West Side Canvas: A Strange Sight on a Snowy Night on the Upper West Side

Snow Angels
By Robert Beck

One of my favorite poems is The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service. It begins:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold

His 1907 story was set in the Arctic cold, which “stabbed like an icy nail” and froze your eyelashes to your face.

It was a freezing night on a New York State mountaintop in 1970 when I encountered a group of campers gathered around a large bonfire, one of whom stood and recited the poem to the crackle and snap of logs and a background of embers rising into a crystal black night. That experience forever linked Service’s tale to the hard side of winter for me, and a half-century later, I recall that man describing the “Night on the marge of Lake Lebarge,” bundled in his parka in front of the flames, just like I was standing there.

The Upper West Side is not some remote Northern Territory, but it has its nasty hibernal weather and a few unusual stories of its own. This February, I looked out an apartment window at night into a winter storm. The snow showed in spheres around the street-lamps, and soft white pools of light spread underneath. There were few footprints and hardly any people outside. Traffic had thinned. Sanitation trucks rumbled past, scraping the streets and throwing salt. It was coming up on midnight.

Two tall, thin men caught my eye across the street because they were walking like it wasn’t a cold, wet snowfall, almost strolling, with their hands in their pockets. One of the men was wearing a dark jacket and hat, and the other was singular in his white long-sleeve shirt and suspenders—no coat or hat—like he had just walked out of a wedding reception or was trying to find one. They had no umbrellas, no hoods, and no gloves. The two strode with an odd lack of urgency through the stone gates into Central Park along the path until they came to the first open plot of lawn and, without hesitation, turned and walked to the middle. They got down, side-by-side, and began to make snow angels on the still virgin cover. There was no hurry, no quickly getting it done and shaking because it was soaking frigid and one guy is just wearing a shirt. They lay full-back, heads solid on the ground as if looking at the stars, moving their arms and legs methodically in unison until satisfied their objective had been rightly accomplished. Then they gave each other a hand up and walked back to the path, continuing under the overpass, disappearing into the swirl, a strange thing done.

* * *

See more of Robert Beck’s work and visit his UWS studio at www.robertbeck.net. Let him know if you have a connection to an archetypical UWS place or event that would make a good West Side Canvas subject. Thank you!

Note: Before Robert Beck started West Side Canvas, his essays and paintings were featured in Weekend Column. See Robert Beck’s earlier columns here and here.

Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here. And you can Support the Rag here.