Prophet's Town
The New Year arrived with tumbling snowflakes. They didn't really look very real. In fact they resembled the imaginary snowflakes that I’d seen in my head as a kid before I'd really seen snowflakes. It had started snowing on New Year's Eve and by the time I woke up the next morning, there was your idyllic white blanket covering the world and it was still snowing. Great big fat flakes, floating and falling silently. Three of us (two of my friends - we'll give them names - Joe, Guha, and I) decided to go hiking to a place called Prophet's Town about 30 odd minutes away from where we live. Prophet's Town is a historical site - famous for different reasons - but for the purposes of this post, the following will be more than enough.
It is an ecologically restored piece of land consisting of wetlands, woods, trails and prairie grassland. So there we were - a little before 10 in the morning walking off into the trail that dips off the road and shortly after we were in the middle of the prairie grassland with swirling snow all around and the silver-white ghostly sycamores in the distance. The surreal scene was straight out of some Russian fairy tale (the strange ones where you never really could tell whether the middle or the end would leave you with a queer feeling in the pit of your stomach).
What did we see? I could write lots about this strange trip but I'll go down one trail for the nonce. We spotted a lonely red tailed hawk skimming the skies overhead and one of us wondered out aloud “What in heaven’s name is he doing up there today?” He seemed to be having a marvelous time - much like us, on a quiet trip of his own. Swirling, skimming, cruising the skies with an amazing grace, and the curious thing was that he didn’t seem very interested in catching any prey. Not two seconds later we could hear the excited hyper “gawks” and the heavy, strained phlapp-phlapp of what sounded like wet blankets. Up we looked. There were five or six humongous Canadian geese. Quite ungainly flyers really. Flapping their wings as if they were imposter-birds who had stuck false wings to their flanks, jumped off a cliff, and were wing-flapping furiously with all their might before their inevitable plummet to the ground came about in one resounding whomp.
We spotted a rabbit not minutes later. Or rather I managed to startle it out of its cubby hole as I went over to a tree stump to thump my shoes out. Although I do try to tread gently I haven’t as yet mastered the Lorenz-like, the Joe-like or the Guha-like grace when on these trekking trips. The rabbit shot out and bounded off in two huge leaps. As we were padding along I heard Joe ‘psst’-ing me and I turned around to see Guha frantically signaling. I turned around to see Joe balancing on a tree stump and Guha pointing his finger out to the prairie grassland. I followed the finger and barely caught sight of three white tailed deer – a mother and two of her yearlings disappear into the white snow-mist. We stood there for a while and I leapt up onto the tree stump, and surveyed my surroundings once Joe vacated it. There was not another human being in sight. The white flakes were drenching the landscape. The dense growth of trees in the northern barrier looked like the first shadows of some emerging mountain range and there was a silence induced not by sound but through sight. The surveying over, we resumed the trail.
Guha walked down to the creek, which was fairly swollen and was frozen over in parts. The silence was broken by the three of us giggling at the thought of gliding across the ice and (following Guha), Joe and I, almost on cue pretended to be ballet skaters for some seconds as we proceeded along the trail. Good thing no one else was there to witness our pirouettes. Guha picked up a log of wood and spun it across the surface of the ice sheathed waters of the creek. The ice cracked – the log floated lazily. Good thing we hadn’t tried skating along its surface. The trail winded into a forest copse (a forest copse I’ll write about some other day). I was walking on ahead in front of the others and as I reached the opening where the trail flooded back onto the prairies, for some sharp soundless seconds I felt as if I were the last person standing on the face of Earth. It came in a rush. I could hear the haunting notes of Offering playing in my ears and I was transported straight into the world of my best-loved story, which also happens to be the most heartbreakingly desolate and surreal story that I’ve ever read. The snow covered seemingly infinite space with the sickly lemon sun danced, flickered and crackled in front of my eyes. The awning silence gobbled me up and the world as I knew it was dead…
I hastily spun around, and to my immense relief there were Guha and Joe not ten feet away. The ghostly world splintered. Not seven minutes later, Guha with a dreamy expression in his eyes says, “if you unfocus your eyes and look down on the ground…you feel like you’re flying high in a helicopter with the Tundra skimming below you…in fact if you look hard enough you can spot some caribou…” I tried that but it didn’t work for me. Each one of us seemed to be on our own little trips off in our own little worlds apart from seeing the one we were all sharing. On the last 20 meter stretch with the winding trail path curving its way to the right and our truck barely visible around the corner – Joe let out a full throttled yell. Before we knew it, he had broken off the trail and was bounding over the grassland. Guha and I followed suit and we were next to the truck in a couple of minutes panting and wheezing with the chill in our bones. And that was that…
The whole trail was approximately two and a half miles. The temperature was
-20C that day (although Joe says that it was closer to -12C). We had walked around for close to two hours. It was an experience that I’ll never forget. It was unbelievably beautiful that day out there on New Year’s day, no less, in that surreal space hanging in between space and time.
