By day I’m an excellent student of the fourth grade.  I turn in my homework.  I act the part.

Simultaneously, I am something else, an agent for an organization not unlike Starfleet.  We too have a General Order Number One.  A Prime Directive.  To interfere as little as possible in certain situations.  That’s all I can tell you.

I’m always on the lookout for ways to surveil.  In time I will study explosives.  I will blow shit up.  Then I will learn to play the drums.  I am here for your safety.

Just another day at the office until I notice our star, the sun, looks low in the sky.

A chilly willy.  My hairs are up.

Warm winter wind blows through the afternoon.  Before sundown it’s gray and still.  Then cold.  Nature begins it’s work slow and methodical.  Frozen drops and crystals appear in the air.  Flakes the size of my thumb in no time.  I’m rooting for it to pile up all night long.  I’m watching bone white cereal waft, lit by porches and cars.

Black & White TV and dinner and then a little more TV.

News.

Cronkite and Sevareid.

Get Smart or Hogan’s Heroes…………..

I’m in the bottom bunk thinking about snow and listening to the radio.

Morning comes.  Everything is different.  I saw it coming but had no idea.  It is grandiose.

A massive amount of snow has changed the world.  The desert seceded to the moon last night.  Wind bequeathed silence.  Cars and fences are now mounds exaggerated.  The sun blasts and hides behind cirrus smears.  I can’t believe it.  I step out onto the porch expecting the old cold to smart but it doesn’t.  The quiet roars.  I am hushed completely.  It sparkles all milky silica soapy snow cone and I get that the blanket is powdery and crunchy.

No school today.  An expedition is in order post haste.

Thick socks, heavy flannel shirt and a scarf.  I bundle and wrap in boots, new gloves and a shiny down coat. I put on my father’s full face motorcycle helmet with the smoked shield.  My sister lets me know right away she’ll be telling on me.  I don’t care for what.  I head out through the airlock.

The sibling I’ve been paired with is a pain in the ass.  She should piss up a rope.

“Giant steps are what you take, walkin’ on the moon.” -This song from the future

The chomp of my feet through the crust is self fulfilling.  The isolation of complete insulation afforded by my makeshift space suit is comforting.  The landscape is distorted so profoundly that is suspends my disbelief.  I’m on the moon, listening to my own breath.  I am on the moon and moving with the slow deliberation necessary for so little gravity.  I know that merely lifting the visor on my helmet will expose me to enough radiation to fry my eyeballs in seconds.

“I hope my leg don’t break, walkin’ on the moon”. -from the musical future

Without the protection of my air tight, state of the art, scientifically advanced astronaut suit, my fate would be horrible but instant.  I’d be baked to a cinder of carbon or quick frozen to a temperature where even oxygen is a liquid and just before either of those things, the air would be vacuumed from my torso like a gaping hole in the fuselage of an airliner at 37,000 feet.

Suction!

I must be careful. The environment is hostile.

All things are threatening.  The trees are festooned with ice.  The only sound is chunks of ice and snow thumping to the ground.  There are oil barrels outside other people’s trailers on makeshift scaffold.  Giant unstable Xs made with 2 x 4s.  “Tubafors”.  Smells like kerosene or diesel.  I’d never noticed them and now I’m upon them.  I crunch up to a tricycle; the only thing showing is a foil and cellophane streamer, flapping and glinting.  I feel that vague dread I get during Civil Defense and Fire drills or when we’re cooking something we caught or killed.

I can no longer afford to only look through the shield.  This is too much.  I understand that my powers allow for some exposure.

I’m so in awe of what I see that my entire premise dials all the way back left and down.  I flip up my visor the better to see.  No more fantasy.  I’m no longer from anywhere but here and what has happened is astounding.  All living things must now deal with ice and snow.  All inanimate objects and structures are under winter’s influence as well.  I worry about the load, the weight and the cold.

Breath is vapor.

Swords of ice a yardstick long dangling and sweating in shadows.  The day warms as the snow shrinks and turns barely blue. Water rushes everywhere.  There are tiny swift streams under the thick blanket of crusty white.  I hear them.  They flow toward the street.  I’m enchanted by the mystery of flows I can only hear.  Like wind.  At yard’s edge is a microcosm of what fields of glaciers must be like and it’s all the way down my block.

I’m off and down the road.  There are places I want to see.  I discover far more substantial flows.  Fast moving streams.  Gullies rushing.  I take off my gloves to try my hands at redirecting the water.  I use rocks and boards and broken brush.  Gravity.  I make a small lake in a desert field.  It drains to the south east and I realize that’s where it’s all going.

Clouds begin to gather and the snow turns barely green.  Blocks from home and carrying my father’s helmet under my arm like a fighter pilot.  Time to get back to the airlock.  I’m thinking about oatmeal and it’s warmth in my belly.  It’s begun to fall again.  Marvelous because the sun is still streaming from the west.  I walk a while in silence thinking and listening.  It’s really starting to dump.  I can’t see but a few feet in front of me.

I’m downhill from home.

Within minutes, all traces of movement are coated and disappearing.  It is quiet.

It is beautiful.  Spectacular.

I am in awe.

Getting cold.

I put my father’s helmet back on……….

The wind whips.

With the visor up, I can only look at the ground or the snow blows into my eyes.  With the visor down, I can barely see out of it and it fogs up in seconds.  I do the best I can to hang my head and look to the sides but I can’t see.  I don’t recognize anything and I don’t know where I am.

My bowels are percolating.

I need to go Northwest.

Drinks for my friends.

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