!’ coming from across the way near the Pine Apple tollgate.

For the better part of a decade, I figured I was better off being slightly unhealthy and leaving the active pursuit of body-related matters alone. This all changed once I joined the Peace Corps, where it was impossible to think too much about my appearance, and where health was of such immediately importance that it was always on my mind. I developed active tuberculosis while volunteering and, for some stress- or nutrition-related reason, started to shed my thick black hair. I realized how much I had taken my functional body for granted. I lived in a mile-long village in the middle of a western province in Kyrgyzstan: there were larch trees on the snowy mountains, flocks of sheep crossing dusty roads, but there was no running water, no grocery store. The resourceful villagers preserved peppers and tomatoes, stockpiled apples and onions, but it was so difficult to get fresh produce otherwise that I regularly fantasized about spinach and oranges, and would spend entire weekends trying to obtain them. As a prophylactic measure against mental breakdown, I started doing yoga in my room every day. Exercise, I thought. What a miracle!

Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road, my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first through the woods, then out into the open fields past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue, green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere. I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening a prayer for being here, today, now, alive in this life, in this evening, under this sky. "Winter: Tonight: Sunset

I lost control of the sport utility vehicle (SUV) many times at astronomical observatories. Driving down the road on two wheels like a stunt car driver after taking a corner too fast and almost rolling over at Roque De Los Muchachos, sliding uncontrollably down Kitt Peak backwards on a dangerous snowy road, and hallucinating on Mauna Kea while driving, to name just a few of the dangerous occurrences.

. . . they beheld its atlas-familiar snowy poles, its blue land-locked seas, its green forests and yellow plains and wide red deserts. They looked down upon Mount Olympus, so tall her summit rose about the highest snow, and the bustling lands of the Grand Valley, thick with cities and towns. As their earth loomed closer, they saw the glittering moonring and here the oracle-eye rested, filling the room with incomprehensible drifting shapes. Some were so huge they took minutes to cross the room, some were tiny and tumbling, some were busy as insects, flitting through the spectators intent upon their small errands; all of them bore the name ROTECH somewhere upon them.

The night is dark, the weather is windy, the road is foggy, the ground is snowy, the environment is spooky, and the bends are scary! Here is a great road for you, a road worth traveling! Fall down, get up, get stuck in the snow, and get out of the snow. If you want to go a long way in this chaotic universe, you need to be a student in a school like this road!

The road led through a wood of great beeches and then into a shallow valley, with the green backs of downs peeping over the distant trees. After Scotland the air smelt heavy and flat, but infinitely sweet, for the limes and chestnuts and lilac bushes were domes of blossom. Presently I came to a bridge, below which a clear slow stream flowed between snowy beds of water-buttercups. A little above it was a mill; and the lasher made a pleasant cool sound in the scented dusk. Somehow the place soothed me and put me at my ease. I fell to whistling as I looked into the green depths, and the tune which came to my lips was “Annie Laurie”.

In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I couldn't see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify—it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: 'This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.' It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.