First Person | A Cave of One’s Own

The day after Christmas, strolling around my mother’s neighborhood in Ferrisburgh, Vermont, I happened upon two young boys attacking a snowbank with ski poles. “We’re going to put dynamite in these holes so that we can make a bigger hole,” one boy told me. “We’re going to crawl in and stay there until summer,” the other added. They returned to their work, mittened hands carefully placing invisible sticks of TNT, and I continued on my way, a long-forgotten gladness beating in my heart.

When I was a boy, no season delighted me like winter; there was no pastime better than honeycombing backyard drifts and driveway plow piles with curving tunnels, domed chambers, and secret alcoves. I felt New England’s harshest season as an invitation to immerse myself in the elements—body, mind, spirit. I felt wealthy, rich with what Thoreau called “Contact!”

And now, in my 30s? Those boys with their imagined explosives were cultivating a tactile relationship with winter itself, whereas I had spent too many hours watching Seinfeld reruns.

Thus I decided: I’d allow my inner child to snug down right here, inside the outdoors. My mom’s response was predictable, as she nodded to the pyramidal snowbank at the end of her cul-de-sac: “Keep your nose free, in case of collapse.” I explained that the warmth of a properly constructed snow cave (where body heat and a candle’s tiny blaze can raise the temperature a whopping 50 degrees or more!) was enjoyed only by the fully buried. She shook her head. “Bring an air horn. I can rescue you with a shovel.”

Ah yes, shovel—that noun that when gripped becomes verb. I retrieved a metal one from the garage, and as I labored on hands and knees, belly and back, the so-called real world slipped away. No cellphones rang, no emails popped up, no money came or went from the wallet.

By dusk, my snow cave, if not bear-worthy, was at least roomy enough to admit a foam pad, a mummy bag, and, of course, a trio of tea candles, each perched atop its own chunky pedestal of ice.

Thirteen degrees. Sharp wind from the northwest. Stars strewn across immense darkness. I squirmed through my entry tunnel, into a darker darkness.

Cramped has a nice ring to it, but snug sounds better. Measuring seven feet long, four feet high, and three feet wide, the cave had to be met on its own spatial terms. After thrashing about in the mute blackness, struggling to un-wedgie my long johns and straighten my discombobulated bedding, I finally got comfy—and not merely comfy-for-an-entombment comfy, but genuinely at ease, relaxed. That exhausted peace, that burrower’s bliss. The tingly happiness of keeping a special secret, a secret nobody knows save for one wee human being, zipped the length of my slightly crooked spine. Held by the cave, I was that secret, safely sequestered.

With a flick of the lighter, I touched each candle to life. The flames, despite the night’s rushing wind, did not waver. The wind, as far as I was concerned, had ceased to exist. Nothing existed but the glistening walls, the crystal ceiling, the shadows cast by my arm as I raised an airplane bottle of single malt (wouldn’t you bring one along?) for a nightcap nip. Nothing but the easy rhythm of my own breathing, the toastiness of my toes. Nothing but the thought that 10 or so hours hence I would be birthed from the snowbank into bright sunshine and blue sky. And that my mother would have coffee going. And that later I would find those TNT boys, ask if they needed help.

Finally, with a follow-up airplane bottle polished off and my candles almost spent, this spell of contentment came apart at the edge of dreams. The magician of sleep cast a new spell over me—and just like that, I was falling as a snowflake, landing as snow upon snow upon snow.