(Inspired by the photograph Cold Storage by Richard C. Isner in the collections of The Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, Virginia)
The Mariners’ Museum holds vaults of the past:
freezer units, refrigerated room, cold cabinets
climate-controlled, time-controlled. Inside live photographs
and negatives, glass plates, a snowy past
that scarcely exists for us any longer in Virginia,
January after January just this edge of spring.
The cold room holds the past captive, snowy scenes
from the 1930s when this museum was new. Dreams rise like ghosts:
all those past winters, laughter captured on faces
in photographs, sealed from the world in vaults
where few see them, except for the rare exhibit.
Cold Storage by Richard C. Isner first met my gaze
in the By the Sea photography show in 2006:
a single point in time like a pin, allowing travelers to move backward,
forward, stepping through the glass frame to find
what has been, what will be. Who we are.
In Isner’s cold world, the snowy boats are horses to carry us back
into the past. Stand here in the gallery gazing long enough,
while other visitors drift away. Wait, watching until your eyes water,
until the boats slowly drift. You startle when they clink together
with that dull anchor echoing—keening like winter:
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up to our world.
I can hear them already. An ache stretches my heart
as I step through the glass, into this whitening world,
where boats thump each other lightly
with the hollow echo of wood, of metal.
They knock in their corral, slowing, circles smaller
as each flake falls, intricate patterns that build silence
in layers of soft white powder. The long echo of a loon
cuts through the muffling snow, drowning sounds of my world.
Winter boats float under fluffy blankets of snow that was once rain,
embraced by slush thickening to ice below, by the lake-turned-snow above,
sheltered here from the endless drift toward the river, the bay, the farther sea.
These slow boats dream of going out on the lake in summer—
and of the parties they witnessed in winters past,
sleigh rides and figure skating. Rounding the curve of the bridge,
ruddy checked, smiling, a woman rides the long-gone bridle trail,
bundled in a fur muff, coat, winter hat, 1930s-style
defense against the cold. I’ve seen her smiling
from crisp, clear photos dating back to the museum’s opening.
She chuckles about how the horse had its way,
how you could learn a lot about a fellow creature just by seeing
where it wanted to go. She’s stroking the horse’s neck
and feeding him apples from one leather-gloved hand,
harness bells jingling in the snow—in this frozen past,
this liminal world that lives in silver prints.
How much I’d love a breath of winter now.
My brother’s family and I often went sledding
by the museum’s Lions Bridge—but it’s been two years
since it snowed enough. Last winter, only flurries.
Each year it’s warmer by the coast, scarcely ever dropping below fifty,
sometimes rising above eighty even in January. The hot, humid summers
were torture even when we first moved here from northwestern New York state
over thirty years ago. I worry how long I can survive each year’s greater heat,
even if sea levels and hurricanes don’t swallow my house.
My heart longs for upstate New York with its beautiful snows,
That blanketing quiet. A promise my child’s heart
never realized was this fragile.
I look into Cold Storage and find respite, calm, the promise of peace
despite encroaching sea. I stand inside this photograph, time stopped
and cold, snow-light in captured winters, the kind that make up
our Christmas legends, though we seldom see them now—
or even their photographs, trapped inside acid-free sleeves and metal drawers
in a room nearly as cold as the winter they shared. These phantoms
vie for life, jostling in my brain for a space I’ll willingly cede them.
Things have changed for our fragile world: less snow, worse air,
species dying, rising seas, a frightening future of scarcity and inequity.
These photos are a time machine, but time is trapped—
we can visit, but it only lives in artificially refrigerated confines,
despite memories still snow-sharp and ice-clear, as cold to the touch
as these vaults. Are our hopes chained up like these snowed-in boats,
unable to live beyond careful climate control?
Or can we turn back the clock on ecological
destruction? Our time’s not frozen yet.
Before we’re sealed in the past—let’s find out.
—
Adele Gardner (they/them) has a poetry collection, Muse Mansion, forthcoming from San Francisco Bay Press; another, Halloween Hearts, released by Jackanapes Press; and over 500 stories, poems, art, and articles published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, American Arts Quarterly, The Cape Rock, and more. Twelve poems won or placed in the Poetry Society of Virginia Awards, Rhysling Award, and Balticon Poetry Contest. They received their MA in English Literature from Old Dominion University, and MLIS from Florida State University.
