ALL THAT IS LEFT BEHIND

When the atmospheric temperature is below freezing, water vapour solidifies into ice crystals in the sky, if the clouds carry enough moisture to allow it. Transformed from their ethereal structure, the crystals succumb to gravity, falling downward through their cloud. As they take this expedition, more of the water vapour that formed them condenses on their surfaces, freezing, one layer on top of another. Once crystals, they are now snowflakes. Heavier they become until they fall from the cloud and descend. Down to the surface of the earth that sent their sky the water that created them.

*

1994 The kitchen was crowded with big plastic boxes full of groceries and utensils; there was enough to feed a family of six for three weeks. The house stank of hot water proofing glue. Leather ski boots and gloves lay out on newspaper, dried stiff from an evening of hairdryer wind. Children darted from one end of the house to the other, collecting dropped scarves and goggles. Their father packed the troopy in the front yard.

One by one, they left the house and clambered into the truck. The children crawled through the front doors, climbing over the passenger seat into the back; the rear doors were packed to the roof with bags and the floor was layered with skis, blankets and pillows. They took their seats, burrowing into the shell that would carry them south through the mountains, high into the alpine region that was always somehow a part of them, no matter the time of year.

The truck edged along the winding roads, in and out of small towns. The sun set on them through the region where the land runs flat, clustered with piles of pre-historic rock. The country runs that way for thirty odd kilometres, before the ground throws its modesty into the sky. It was almost dark when they passed Lake Jindabyne.

‘Ready for it, Lou?’ Richard asked his daughter. She had crawled into the front of the truck and sat nestled between her parents.

‘There it is,’ he said as they drove along the dam wall.

‘That’s not a river,’ Louisa said. ‘Where’s all the water?’

‘Well, since they damned it, all the water’s in the lake. But that’s where the river was,’ Richard explained.

‘Doesn’t look like it says in the song.’

It was dark by the time they reached the top. Louisa awoke to the sound of her parents talking in whispers, opening the truck doors to go out into the cold that instantly found its way in to the jumbled nest of sleeping bodies. Everything was dark apart from a glow that reached the truck from a distant light. There was a flood lamp further down the road, colouring the fog into a whispery gold cloud that danced at the base of the quiet mountain.

*

Snow estranges reality; the friendship between winter and water produces something magic for the human senses. After snowflakes have fallen, after they layer the ground, sound is postponed, held captive in the chambers of frozen water. And if snow freezes to ice, sounds are released ten-fold, bouncing back into the ear of the listener, if listening is what they are doing. Sonic cataclysms are lost on our inability to hear them. Visual calamities, infinite rainbows of colour, hide from mind’s eye. There is colour in everything. But snow, estranged as we are to it, reflects the light that allows our understanding of its chromaticity. Light, which must scatter and be absorbed, knows no gaze. The rainbow is there, but all we see is white.

*

1995 Peering through the foggy glass, Louisa sat watching as the older children from the lodge built a snowman on the outside deck under the headlamp. The adults began to gather by the fire to drink wine and laugh, rosy cheeked and smelling of cold sweat. Everyone had returned from a night ski. They were happy, soaking in the enchantment of a soft snow shower that had come through the early evening to stroke the south-western face of the mountain. Louisa wished she had not been scrubbed clean as she sat watching in her pyjamas.  

‘Lou, you should go out there. Look at all that lovely snow.’

‘Really?’ Louisa jumped up in disbelief. ‘Can I?’

‘Go have a play outside before it gets too late.’

Louisa held her oversized pyjama pants up around her chest as she ran for the drying room. She pulled on her snow boots and mittens, climbed into her father’s ski jacket and began to push with all her weight against the enormous door that led onto the deck. At once the door was opened from the other side, spilling her into the lap of a sixteen-year-old boy. All the others were going inside and before long she was left alone in the falling snow.

Louisa sat on a shovelled pile of hard ice that had been shaped into a bench and watched through the fogged window as they piled into the lodge’s living room.

Their mouths moved as they walked about inside, but Louisa could hear nothing beyond the slightest pattering of snowflakes as they rested on the dry jacket that she swam in. She looked up, watching the flakes fall towards her through the headlamp. She could only watch the rushing pattern for a moment before she had to rub the flakes from her eyelashes. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth to catch them on her tongue. Again she looked up into the gold stream of the headlight; every flake was rushing, twirling, moving too quickly to catch with her eyes. It was magic. Louisa was sure of it.

Someone tapped on the glass window from inside the lodge. Looking up, Louisa felt her face go hot. They had all been watching her. She smiled weakly and rubbed her hands around in the snow in an attempt at indifference. They knocked on the glass again, gesturing at something behind her. She couldn’t hear what they were saying. Behind her were the gum-trees, twisted and haunted by the headlight’s shadow. She stood up and faced the trees, backing slowly toward the lodge door. Inside they continued to point out to the darkness. Louisa’s stomach turned and she pulled against the heavy door with no luck. The ground was covered in ice; she had no footing.

‘Can someone please open the door?’ She yelled in at them. They continued to laugh and point into the darkness beyond the deck.

‘Please,’ she yelled, ‘let me in!’

Louisa found her father in the group. He smiled at her and pointed to the ice seat. Louisa looked over.

Perched up, staring straight at her, was a small brown fox.

Louisa stood very still. Again she saw the rushing snowflakes as they tumbled down, covering the fox in a fluffy white coat. The fox moved one paw and its head forward, sniffed the air and watched Louisa. Taking three quick steps further, it sat back down this time closer to her. Everyone inside smiled and laughed, looking from Louisa to the fox, from the fox to Louisa. The fox sat poised, focused, looking from her hands to her face and back again.

Louisa reached into the pocket of her father’s jacket and pulled out the plastic bag full of nuts, dried fruit and chocolate. She picked out a single cashew and tossed it on the ground near the fox. Snatching it up, the fox chewed it with its head tilted back and took three more steps toward her. Louisa looked inside. Everyone had stopped talking; they all stood silently. Louisa turned toward the creature. It was clear what was required of her. She picked out a piece of dried apple and, kneeling on the deck, held her hand out to the fox, flexing her fingers downward in case he thought they were food. The fox drew closer and Louisa turned her head sideways, squinting her eyes in anticipation. She felt a quick brush on her palm as the fox took the fruit.

There was an outburst of tapping and knocking on the window. Louisa opened her eyes to see the other kids scrambling to come outside, desperate to meet the fox. Before long, the door to the dry room behind her burst open. The fox, startled by the sudden movement and laughter, froze, crouching, then leaped off into the dark behind the ragged snow gums.

‘That fox never goes near anyone!’

‘My dad used to leave scraps out for him.’

‘No one has seen that fox in ages.’

‘It might come back. Do you reckon he’ll come back?’ One boy questioned Louisa, who held obvious authority over the dealings with the fox.

Louisa looked out into the trees, confident now, unafraid.

‘He won’t come back.’

‘Too many people now, I guess,’ an older boy said. Richard walked out from the dry room.

‘Alright everyone, back inside. It’s almost time for bed.’

The children all started filing back into the lodge. Louisa stood still, her eyes fixed on the darkness. Too many people, Louisa thought, scanning the perimeter of the headlamp, looking into the gums beyond the deck.

‘Too many people,’ she told her father, shaking her head. Richard picked her up, rested her on his side, and looked out into the night with her. 

‘Not enough magic,’ he confirmed. She looked up at him, grinning. He smiled back down at her and winked. 

*

1967 Richard sat atop his father’s ’48 Ford utility with a can of cold beer, waiting for the action. He and his brother James had taken the afternoon off work to drive up through the Mountain Gums on Kosciuszko Road, to the place they had camped as children. Their lookout took a view of the lazy town, now faded and rudimentary compared to the new buildings and fresh asphalt roads that clung to the brown grass hills. Much of the old town had been taken down; parts had been pulled and dragged out of the path of the work trucks that lumbered through the valley since the beginning of the dam. All was settled now. Everything was in its place. Richard waited for the flooding.

‘Can you imagine it, Rich? I mean, the lake, you know?’

‘Wha’da ya mean?’

‘I dunno, what it’ll look like, I guess.’

‘Dunno. It’ll take a while yet.’ Richard swilled the beer in his can and took a long sip. James was younger than Richard, by full a year. But the boys had grown up as twins. Richard had repeated third-grade and so he and James shared their friends, girlfriends, homework. Not that that kind of thing wasn’t common in a town as small as Jindabyne.

‘Dad’s got the shits.’ James added with a laugh.

‘He’ll get over it.’

Their father was on board with the protest. He’d been fighting the Snowy Hydro since the scheme went public in 1949. Richard agreed with him mostly; he’d been hearing about it his whole life. He didn’t care much about the old town. It had been great having a new one. He just wasn’t sure about all that water. While the old men went on and on at the pub about the Snowy River, the corporations and the injustice, Richard looked out over the valley. It worried him, this flooding. But exactly why, that was something that he couldn’t quite reach.  

*

Snowmelt is water, produced from thawed elevations. Once in the sky, drawn up into the atmosphere by heat and brought back to the earth as snow again, it recycles itself in the hydro-cycle of the planet. Garnering snowmelt for the creation of energy and irrigation, hydro systems and damming schemes speckle mountainsides. And through it all the sky keeps up its game; dumping, dying, and taking it all back again. All the sky knows is the difference between wet and dry, cold and heat. And if it gets less of one or the other, things begin to change.

*

1987 Richard drove the last stretch of Jindabyne Road, leading up the valley toward the hidden town. The wind from the open window carried the dust off the dashboard and the sunlight caught it, lighting it up as it floated through the truck like a dried out snowdrift. Louisa had come earlier than expected. They had planned to be settled in Canberra before she was born. He hadn’t had time to get his other girls sorted for their stay at James’ place as planned. But Louisa came early and now the girls were at the hospital with Jenny in Cooma, and he needed to hurry. Back up to Jindabyne to collect the things they hadn’t had time to organise. He needed to be in a hurry, but exhaustion swelled through him and the sun slowed him down.

He and Jenny had decided to move to Canberra when news came of her forth pregnancy. Her sister lived there, and Richard could get a better job. Practicalities became the driving force behind their lives. That, and Jenny wanted the change. The mountains weren’t going anywhere, she had assured him. It was the way about her, when she kissed his closed eyelids the day they sat together on the shore of the lake. It was the way about her that let Richard know that he would follow her anywhere.

Richard collected items from the house, digging through boxes of packed up clothing. He hadn’t intended to stay long, but ended up walking through the yard again, taking it in on his own for what would be the last time. It was strange how he had wanted Louisa born here and now she was early, just in time to grant him his peace. The notion of it rolled around in him with a certain sense of pride. He got back in the car and drove north past the dam, stopping for a walk before heading back up to Cooma.

He took the paved footpath down past the dam wall, down toward the heaped pale-grey stones. They looked to have been dumped there purposefully. Richard and James had fished there once, back before the lake came. They had stood knee deep on the riverbank, feet anchored between the rocks. They had a purpose, those rocks, a purpose beyond steadying fishermen’s feet, and they seemed to mourn at him, up through the open air that they had never been meant to witness. The Snowy trickled and leaked down through what was now a creek bed. The stones of its dry banks mourned. They lay abandoned to the hundreds of thousands of megalitres, held in anticipation just meters from their open grave.

Richard knelt down and dug through a pile of smaller stones. They were coated in a pale dust that granulated like salt. He found one that was marbled with a dirty red and yellow, an amber colour that held galaxies. He took it down to the creek and washed it in the stream. This gift to his new daughter was too premeditated. But he went ahead with it anyway. He was glad Louisa had come to them in this place. They would move to Canberra, but Louisa had come early. He allowed himself to let her premature entrance mean something more than luck. 

*

2003 The conditions on the mountain were horrible; spits of ice hit Louisa’s face as she sat on the chairlift alone, the wind trying to take her off into the sky, to some other place. Delirious with nerves, dry mouthed, she was slugged, higher and higher into layers of white cloud by the lift. At the top, she pushed off slowly through the dredged down snow, moving across the mountain to the race tent, perched at the beginning of the course. There was no-one there that she knew. Her name was called out through the wind and she unbuckled her skis and stumbled, head down, to the tent. It swayed and stopped, jostled around like a flag whiplashing around a frozen pole. The tent didn’t want to be there and the mountains didn’t seem to want it there either. They spread out beyond the tent, letting it and everyone else know that they were the only entity present that held enough endurance. They were the only thing that revelled in the sky’s vehemence. 

‘Louisa, I’m Louisa!’ she yelled over the sound of rushing wind.

‘Your bib? Race bib?’ The marshal yelled back, prodding at her chest. Louisa hurried to take off her jacket.

‘I thought I had twenty minutes?’

‘What?’

‘Twenty minutes!’ But her protest was lost beyond the sound.

‘Come on, you’re up now!’ The marshal yelled at her.

Louisa left the jacket in the snow, without anyone to give it to, and moved forward into the tent. It was strangely calm inside, although the walls moved spasmodically. Her heart was in her throat.

‘Louisa?’ The gatekeeper asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Ok, on with your skis and down you go.’

Louisa struggled with the bindings, fingers frozen. Dizziness entered her head as she stood up straight, waiting for the gatekeeper. She looked out one last time through the tent’s opening. Sisters, her father – none of them were there.

‘You’ll be right, love. Watch for the second flag. All the girls been takin’ it too wide. There’s a shitload of ice just past it. Stay high enough and you’ll be fine.’

Louisa nodded. She took hold of the gate stumps, one in each hand, and watched the red time gauge in front of her knees. Her legs shook uncontrollably. The gatekeeper talked into his two-way, ‘Ready?’ And then silence.

‘Ok, Louisa. Ready?’

Louisa nodded. Second flag, lean forward. Chest down.

‘Alright. Here we go. You know it, two beeps, a long pause, on the third beep you go. Watch that second flag. Good luck.’ And then he spoke into his two-way. ‘She’s good fellas. Let’s go.’

Louisa lent back away from the gauge, ready to swing into it when it was time. The timer beeped twice. She pulled backward. Beep. And she dragged her weight through it, with everything she had, propelling herself downward, seeing nothing past the mountain but the first flag. It was all lost on her now. With each turn she pushed farther forward. The second flag meant nothing to her as she dug her edges into the ice and felt it fling her even faster down the slope. The ice on her face did nothing to her either. The rattling of the bells and whistles piercing through the wind were shallow murmurs behind her. Someone had called her name, yelled at her to go, go, go. And she went. Beyond the finish line, beyond the mountain, the snow, so fast that she lifted and flew through the air beyond those people, leaving them behind her, ants against a white, soft background. So fast that it all turned into colours as she took off into the sky.

*

The surface of snow changes. Like skin, it ages; it feels the climate and shifts, according to its boundaries. How it layers itself on the ground depends on the weather. If the air is calm as it falls, the snow pack is soft, leaving a surface of powdery youth. But if a wind is up, if the sky moves itself with a strong and persistent pace, the flakes will break and scatter, driving down hard. Snow carried by storm is left with a hard face, perhaps a hard heart. But this is only half the story. Once layered down, snow narrates itself on the ground, dictated by the uncontrollable current of the sky.

*

2004 The two-seater plastic canoe bobbed in the middle of the lake. Claire was the only one of the sisters who had managed to stay on board when Louisa stood upright in shock at the cold water that found its way through the drain holes and onto her backside. Claire struggled to hold the flimsy paddle through hacks of uncontrollable laughter.

‘Lou!’ Margaret gasped, surfacing from her sudden upheaval into the cold water. She grabbed at the side of the canoe, spluttering. Lauren had flopped sideways into the lake, while Louisa dived over the nose of the boat when it was clear that the thing didn’t plan on staying put. Margaret had copped the worst of it all; she had lurched, half standing, to grab at Lauren while she fell. Margaret had missed, wavered, and, arms helicopter swinging, fallen backwards into the water. Supplies lapped around the sisters as they struggled to the side of the canoe – a soggy blanket, a plastic bag full of tinned beer.

‘Holy shit,’ Louisa panted, hugging the side of the boat. Claire’s laughter throbbed silently through her contorted face.

‘It’s fucking freezing!’

‘I got water,’ Louisa explained through heavy breath, ‘I got water on my arse.’

‘Margaret, quick! Grab the beer!’ They left the other detritus to sink.

‘Claire!’

‘OK, alright. Lou, you get in first to even it out.’

Louisa had already begun to clamber back on to the canoe, stopping to correct her balance and get a better grasp of the rope toggles. Margaret got on next, her legs splayed over the edge. But a fourth person now seemed impossible.

‘How the hell did we all fit in the first place?’ Lauren stammered through her shivers.

‘It’s warmer in than it is out,’ Margaret assured her. ‘We are almost on the other side, just swim along with us.’ It wasn’t until they all got a hold of themselves that they heard cheering coming from the shore of the lake. Others had begun to set up fires on the far side, as is the case in the evening during autumn. A group of young men whistled and clapped at the girls as they dragged themselves across slowly.

‘Fuckwits,’ Claire hissed.

‘Piss off!’ Margaret yelled at the strangers on the shore. Lauren heaved her slippery body onto the side of the boat without warning. Claire lost her balance and fell in. Barks of laughter echoed across the water and the cheering on the far side erupted once more.

*

2007 Louisa packed her father’s troop carrier with boxes full of books, clothes and old relics from her childhood home. Worn-out pillowcases, her grandmother’s teaspoons, a porcelain kitten. The truck was packed high to the back, the way she had remembered it from all those trips across the state with her family. This time there were no skis. But in a box somewhere, the type that doesn’t garner specific enough contents to deserve a label, beneath old shoes, some adolescent letters and scattered stationery, lay her old season passes and a few dusty trophies. The souvenirs from years spent moving up and down the mountain. All of her sisters had lives beyond this place, lives dispersed and seeping like mist through the endless valleys of adulthood. She had arrived late, and it was time to follow them on.

Richard came out to check the trailer lights, look in on her packing and hang about unnecessarily.

‘Good job with the packing,’ he said from the back of the truck. ‘Take it nice an’ wide on those corners with the trailer. Dunno what it’s like in that city but I’m sure there are a lot of tight corners. Not like our roads out here.’

‘Yep. Got it.’

‘When you off?’

‘Pretty soon.’

‘Me and mum are headed down to the creek later this evening. You should take the night off, head out in the morning.’

‘Yeah, nah. I want to try and get my new place set up before next week when semester starts. Thanks but.’

‘Fair enough,’ he sniffed. He opened the back of the truck and pushed a box in tighter against the load, locked the door and closed it again.

‘When’ll you get back up here, d’ya reckon?’

‘Ill be back with the truck in a bit, but other than that I dunno.’

‘Rightio. Well maybe me and your mother could come by sometime. It’s a long way but the drive’d be good. Bloody Melbourne. Long way off.’

‘I’m not disappearing, Dad. Take it easy.’

‘Yeah. Yep.’

Louisa was the last to splinter away from the rest of his family. They had all moved on and out, listening to the call for change inside them. They got that off Jenny, Richard was sure. Some of his girls were still living nearby, although they had families of their own. They came back together for Christmas, Easter sometimes.

‘Want me to drive down with ya? Help unload this stuff. It’d save ya bringing the truck back.’

‘I’ll be fine, Dad. Besides, I’ll need to move stuff back and forth. I’ll have it back in a couple of weeks. You can’t just hang around in Melbourne for two weeks while I get my shit sorted out.’

‘Righto. Well, I’ll see ya in a couple of weeks then.’

Louisa crawled out of the back of the truck over the passenger seat, but he was gone. She walked through the front yard and into the house to get her bag, and say goodbye to her mother.

‘Be careful, please,’ her mother said, as she hugged Louisa goodbye.

‘Yes, Mum.’

‘I mean it. If you get tired, stop. And eat something on the way please.’

‘I’ll be alright. It’s an easy road.’

They walked back out to the truck. Louisa looked around the side of the house for her father, but he was missing.

‘Say bye to Dad for me.’

‘Where did he go? God, he’s useless.’ Her mother hurried back to the house, calling out after him. Louisa turned the engine over and the truck rattled into life.

‘I can’t find him, Lou honey. I’ll let him know you got off well,’ her mother said. There was an apology in her eyes. A distant telepathy telling Louisa that she knew he was letting them down.

Louisa pulled off the front lawn as her mother waved goodbye. She moved the truck along the street. The gums on the ridge across from their house stood indifferent against the afternoon sun, against her leaving. Against the years spent crawling over their branches, burying pets in their shadows. She thought something like wishing them well as she moved along the road, headed to the highway exit at the back of the quiet suburb. Before she turned off the street she saw him, walking up the track to the top of the reserve. He walked slowly, slower than usual. She beeped the horn and he turned to watch her go. She waved and smiled. He raised one hand in farewell.

*

2011 Richard walked the path along the dam road to where the crowd had gathered. There was an electric jubilation that teemed through them all. People smiled and chattered over the sound of booming water. Megalitres of lake poured from the dam valves, crashing down into the creek bed below.

‘Richard!’ It was Ted Barker, an old school friend.

‘G’day Ted. Come for the show, eh?’

‘Bloody oath. It’s about time.’

‘I reckon time’s probably out for the Snowy.’ Richard had prepared himself for talk of drought, dry land salinity and the ghosts that multiplied downstream. He had come for the show, but the people he knew there would want to talk about the river, about the problems.

‘Yeah,’ Ted continued. ‘I reckon so too. Still good to see someone giving a shit about it.’ Who Ted meant by ‘someone,’ Richard didn’t know. But he nodded in agreement.

Richard walked to the railing of the dam wall and peered over. Dirty white spray lunged from its middle. The water swallowed up the gully below, stretching itself up the banks further than Richard had ever seen water do there, even before the scheme. The Snowy River Alliance had put together a poster of black and white photos, images from decades before. Protesters, women holding children, now long-dead old men: ‘Let The Snowy Flow!’

The poster was small and meek, flapping about in the breeze that rushed the dam wall. The crowd was smaller than he had expected. The water released, although huge in its movement and fall, was small too. It was but an inch of what had been dammed over the years, and only from that winter’s snowmelt. The damage was done, and the water would find its way back to the sky, back to the clouds and back onto the mountain next winter, just to be tackled back into the dam. It was a strange gesture, but a really wonderful sight.

*

Snowpack is affected by everything. Anything that can occur will transform it, laying a different script. Perennial snow stays all year long, and tells the stories of seasons and seasons of change. The weather brings ripple marks, barchans and bridges; these formations speak of driving winds and storms, movements of the sky and caresses of the sun. Everything deposited only to be changed into a different way of being. Snow on the ground is as transitory as time itself. In the Australian climate, snow is seasonal; it comes with the cold and leaves with warmth. And there is less and less of it, as time disappears, as the years drift onward. If snow is anything to go by, temperatures appear to be ascending. Its narrative is losing, as the story of the sun takes its place.

*

2012 Getting together had turned into a storm. If it wasn’t the older children teasing the younger, it was the pregnant sister crying, or the tired husband cursing. If it wasn’t the general calamity that was five new families stuck in the same house, it was the sad feeling threading through it all, that nothing would ever be the same.

Some times were better than others; some still held the humour and friendship that they knew themselves for. But the bad ones seemed to be outweighing the good, and everyone was getting tired. Their world was changing and it was a job keeping up.

Louisa’s parents had moved further into the mountains, south, deeper into the creases of the Great Dividing Range. They had four and a half acres, fenced off a track down from Eucumbene Road and backing onto Lake Jindabyne. The house was a lofty lodge, built by a German migrant. Louisa’s father joked about how the old guy had moved in with the Hydro System and didn’t seem to think there was anywhere better to go. He joked to try and get them to visit, to try and get them to stay.

Louisa watched them all, joined them in their new ways of getting about life. She disinfected bottles and bibs in boiling water, wiped down sticky high chairs, went to bed at 9pm. She slept on couches mostly, the proper beds reserved for couples, families. She woke at all hours of the morning to have cups of tea in the living room with mothers and feeding children. She listened to all of their complaints, most on account of one another. Louisa melted into their patterns, somewhat seamlessly. But she still had the ability to see it all moving about, as if she were high above them all, looking down.

‘Has anyone seen Tommy’s dummy?’

Napping bodies lay around the living room. Mark, the newest of the husbands, stirred and sat upright, his palms rubbing hard into his eye sockets.

‘Nah. But just take one of Sophie’s. I think there are a couple in her cot.’

‘Thanks. But Tom’s has a little bell on it, and it kind of rattles and puts him to sleep. Laura, can you move for a sec, I just want to check behind the couch.’

Laura rolled over with a sigh. Freida, her little girl, began to cry. It echoed down the corridor.

‘Quick,’ Margaret sneered. ‘Tommy just went down.’

Laura hopped off a dead foot, down towards the makeshift nursery. The corridor carpet was constantly slipped and twisted up against the wall, the rushed journeys were too frequent to bother lining it up again. The remaining bodies all peered at the doorway and held their breath. Freida continued to cry, and then the twins woke up. 

The afternoon rolled forward into the evening. The turbulence stirred and shifted throughout the house while the sun set over the hills to the west of the lake. The day had been a mild one, as mild as a day can be that exists in the cradle of higher mountains layered in snow. The warm change had brought through a wind speckled with wet sleet, glazing the hills and roads with moisture. The moisture soon snapped frozen into ice by the unstoppable cold that comes to everything in the night.

*

Louisa held Tommy and walked back and forth around the kitchen, hushing and swaying him as he screamed over the sound of a fighting family. Laura had given up, and sat crying on the balcony.

‘I think we might all just need to calm down,’ Jeremy said.

‘That’s a bit much coming from you, mate. Yesterday you got up me for stressing over Claire’s flu, and now you’re getting on it about calming things down.’

‘Richard, could you make yourself useful?’ Louisa’s mother had carried on making dinner for all of them, and her father was sitting on the couch, reading the paper, people bustling and yelling around him. He didn’t move.

‘Richard! For shit sake.’

‘What the hell d’ya want me to do?’ He lifted himself up off the couch with a heavy sigh and lumbered over to the kitchen. Louisa’s mother gestured toward the mess he had made scaling fish an hour earlier. Tommy took one last breath before he arched his head back and screamed his face blue.

‘Jesus, Tom.’ Louisa kept on patting his back. ‘Maggie, I dunno what’s wrong here.’

‘He wants his dummy and I can’t fucking find it.”

‘Give him one of Sophie’s,’ Claire implored.

‘He doesn’t want Sophie’s,’ Margaret barked back. She covered her face with her hands and began to cry. ‘Tommy’s has a bell on it.’

Louisa collected the keys and pulled on her jacket.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Up to town. See if I can find that kid a bell.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Richard said.

‘You stay.’

‘Lou, nothing’s even gonna be open.’

‘Help Mum with tea,’ she replied. ‘I won’t be long.’

Richard watched her rush out to the truck. She had become a stranger to him in many ways. But she seemed altogether closer to who he was than she had ever been before. 

Louisa drove slowly along Jindabyne Road. The headlights glimmered through the gums, stealing views of their glowing limbs, arms reaching out at the road – a family of ghosts in farewell. She leaned forward into the steering wheel, peering through the windscreen at the road that she knew so well. She remembered her childhood realisation that every road was connected to every other. They had different names, but the black surface snaked in one long, unstoppable strip around the country. She passed a wallaby that lay dead on the side of the road. Looking up, she saw the fox. It stood still and its eyes gleamed green from the middle of the road.

*

Snow cover stabilises the temperature rhythms that embrace the world. A recurring shroud, it moves in between the seasons that are webbed by the turning of the earth around its orbit of the sun. The snow that comes and goes recycles the water ever present in the atmosphere. But a lot of it sticks around, acting porter to the cryosphere. Permafrost. Bodies of ice larger than countries, cooling the glass of water that is the earth’s sea. The snow that needs to leave in the warmer months, that needs to melt and become the sky again, is returning less and less. Beyond the heartache this spikes in its holding regions, something else is tormented. Symbol of a disturbed regularity, the loss of snow implies growing heat. Heat that, despite its localised behaviour, looks to move into the places of the earth that cannot sustain its effect. Perennially frozen ground knows no heartache. There is no negotiating the grounds for humanity with ice that can do nothing but melt.

*

2012 They all continued to jostle around the house in a temper. The older children sat in front of the open fire in towels, drying off from their communal bath. Margaret had managed to settle James into his cot, but still walked about in frustration, exaggerating all of her actions. Laura was still meek and weepy. Frieda had colic. At Claire’s request, Mark and Jeremy had taken their heated conversation outside. It wasn’t until Jenny walked into the room with the police officer that they all turned completely silent. They watched Jenny sink to the floor, crumpled, her face drained and ghostly. The officer looked ill himself, as they all stood watching him. He swallowed hard as Richard got up from the couch to walk towards him. Claire rushed to help her mother.

No other cars involved, the officer told them. She hadn’t been speeding, either. Just caught some sheet ice at the tight bend, up on Jindabyne Road, the corner where the lake came into view. Richard knew the one he meant.

‘Where to from here?’ Richard asked.

‘She’s been taken to Cooma.’ The officer stopped for a moment, looking down at Jenny on the floor. ‘Someone needs to come and identify.’

*

His other children prepared to leave. Leave the house, the mountains, leave the things that had happened there. Picking up and shifting off, just to find another landing. Avoiding their departure, Richard walked the dirt track down to the lake. He’d had no practice with this type of farewell.

The road had formed its usual spring rivets; it had formed trenches, paths and veins for running water. The ground was easily manipulated by water. Once a soft dirt valley, the lake they brought in refused to acknowledge its home as anything other than what it was. The banks of it were soft as ever, almost silk, and it was mostly red. The stones in the dried out riverbed were where that water was supposed to be. And the lake lay on ground that wanted to be dry.

The sun sat on the tip of the mountain, offering a goodnight to the town and to the water. The lake lapped at Richard’s feet, cold and indifferent. He walked into it, wading out slowly. And then, without pause, he lowered his body deep into it and pushed out, swimming below its surface, coming up again further out. The lake was long and mostly shallow near its banks and he placed his feet down and stood up. The water lapped at his chin.

Richard watched the mountains. There was something of solace in their quiet, in their ageless survival, in all the water that they let down. And everything breathed. All at a different frequency, at a different level, a different dimension just out of his reach. But it breathed, and that, at that moment, seemed to be enough to convince him that it was still worth something. That it all still meant something without Lou. With every second he felt it change. But this time, perhaps for the first time, he felt himself moving along with it. Richard was still there, along with the mountains. Along with the stones and the water and the world. Along with everything else that had been left behind.  

*

1991 Jenny crossed the wet foyer of the snow shelter and threw her gloves on the table in front of Richard.

‘I’ve had enough. Your turn.’ She sat down with a sigh.

‘What’s wrong?’ Richard asked.

‘She has no patience. Honestly, Richard, if you want to drag us all up here for weeks on end, and force the girls to ski, then you’re going to have to deal with it when shit hits.’ Jenny took his coffee and crossed her legs.

‘Alright, where is she?’

‘Out front, on her back, wailing at the sky.’

Richard walked out the front of the shelter and found Louisa, tangled on her side, ankles twisted in attachment to skis that wouldn’t budge. She moaned softly into the mittens that covered her face, body jolting from her breathless sobs. Richard couldn’t help his smile.

‘Come on, Lou honey. Let’s try again.’

‘No,’ she moaned.

‘Come on.’

‘I said No!’ The protest tweaked into a screech.

Richard knelt down and unclipped her skis, then lifted her up by the shoulders.

‘I don’t like it,’ Louisa cried at him. ‘I can’t do it,’ she clung onto his leg and opened up a torrent of new sadness. ‘I don’t want to do it.’

‘Louisa, calm down.’ He tried to get a look at her face. ‘We’ll have a break. Let’s go for a walk up the track there. Look for possums.’

Louisa went quieter, sniffing into her snot-covered mitten.

‘Possums?’ she questioned, her small chin quivering.

‘Yeah, possums. Come on.’

Richard picked up her miniature skis and rested them on his shoulder. Louisa hadn’t figured out poles yet. He bent down sideways and took her hand, leading her off the flat track that led past the shelter. When the path got steep, he picked her up and she clung to his side. He stopped at a low Snow Gum and sat her on its ground-sprawling branch. Louisa had stopped crying, but she continued to sniff and shiver, hanging on to her resistance like a security blanket.

‘Can you see any, Lou?’

Louisa gave him a grumpy look.

‘Where are all the possums, Louie?’ Richard continued. ‘Reckon there are any in this tree?’

Louisa looked up into the gum’s branches.

‘Maybe,’ she was giving into the game.

‘Possums don’t have to ski,’ she retorted.

‘You’re right, they don’t. Know why they don’t have to ski?’

‘Cos they can fly?’ Louisa asked, in all childhood seriousness.

Richard laughed. ‘No, but that’s a good guess. Possums don’t have to ski because they have special things about them, things that make it easy for them to get around in the snow. They live in the trees but they have special fur.’

‘Special fur,’ Louisa repeated. ‘Like magic fur?’

‘Yeah,’ Richard smiled. ‘Like magic fur.’

‘I wish I had magic fur so I didn’t need to ski,’ Louisa said softly.

‘Louie, you don’t have to ski, honey. But it’s a lot of fun once you learn. We’ll try again later on, you just need to go slowly.’

‘Lauren and Maggie don’t go slow. They can go really, really fast.’

‘Yes, but they’ve had more practice than you. You need to go slowly when you practice.’

‘I want to go fast,’ she squealed, smiling and throwing her mitten-clad hands into the air.

‘Really fast?’ Richard asked.

‘Yeah! Really, really fast!’

‘Well you gotta make friends with the snow first.’

‘You can’t be friends with the snow.’

‘Sure you can. You just got to be quiet for a little while and listen.’

Louisa stared at him.

‘Shh, wait.’ Richard covered his lips with two fingers, ‘did you hear that?’

Her eyes lit up. Eyebrows raised, she peered around her.

‘I can’t hear anything.’

‘Wait,’ Richard continued. ‘There! Did you hear that?’

Louisa grinned at him.

‘No.’ She wagged her head back and forth, smiling and giggling.

‘There! Again! It’s saying, “Hello Louie”!’

‘No No No!’ She yelled joyfully. ‘No, Daddy, it’s saying, “Hello Daddy, hello Daddy”!’

Richard laughed and lifted her off the branch. He rested her back on his hip and picked up the skis.

‘Let’s go find Mum and have some lunch,’ he said. ‘You want a hot chocolate?’

‘Yeah.’

Richard carried her back down the way they came, towards the shelter. The afternoon sun clipped through the gums sending streamers of light across the ground in front of them. Louisa sucked on her mitten, looking down, head swaying in time to his struggled steps through the weight of the untouched snow.

Originally published in Southerly 74:2 (Brandl & Schlesinger) 2014