The powder-dry snow is piling up evenly everywhere outside. The air is the light fog of falling snow.

It started about the time I got up this morning. First look out the window at the day saw a few little clusters of snow in the armpits of tree branches and a light powdering on the ground. The tiny flakes of cold snow ride the air currents like a huge flock of billions and billions of tiny white birds.

When the state paved the highway through here for all the new cars, they left a black fence of some kind of woven plastic cloth held up by metal posts to catch the fill they put in to raise the road two feet. I've liked it from the first. This long black wave stands in the landscape like a brushstroke that I find pleasing to the eye, and it hides the scar of the road. It's like a sculpture in the landscape, a simple, easy-to-make black running fence like the artist Christo ran over the landscape of California in white.

The ground is white with maybe three inches of snow. Saplings and small trees stand in white with the black running fence behind them. Beyond it, the forty or so foot high bank across the road in the background is nearly solid white. It once had a big rock, ferns, rhododendron, mountain laurel, mountain azalea and trees. Now it's covered with the tan winter stems of the stuff they planted by spraying black tar on the bank with seeds in it. The plant itself looks like it came from outer space.

It's nice today, the whole bank white with long grass-like stems in tan. It's true, there are times when even ugly is beautiful. Before I left the city, I taught myself to appreciate the beauty in ugly. In a city, there's not much other way to find beauty. But it turned boring. I wanted the real thing, mountains where still a little bit of native growth was left with streams running through it, gravel roads, old people with a living twinkle in their eyes and a life close to the elements.

Whatever it is that exterminated what was left of the native trout in this mountain since the arrival of Christmas trees is in my water. I, like everyone else in the county, am drinking and washing in the water that eradicated the native fish. Yes, there were red-finned mountain trout in the streams here until just a few years ago. I told people these streams were fished out hoping to protect the ones that were left. I knew they were here, because I saw them.

I'd sit on a rock in a stream near a little cove of still water for an hour or so and the trout would come out from the shadows under the rocks they darted to when I walked into their world. They'd swim around looking for bugs—I even saw the fertilizing of eggs as trout do it. Now I can sit still all day and fewer minnows every year come out in the open to resume their lives when the giant is quiet, but never a trout.

We have laws now about keeping cows out of the streams because they pollute the water. However, all the time cows were polluting the streams the trout lived in as much abundance as they could for the fishing. When I shower now in water from the spring I remember the trout are gone, the earth's water is poisoned at the source. It's all about making money, like everything else in America, in the world, like wars, like legislation, like television, like everything. People and life in general don't matter, unless, of course, those people are at least multi-millionaires. I've come to a place where I just accept it as the way things are. I can't reverse it or stop it or do anything about it but accept and go on, like ugly in the city and a forty-foot bank of alien plant life. I used to cherish the indignation of the young—it hadn't oughta be that way and I'm here to do something about it! I can't even pretend to recycle anymore or care what anyone thinks of it. I know, it's the law.

I sit here watching the snowfall, glad it's not the freezing rain and sleet the weather prophets predicted for us. I like to believe that everything else will turn out better than predicted. I remember what a wise friend told me, "Patience wins."

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