A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [7]
The temperature had clearly risen in the week preceding his arrival and the deep snow was gaining in weight and plasticity. Jerome’s footsteps remained embedded, small blue pools in sodden drifts, semi-permanent paths could be made from place to place, and the white surface was punctured by emerging grasses and shrubs, the shadows of which were like maps of rivers drafted on a white sheet of paper. The trees, in which he knew the sap would soon begin to rise, were beautifully placed, their branches vivid against snow and sky, the abandoned nests of birds and squirrels clearly evident. One tree in particular held his attention—an enormous oak with a thick trunk supporting a number of twisted branches.
Although it was the end of winter, almost spring, there was something ripe and faintly autumnal in the soft glow of the light in the waning afternoon. A fine mist filled the air and gave a malleable look to shapes that one month earlier would have been so frozen and emplaced that interpretation might have been impossible. This cusp of a declining season, which held on not only to itself but also to the blackened twigs and stems and seed pods, to the bones of what had gone before, felt as exciting to Jerome as the uncovering of an ancient tomb. But it was not the quickening of nature that intrigued him, rather the idea of nature’s memory and the way this unstable broken river had built itself briefly into another shape, another form, before collapsing back into what was expected of it.
When he was finished with the primary documentation, Jerome wedged the camera in the groin of the hawthorn, then laughed when he found that its odd appearance in that location made him want to photograph it. He removed the shovel from the drift in order to begin the first of the physical sessions of the project. Using the front edge of the shovel he drew a rectangular shape approximately eight feet long and three feet wide on the untouched surface of the snow, then he reached for the camera in order to photograph the lines he had drafted, which were wonderfully exaggerated at this moment by the angle of the low sun. He returned the camera to the tree and began to dig, creating an inner wall by using a plunging motion at the edges; then, with wide-sweeping gestures, he flung the excess snow away from the centre so that it would not disturb the surrounding surfaces. It was not easy going; the ice storms of the winter and every crust that had once been surface had formed a series of tough layers—like strata on a rock face—and often he was forced to turn the shovel around to use the handle as a pick or gouge. When he neared the frozen surface of the earth, he tossed the shovel aside so that he could hunker down and work more carefully with his hands. He wanted everything he was uncovering to remain in place, as it had remained in place since the first snowfall. Unlike some artists who had exposed the roots of trees, he would not call what he was doing “an uncovering,” but rather would refer to the process as a revelation, and would entitle the photographs he would take of this area of the site The Revelations. As he was thinking about this title, a shadow near some small willows farther down the shore moved at the edge of his peripheral vision, and he sat back on his haunches to survey the outlying terrain. It was then that he saw the small carved angel emerging like an ice sculpture from the snow, and he tramped across the quarter-mile of white space that separated him from it. An old gravestone, he realized as he approached, most of which was still buried. Perhaps there was a modest graveyard waiting to be revealed by the spring melt. The angel looked like a solemn child, lost in contemplation and surrounded by a circle of fresh pawprints. It had not occurred to Jerome that there would be animals on an island only a mile long and half again as wide, but he supposed that the animal tracks must have been made by a muskrat or an otter, some