Divining the signs

It is the kind of snow that makes anyone feel like an expert tracker.

A light layer of brittle fresh snow capped over warmer, wetter sidewalks and roads, so that every footprint is a sharp black outline.

I turn out of the cul de sac and I’m following a man walking his dog — they’re out of sight in the early morning dark now, but the dog has stayed in tight along the high snowbank, long claws leaving an apostrophe above each round front pad-mark. The man lopes along a distinct track with his toes turned out, the front of his boots much further apart than his heels. It’s a pattern that suggests an unhurried gait, closer to stroll than hike.

I look back at my own prints, pleased that the snow has frozen enough now that I am not leaving the same sort of definition behind me.

Yesterday late afternoon was light drizzle changing through freezing rain and eventually to snow in the evening. It has created the sort of winter trees that moviemakers work so hard to create, each branch and stick individually cased in an even down of snow. The sort of thing that won’t last much beyond sunrise, that melts away almost before you can take it all in.

I’m heading through the hospital parking lots, because they’ve been plowed: the sidewalks aren’t, yet, even though it’s been almost two weeks since the last big snow.

There’s an old saying about it being darkest just before the dawn: no place is darker than the overnight public parking behind the hospital, where individual cars are scattered few and far apart, snow-shrouded, the ones left behind after everyone else has left.

The snow falling on the employee parking shows who’s been in all night, and the snowless cars of the early arrivers for the morning shift.

At the back of the lot, you cross over a thin gravel path now deep under snow: rabbits have been crossing it regularly, their tracks perpendicular to the human trail. On the next stretch of road, there are three sets of boot tracks heading towards me, and two in the opposite direction, taking the same route I am. One of the pairs of boots has a deep, aggressive tread. I think of that trail as “Angry Boots,” though I don’t really have a reason to think that, beyond the pattern.

There’s a lot of confusing in the world when you’re divining things from the few marks left behind afterwards.

A welter of cat footprints run alongside the bank, as if a team of cats had made its way along the road.

But that’s a distraction: look closer, and the tangle of prints are all the same size. I’m pretty sure it’s all from one cat, one undecided wanderer.

A woman hauls a reluctant and bushy collie down the street by its leash: when I cross to their side of the road, I see that the snow has gotten harder and that they’ve left not a single distinguishable mark — though someone with a much larger dog had taken the same route earlier. I take off my glove and put a fingertip into the black dog-print — it is far too frozen solid to be new.

Even with the clear evidence of your own eyes, things are not always as they seem. My point?

Just because someone chooses not to say anything, doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to say.

And just because they didn’t broadcast their doubts and fears and hurt alongside a telephone company’s Twitter handle on one particularly designated day of the year doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep listening. I look and listen all the time. Just in case.