On a Snowmobile, Stippled Pleasures Our family, including three boys ages 8, 10 and 11 and two cats, is seven months into our year in the woods, and at long last we are snowbound. We've been waiting for this since October! Our local friends have been assuring us, "Once it starts, it won't let up - and you'll be wishing it would," but so far this has not been the case. We have a decent 10 inches on the ground, but it's been days since we had a top-up. At least the cycle of teasingly little snow, then sleet and an abomination of rain, finally turning to a crust of ice, has abated. But winter is more than half over. It seems we ended up in Maine during one of the warmest winters the state has had recently. Even though this makes life a lot easier logistically, it isn't good news for those who depend on tourism, and most people end up thankful to some degree for the snow we've got. About three weeks ago, with a forecast for some serious snow the next day, we drove our four-wheel drive Jeep plus ice chains to the bottom of our mountain for (what we hope will be) the last time this winter. It's now parked next to our already hibernating van, just where the snowplow stops. For transport, my husband Craig brought our two snowmobiles out of storage, one a "deep snow special" called a Yamaha Viper and the other a hardy Ski-Doo with two seats. Craig, who in a former life was the nation's youngest certified master automobile technician, and has done all the repair work on our Jeep, has been tinkering for months to make sure each machine is fully functional and can tow our two sleds. He and the boys have really taken to snowmobiling. I, on the other hand, am a holdout. I first tried snowmobiling last winter, and by now I feel reasonably comfortable driving one for necessary chores like shuttling the groceries up our mountain or driving the kids around when everyone wants a spin. My first longish ride was a few weeks ago. For a change, it was snowing when we woke up, and the family consensus was, "Bag school and let's get out there!" Craig took two of the kids on the Ski-Doo and I had the third on the Yamaha. Starting out, I was overwhelmed, as always, by the noise, which devours roughly one-third of my ability to enjoy the woods: gone is the rushing of the wind in the branches, the clacking of twig against twig, the scuttle of the occasional squirrel, the squeak and crunch of footsteps in the snow. Instead my ears are assaulted by an unrelenting roar. We can't even talk to one another without either yelling or turning off the machines. Okay, okay. So a person can't hear the wilderness from aboard a snowmobile. But after the first half-hour had passed, I was on to "Wow!" Here we all were, deep in the evergreen woods with a thick snow swirling down on us, following a twisting track so narrow we were grateful for the heavy motorcycle-type helmets we all wore - they protected us against seriously big branches that hung across the trail every few feet. Let's face it, on skis or snowshoes, the trip would have taken a couple of hours - if we'd managed to get the kids to go at all. "Wow" lasted about 30 minutes. Then I started to ache. It has been an education for me to find out how athletic snowmobiling is. My clunky Yamaha was a real pain to turn. Most of the time, we were on back- country track that was "ungroomed," meaning no one had gone before us to smooth it out. There were many tight turns, bumps and dips, and partly concealed fallen logs and rocks to avoid. I pretty much had to hang on the handlebars with all my strength to follow the bumpy track, often standing up as I drove to more easily use my weight to keep the heavy machine upright and my kid onboard. To top it off, my right hand really began to hurt. For those not in the know, the way you keep a snowmobile going is to continually depress the thumb throttle. Too much, and you rear forward like a snorting stallion. Too little and, well, you slow down. It's got to be juuuust right. And keeping one's hand precisely in the right position for four hours - or, frankly, more than about 20 minutes - is a pain. At least for me. The kids, though, have a very different view, which is anchored in one beautiful fact: they can, personally, Drive Something Fast. This is because we live near a big lake that is now covered with two-foot-thick ice and is pretty much one big snowmobile track. Everyone loves to go fast. It was kind of a shock, when my eldest first asked me if he could drive, to realize that "yes" was a reasonable answer. Not, obviously, alone, or on ungroomed back-country trails winding treacherously through the woods. But under a wide sky with miles of flat and mom or dad on behind - well, why not? So far the kids have all driven several miles at speeds up to 35 miles per hour. No one around here takes snowmobile safety lightly. The other night was one example of why. I was up in the middle of the night again and glanced out the window. Away down on the lake were the brilliant gold headlights of four snowmobiles converging on one spot. Midnight ice fishing party, I thought? The next morning we learned the truth. There had been a terrible accident. It's hard for me to think that, as I was returning to my warm and cozy bed, a man had just been thrown from his machine. He lay all that night unconscious in the snow in sub-zero temperatures; his friends didn't find him until the following morning. He was still alive. This brings home a fact of life, that every moment I live and breathe, safe and whole, is a moment when someone else is in danger and pain. The bottom line is, I'm more of a skiing or walking sort than a snowmobiling sort, although I appreciate the fact that snowmobiles make our life here a lot easier, not to mention bringing a lot of enjoyment to a lot of people. The other day Craig took the boys to a local snowmobile race and I spent a blissful morning alone, up behind the house on the highest point of land. I lay sprawled on the sparkling white snow against a tree stump and let the whooshing of the pine trees in the wind surround me and consume me. I feasted on the forest and land stretched far and rippling to the horizon. I watched the clouds. I ate snow. When my legs got cold, I got up and trudged back through the woods, following tracks I did not know. Red fox? The house felt good and warm when I entered, fresh from the outside. School is going reasonably well these days. After a long holiday break, we are back at our poetry. I decided to tackle "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's a tough one, but I love it - so much so that I asked my mother to read it at our wedding 14 years ago. I'm thrilled to say that, line by line, we are slowly decoding it, and the kids are learning it by heart. Glory be to God for dappled things - For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches" wings; Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. Today we worked on line 8. What does Hopkins mean by "who knows how?" I'm not sure, but maybe, we thought, it's that it doesn't matter how a person, or animal, or thing, got "freckled" or different. Could be that it was that person's choice, or that animal's accident, or it could be that thing or animal or person was born or created that way. Hopkins's message, I thought, is that it doesn't matter: Glory be to God for all, regardless. The whole poem celebrates a different kind of beauty: it focuses our rapt attention on what most would find plain, or even ugly, and tells us, Here too is beauty. (After class was over, something kind of funny occurred to me: Hopkins has a kinship with Lady Gaga. Check out the wonderful short clip of young Maria Aragon singing Lady Gaga's "Born This Way," and perhaps you'll agree. As I like to tell my husband, everything's connected.)