Palimpsest

pened… when? As soon as I started noticing this, other tracks followed—a new set emerging already looking old and exposed to the sun, because they happened sometime in January? And those crisscrosses? While they looked to be totally different, they now seemed to highlight the same beast’s pattern from different times—a lighter, thinner set having been covered soon after they were made, and the deeper, broader set having been covered after some exposure to the sun. I got to spend several weeks mulling over this frozen record, peeled back one or two inches at a time—this winter chronology moving in reverse. I am sure that people exploring ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica get this same sense of awe—connecting frozen gas signatures to life on the planet tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago, and even connecting those gases to global events—a century of melting, a dramatic series of volcanic explosions, or the comings and goings of great legions of flora and fauna.

My world is a whole lot simpler. “There went a fox. Maybe in February?” And, “This seems to be where the coyotes walk. Or maybe it was a wayward badger?”

A palimpsest is something you write on that you can erase and write on again. This process invariably leaves ghosts of the past, like we see on a poorly erased chalkboard. This spring literally uncovered what each storm erased, walking me back through the year, walking me back through the frozen archive until, like so many seasonal things, it all literally vanished.

Harry Weekes is the Founder and Head of School at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 50th year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and one of their three baby adults- Simon. The other members of the flock, Georgia and Penelope, are currently fledging at Davidson College in North Carolina and Middlebury College in Vermont.