On Snowy Nights

This year, On Snowy Nights also marks a moment worth noting. Jim recently received his third, First Place Award of Excellence in Explanatory Journalism from the Nevada Press Foundation for an article written for RANGE Magazine, a long-time colleague in independent Western journalism.

The piece—“Oh Idiocy, Thy Name Is Government”—was recognized not for rhetoric, but for the clarity, evidence, and discipline required to explain complex public-land and forestry issues without distortion or agenda.

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On Snowy Nights...

On Snowy Nights reflects what sets Jim’s writing apart: the ability to move between the technical and the lyrical, to ground complex realities in language that is human, accessible, and quietly instructive. It is an essay that trusts the reader to feel first—and understand more deeply
because of it.

May this season grant you a snowy night: a pause, a breath, and the clarity that comes with both.

~ Julia

On snowy nights back in the 1940s, my Father often took me for sleigh rides after dinner. He seemed ten feet tall back then, trudging out ahead of me in the darkness, his gloved hand reaching back to grip my sled’s towrope.

More than 70 years have come and gone since our last ride, but I can still see him there, and I can still hear my sled runners gliding quietly over new fallen snow. He would pull me down the middle of Mission Avenue, past the Parks, the Bottinellis, the Corbells and the Brainards, all the way to Mrs. Fattu’s house at the corner of Mission and Hill.

Glowing Christmas lights strung on eves and down porch railings cast red, green, yellow and blue shadows across snowy yards. Barren maple and mountain ash tree limbs swayed silently in the December evening breeze.

It was so quiet you could hear snow falling through the still night air. Snow banks along shoveled walks seemed like mountains to me. They muffled the gentle sounds of passing cars.

Approaching headlights became retreating taillights, then silence again, broken only by the sound of sled runners, and the steady cadence of my Father’s walk.

I suppose there were other dads out there clutching towropes in the darkness, but I do not see them in my mind’s eye – only my Father, me, and my American Flyer. Now both of them are gone: first my sled, sometime in the 1950s, and then, too soon thereafter, Dad.

As gently as falling snow, he slipped silently into the Darkness on a December night in 1986. And now only memory connects us, and it is I who reaches back for my Father.

On Snowy Nights first appeared on our Evergreen website in December 2014. It will also appear as the Prologue in "My Father's Ashes," a memoir Jim has written about his growing up years in Kellogg, Idaho.

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