Escape

At the beginning of November, 1995, I traveled with two friends to upstate New York with no specific destination. In our early 40s, two men and one woman, we planned on touring the Finger Lakes region. There was no sexual connection. We were friends and we hadn't been on a trip in a long time, mired as we were in middle-age, young kids, work, sick parents, marital problems and other life pressures---we planned on escaping from all that, if just for a few days. There was also a slight pretext in my going: though the Finger Lakes were more Central or Central-West, Western New York had a high concentration of Lockwoods. In fact it was the U.S. location with the most Lockwoods, and the second highest in the world, after Yorkshire, England (I believe Liverpool was third highest). So aside from the sheer need to get away, I was on a quest to find my roots, ancestral home, etc. I was even shown a place on a New York State map called "Lockwood Corners" a mere blip in minute-sized type.   

In the town of Homer, NY, we entered a library of the kind that were popular in the 1800s and early 1900s, like a gaunt historic house. I was standing upstairs on a creaky wooden floor in a narrow aisle of old hardcover books, and the place was completely silent, a profound silence that felt as if I were alone in the universe, in a private space where everything around me had cut out like turning off the sound in a movie. I held a small hardbound volume in my hand entitled, "The Queen's Garland," a collection of Elizabethan love verses more gelded and platonic than bawdy but a charming book nonetheless. A book sale was taking place downstairs so I would be able to buy "The Queen's Garland" and take it home with me.
I perused its pages and stopped at: 
                                             
                                       The blackbird and the thrush
                                       That made the woods to ring,
                                       With all the rest are now at hush,
                                       And not a note they sing. 

and while lost in the silence and the ancient book, I became aware of snow. Snow was falling outside the library window---flurries at first, but as the minutes passed and I paid only slight attention, the snow became more than a harmless flurry. Those earlier flakes, spinning in the November wind, had felt like a gift out of time in the silent library, but now the snow had evolved into a full-blown weather event. My friends and I quit the library and drove north to Lake Ontario where the sky was a vault of iron but dry, and dry ground, too, as if a switch had been thrown to stop the snow. But after about 10 minutes on the frigid shore of the lake, the snow returned accompanied by gale force winds that caused us to vacate and drive east on the East-West interstate towards Syracuse. Nature appeared confident in its malevolent display of wind and snow as though it had done this countless times, even sending us a friendly reminder now in early November. A white out. Traffic crawled in the flash storm, cars stalled, and others skidded off the road onto the highway shoulder sometimes denting the guardrail. We joked and tried to make light of a fairly scary phenomenon. We scanned the radio static for a weather report or snow emergency warning but only heard Johnny Mathis crooning:

                     "What a moment to share, it's wonderful, wonderful
                                  Oh, so wonderful, my love."

The entire sequence of events---from shadowed muffled library interior with a few snowflakes to a raging winter storm---had the flowing illogical logic of a dream.

We passed the night eating and drinking at a brewery in Syracuse, and the following Sunday, a lovely fall day, we drove along the lakes and stayed in Ithaca and Monday hiked some of the Gorges, another fine blue autumn day. And yet with everything we did that weekend, the threshold of terror in the silent library as I stood on the second floor with a hardcover book in my hand and the few snow flakes whirling outside the window is what I remember most.