Snow/tracing paper
The snow that fell during the night is exerting its hegemony. Emergency removal work is underway in the parts and workings of the city perceived as the most important, but not here. The snow is like a tracing paper laid out over an old crumpled drawing. A blank promise of another interpretation.
A snow plough is slowly moving past on the main road. The plough’s rotating beacons project monochrome orange on an otherwise grey-scale world. The plough is heading somewhere else. The sky is black and will not turn cobalt for a while. The snow reflects any faint light there is, keeping the world visible. The area is calm, except for some commuters trying to free their cars from snow or walking in slow motion through the fallen precipitation, in their efforts to catch the early train.
The soles of the commuters’ shoes don’t hit the concrete pavement. Feet wade through the fresh snow. It creaks when the snow is compacted under the soles and the snowflakes break and rub against each other. The world sounds different from yesterday morning. Billions of tiny hexagonal water crystals, all different, beautiful, stacked irregularly with air in between, are filtering the sound waves. Car doors opening and closing sound duller. The snow removes the harshness from the sounds, even from the scraping of the snow plough on the main road. The background noise of the city, and of the infrastructure serving it, is gone. Sounds are easier to distinguish. Close by sounds are relatively louder than last morning. A couple of birds in a bush are singing.
Details have vanished, the world has lost the resolution of a working drawing. Only the outlines are there, the building volumes, the crowns of the trees, the topography. The graphics on the street are covered, compositions of lines, some in infinite loops, to be adhered to by every citizen under threat of reprisal. The insignificant, but tangible, border of the kerb is also hidden. Eyes cannot any longer decipher where street becomes pavement, parking turns to park, pathway to lawn, playground to flower bed.
The commuters, the newspaper delivery man, the few already walking their dogs, are all trying their best to act precisely as yesterday. The rules of engagement with the material world have been taught so intensely that they have become a permanent part of the consciousness. Walk on the paved path. Obey the kerb. Drive along the lines. Movement is mostly following someone else’s plan, made long ago. But some people slip. Walk beside the pavement. Stumble on the kerb. Make the turn too wide and end up on the wrong side of the street. All mishaps are quickly corrected.
Borders are covered. Movement is no longer directed by physical details. The tracing paper is laid out. It is blank.
Everyone is trying their best to act as if everything is the same as yesterday.
In the park, and further into the cemetery, few have set foot since the snowfall. The snow is smoothly covering almost everything. As morning turns to day, the number of footprints crossing the snow increases. A movement diagram is beginning to be laid out on the tracing paper, a diagram of trying to move like any other day. Some paved pathways are used frequently, some not at all. The footprints show directions. A closer inspection leads to loose assumptions about demographics. The distribution of foot sizes and types of shoes tells a story, so do the brand names moulded into the soles and now embossed in the snow. A pair of Air Jordan 6.
The movement diagram has got prints other than from feet. Rabbits move with little concern for human borders. At one spot it looks like there has been a rabbit congregation, but you can’t tell if the rabbits were there simultaneously; time is only vaguely a part of this diagram. The rabbit tracks run along an imperceptible logic, but they have a definite pattern, a weight, the tracks are not a random criss-crossing on every available surface. Tracks from a pair of magpies playfully jumping around investigating the snowy world intersects the rabbit congregation. Or maybe they are crow tracks. A fox has been strutting diagonally across the big lawn, looking for rabbits, or more likely for food more easily caught in the dumpsters behind the buildings on the other side.
As days pass, an increasing number of tracks run along each other, cross and overlap. Many overlapping tracks become a path, turns normative, feet tread on the already trodden. Some of the paved pathways hiding underneath the snow continue to have no tracks on the surface at all. Only when a print is on top of another does it become clear in what order two parallel tracks were made. It remains unknown if the track making creatures were there within seconds of one another, or within hours, or days. Are they companions, is one following the other, is it the same person with different shoes? The tracing paper gets filled with information and narratives, but its creative potential is still unexplored. The exception is the nursery school’s afternoon in the park: Tens of thousands of small footprints, tracks zigzagging, snow angels, snow wrestling, snow fortresses, snow sculptures, snow fooling around. No respect for old borders, but possibly constituting new ones. Those traces are really messing up the diagram.
When spring comes the tracing paper is forgotten, if ever it was part of any consciousness. On branches of blossoming trees, new birds sing different songs. In the park there is a dirt pathway that wasn’t there before. Back when the snow covered the area, a plough left the paving and took a tour on the lawn. In a winding loop it scraped away the snow and, along with it, the grass underneath. It might have been the result of a joyous understanding of the tracing paper, but it was probably a mistake. It is the only trace left.
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Snow/tracing paper is also posted in Swedish.
This text has previously been published in Swedish in Tidskriften Stad 3, 2013, ISSN: 2001–631X, and in Magasinet KOTE 4, 2014, ISSN: 1893–8132, in German in Der Architekt 2, 2014, ISSN: 0003–875X, and in English and Danish in Tid & Rum, Arkitektens forlag, 2012, ISBN: 9788774074168.
The text was awarded second prize in the architectural competition Time and Space 2012; a competition in writing about architecture.
