The melting of Ted Turner's Lawn

The snow begins to fall. First coming in light flakes and patches, only slightly obscuring the view of nightriders and street side windows. But before long it falls in chunks of soft ice peppering down as fast as rain. The warm streets and rooftops remain safe for the moment being, but icy and brittle porch patios and exposed tree branches begin to feel the weight of the now heavy snowfall. If it was day we could see the clear air become misty and white, but it is not. It is night. And all we can see is the narrow expanse of Ted Turners front porch light into the windy and raging storm. But this too is only for a second. Because it isn’t too long before he slams shut the wide mahogany door only after he’s seen for himself how cold and powdery it really is outside, only after the intruding wind has stung his red fatty face for the first time, and his feet are burning with cold.

In the morning there is a slow grey dawn. Schools everywhere have been cancelled, and the falling and awful collection of snow has kept on until this point. Outside the temperature remains well below zero as the first early birding child steps out into snow that is- well, how about that? - It’s up to his knee. Two and one half feet, thirty light and soft inches of this sugar snow have fallen overnight. The mothers tell their children to pack their legs tight with socks and thin sweats, for the deep and malleable snow is sure to get in their pants somehow, each awkward kick or lifted foot scooping up another cup or so of snow in their matte black rubber boot, and that snow slowly melting into water cold as ice, and that water trickling down to sock through their child’s three woollen sock layers.

Dry oak and elm logs burn in fire places all around, giving off that fine musky smell in this cold January winter: a heat not artificial at all, only the slow, searing combustion of ionized carbon and oxygen. Snow unlucky enough to have collected on the many family stores of winter logs are brought inside into the burning warmth of the house, they decrystallize and slowly melt away, or at least some begin too. Others are placed strategically and distinctly into the twisting red flames of the very fire, their pain and death heard only by those chilled children standing close by, soggy and shaking in melted snow, through the last high sizzles and cries of the snow turned water.

By dinnertime there is no one left roaming the streets. The snowmen have been built, the snowball battles have been fought, and the electric generators have been filled with gas. The last wind blew away with last night’s storm, birds nest silently in their nests, all cats and dogs have been moved into the many houses and garages for the night to dry. Everything is quiet, or so it would seem. But be sure to look deeper, directly below the tender surface of the snow that hasn’t yet been disturbed, and you will find something short and tragic, something that has kept on. . . .

Each snowflake is unique. A child could tell you this fact, but what they could not tell you is the unique story of each one of those snowflakes. Think. What other beautiful and sometimes annoying creature is so blatantly unique? Every snowflake is it’s own creature, maturing through adolescents on the long and solemn fall down, settling into die by the time the next younger layer has fallen.

It is only a small part we will get to see, but it is an almost cliché one among the life and death, each day, of billions of snowflakes. They leave no written records of past civilizations, no great book of knowledge; they can only melt to be reborn, by chance, into another equally ignorant and clueless snowflake in the future. We see one-fourth square inch of a snow thirty inches deep. It seems small, yes, but within this small rectangular prism of frozen and crystallized ice we can also see the rise and fall of a civilization.

At the beginning there was only ten, the first surviving ten, able to overcome the lethal warmth of the ground and live on until the final days of sun. They named one king. They called his, a rough translation, Rainmaker. Rainmaker declared himself king, and at that exact moment another flake fell, his name was Tiberius, young and fit flake, who hadn’t been injured by the pressing heat of the ground like those he laid on. The other flakes thought Rainmaker to be a profit, as more and more flakes fell, making there little mound the most powerful in the entire known kingdom.

Believe it or not, but snowflakes do eat food. It falls in the air with them. Call them powders. The first fell when the first ten flakes were weak, and Rainmaker had just called himself king, thus promoting what would become a suicidal believe in his followers. This became a good and prosperous time for his people, powder fell plenty and they’re enough to go around. More and more flakes fell, and those flakes were welcomed under the good and trusting reign of Rainmaker. And then the height of their great little snow mound reached one foot.

One foot of snow above them put stress on the older levels, which saw these new flakes not as welcome contributors, but as a nuisance. Tiberius spoke for the older classes to Rainmaker. But Rainmaker said that was the burden of the older classes, and without it everything would collapse. Tiberius began to see Rainmaker as an unfit and out dated old flake, and staged a revolution to kill him and his nine other followers, and then promoted himself king. Once in his thrown he found a big challenge before him, as more and more flakes were falling by the hour, and we were up to eighteen inches. So he asked his science advisor to come up with a solution. And the advisor told him to try and arrange the flakes in stacks of and equal amount of legs. So Tiberius did this and all six legged flakes got on another flake with six legs, hoping to relief some of the pressure gathering on the bottom. It didn’t work. Many were crushed instantly because each individual faces the weight of an entire race of snowflakes, a pressure no snow could live up to. Tiberius and the scientist were killed in their own plan.

And a new plan came forth, voted on by the entire body of flakes, which had now reached it’s final height of thirty inches. It called for all races of snow flakes to move together in such a way that the pressure was exerted not so much in the snowflakes, bit in the many brown blades of grass below them. This worked, and there was comfort and food for all. Eventually more laws had to be made, some snowflakes were raping and killing others, and that wasn’t good so they put the snow flakes into the pool of melted water of all the others before them.

This worked for a while. But certain groups became unhappy. Some groups said decisions should be left up to the individual, and not up to a majority. They said the denser, older bottom half was out of touch with the younger, fresher snowflakes. They were given a seat in congress to shut them up and that was that for a while. Two days later the sun came out and melted a top layer of snow. It was unspeakably awful. Reforms and research was done to see how to stop this natural phenomenon, and an answer was found. Powders turned out to have magical temperature holding properties, and could absorb the heat of the sun without melting or anything. The snowflakes warmed up, yes, but these magical powders made it to where they would never melt, no matter how hot it got.

But things soon boiled over in a whole other way. A group of radicals took over the senate and state police and military because they believed the majority of the younger half now was ruining old and cherished values of a superior race. The radicals told the youngsters that of they’d just stay over on their own side of the mound, there would be no war. But the youngsters saw injustice on the other side, and declared and all out war on the bottom half. The snowflakes could only kill another by killing themselves, so it was only a matter of what side had more flakes.

And as the war waged on, the mound got shorter. The people outside though the snow was melting, but no. The flakes were devouring and killing each other for political reasons, from the inside out. The last battling flakes noticed not the baking sun on their backs, that they were the last of a comical and satirical civilization. But their hatred and intolerance for one another was to great, and they themselves, not the sun or fate, they had the powers and resources to over come both of those, was the final and genocide end to another great race of snowflakes.