ENDGAME THE SNOW CAVE

One late December day, while strolling around my mother’s neighborhood in Ferrisburgh, I happened upon a sizeable snowbank. Two six-year-old boys were attacking the crusty mass with ski poles, their focus and drive a thing to admire. “We’re going to put dynamite in these holes so that we can make a bigger hole,” one boy told me, pausing to wipe his runny nose. “We’re going to crawl in and stay there until summer,” the other boy added, his grin spreading from ear to ear and beyond. They returned to their work, mittened hands carefully placing invisible sticks of TNT, and I continued on my way, remembering, a gladness beating in my heart.

You see, no season delighted the childhood me like winter, no pastime like honeycombing the backyard drifts and driveway plow piles with curving tunnels, domed chambers, secret alcoves, claustrophobic-cumcozy nooks, cozy-cum-claustrophobic crannies. Were these subnivean palaces of my youth objectively grand, or did they only seem so to the chief architect, engineer, and builder? Better question: Does it matter? From four to fourteen I felt Vermont’s harshest season as an opportunity, as an invitation to wholly immerse myself in the elements—body, mind, spirit, soul. In a word, I felt wealthy, rich with what Henry Thoreau called “Contact!”

And now? At the ache-when-Iclear-the-walk age of 36? Sure, I’ve dug a few snow caves on mountaineering trips in the Greens and the Whites—I haven’t yet totally lost touch with the unique satisfactions of stuffing oneself beanie first into a smoothsided tube and slumbering as a bear might. But let’s be honest. Over the coming weeks and months, those boys with their imagined explosives would cultivate an intimate relationship with capital-W Winter—a sensuous, tactile relationship with The Thing Itself— while I would probably just potato on the couch watching Seinfeld reruns.

Thus it was decided: Another evening at my mother’s house was in order, but this time, rather than gorge on holiday ham, drain drams of peaty Scotch, and eventually conk out on a soft mattress, I’d allow the inner child of yesteryear to snug himself down inside the outdoors. Mom’s response, when I mentioned this plan, nodding to the pyramidal snowbank at the end of her cul-de-sac, was predictably Momlike: “Remember to keep your nose free, in case of collapse.” Patiently, I explained that the warmth of a properly constructed snow cave—body heat and a candle’s tiny blaze can raise the internal temperature a whopping fifty or more degrees!—was enjoyed only by the fully buried. She shook her head, unconvinced: “At least consider bringing an air horn, that way, if need be, I can come to the rescue with a shovel.”

Ah yes, shovel—that noun which, once gripped, becomes verb. The first task was retrieving a metal one from the garage, the second task was chiseling a starter hole from the pyramid’s consolidated junk-snow, and the third task was accepting, with a huff and a puff, that the inner child had lost some of his yesteryear fitness. Luckily, it wasn’t long before fatigue morphed into a kind of sweaty, meditative trance, a trance that became

. BY LEATH TONINO

gymnastic contortions I’d not known to be physically possible. Honey, I’m home!

Cramped has a nice ring to it, but snug sounds better. The cave, which measured seven feet by four feet by three feet (I could sorta, kinda, slightly sit upright) had to be met on its own spatial terms. After ten minutes of thrashing about in the mute blackness, struggling to un-wedgie my long johns and straighten my discombobulated bedding, I finally got comfy—and not merely comfy-for-an-entombment comfy, but genuinely at ease, relaxed. Here, again, was that exhausted peace, that burrower’s bliss. The jolly, tingly happiness of keeping a special secret, a secret nobody in the universe knows save for one wee human being, zipped the length of my slightly crooked spine. Held by the cave, I was that secret, safely sequestered.

ever more entrancing the deeper I dug. Laboring on hands and knees, on belly and back, the so-called “real world” slipped away. No cell phones rang, no e-mails appeared in the Inbox, no money came or went from the wallet. I’m tempted to describe the meditation of burrowing, the exhausted peace it engenders, as quasi-religious: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Snow Cave, and the Word was Snow Cave.

By dusk my dwelling, if not bearworthy, was at least roomy enough to admit a foam Thermarest pad, a synthetic North Face mummy bag, and, of course, a trio of tea candles, each perched atop its own chunky pedestal of ice. Everything neat and tidy, I joined my mother for a quick dinner of—what else?—leftover ham and Scotch, then headed back out, fullbellied and pleasantly buzzed.

Thirteen degrees. Sharp wind from the northwest. A few stars strewn across immense darkness. I squirmed through my entry tunnel, into a darker darkness, and did a sequence of

With a flick of the lighter, I touched each candle to life. The flames, despite the night’s rushing, neighborhoodencompassing wind, did not waver. Heck, that wind, as far as I was concerned, had altogether ceased to exist. For a spell, nothing existed but the glistening walls, the crystal ceiling, the shadows cast by my arm as I raised an airplane bottle of single malt— wouldn’t you bring one along?—for a nightcap nip. Nothing but the easy rhythm of my own breathing and the toastiness of my toes. Nothing but the thought that ten or so hours hence I would be birthed from the womb of the snowbank, born anew into bright sunshine and blue sky. And that my mother would have the coffee going. And that with caffeine surging through my veins I would stroll the stiffness from my skeleton, find those TNT boys, see how they were progressing, ask if they needed help.

Finally, a follow-up airplane bottle polished off and my candles almost spent, this spell of contentment came apart at the edge of dreams. So it goes. The magician of sleep, the magician named capital-W Winter, cast a new spell over me—and just like that I was falling as a snowflake, landing as snow upon snow upon snow.

Leath Tonino is a contributig editor to Vermont Sports. A version of this essay originally appeared in Yankee