Gone in the Winter

As summer turns to autumn, I see the shades of winter looming in the distance.

“At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream.”

― E.B. White, Essays of E.B. White

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I woke up early this morning to find the sky filled with grey clouds and a light rain falling on my world. I rose with the day to drive to Annapolis. A friend told me her daughter Elise was there for a tennis tournament at the Naval Academy this weekend and asked if I would go cheer her on, so she would have at least one fan in the stands.

I made the forty-minute drive alone in the misty rain, noting that the trees along Route 50 moved gently as the first cold winds of autumn flowed through their branches, here and there casting an amber leaf to the ground. When I arrived at the Academy tennis complex, I walked upstairs to the upper level, where young women from various east coast schools gathered and waited for the first matches of the day. Elise was already on the courts below me, preparing to play a doubles match. I looked on from above and waved as she drew close, wishing her good luck against her rivals.

The match lasted about an hour, and as Elise played I remembered that she is at the start of her second year, exactly where Enzo would be, if he were still alive. Indeed, my friend would sometimes joke that the two of them would get married one day, and that memory flowed through my mind as I watched Elise and her fellow athletes around me revel in their youth, friendship, and life.

When their match was over, I met Elise and her partner, discussed the outcome — close but lost in a tie-breaker — and then thanked her when she told me how sorry she was about what happened to Enzo. She added that she had no idea when she would play next, so it made no sense for me to stay. I wished her luck with the rest of the tournament and left her to her friends.

Soon, I was once again alone in the car I had bought when Enzo started college. It was to be a car for our future road trips and adventures, and I drove it whenever I went to see him at Maryland. He always wanted to play his music in the car, so together we would drive and talk about sports and school, as we listened to his favorite songs, new and old. It is a small car, so we sat close, father and son enjoying each other’s company for a few moments I never failed to cherish. Perhaps because those trips with Enzo meant so much to me, when I am alone in the car, feeling both his presence and absence, I am often overcome with the enormity of my loss. When he was killed, I contemplated selling the car, because seeing it in the garage was too painful for me. In fact, when I finally drove it for the first time after his death I happened to look down at the speedometer at one point and noticed that I was driving 120 miles per hour. I had not felt the speed. I was so lost in the pain of driving without him for the first time that perhaps some part of me wanted to die on the road as he did.

Today, as I drove home I stared into the distance, the brooding masses overhead making the world look frigid and lifeless. I traveled in silence at first, listening to the wind move past me, but at one moment I turned on the stereo just as I noticed a flock of birds flying south in formation across the horizon. The first song that came on is called “Gone in the Winter,” and as I heard its words all I could think about was Enzo’s absence. The song tells the story of someone who has disappeared in the midst of winter, leaving no trace of who he was for someone who seems to have loved him. The person gone is now out of reach, free from pain, and lost in the winds that cross above the seas. In the song, the missing soul warns the listener that he will look for him everywhere but will never find the person he has lost. In consolation, the voice promises to send a song that will let the other know the one who left is still out there, hiding somewhere “down in the salty blue.”

I contemplated the words as I watched the birds disappear into the distance. When the song was over, I played it again. And again. In fact, I played it over and over all the way home, taking in each word, a tear or two falling now and then, imagining that it was a song Enzo sent me on this cold, lonely morning. When I reached my house, I searched for the lyrics to the song on the internet. Amazingly, in an online universe of music, the words to the song are nowhere to be found.

It is dusk now and darkness falls over me. For the past hour, I have tried my best to decode the song’s lyrics, wishing to comprehend what they said to me on my solitary drive. As I put the final line in place below, I looked up and noticed that October arrived today. I can feel the cool air of autumn embrace the world around us. Soon, the cold of winter will come and find me, alone in my car probably, listening for that distant song and dreaming of the past.

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I fly free, I fly free, I fly free.

I fly so free,

Over the buildings, out past the cornfields.

The wind and the rain and the ice clouds — they cut through me.

I carry on. I’ll leave no traces.

—

Gone in the winter, gone in the winter:

Burned out and snowblind, asleep on the breeze.

You will remember, me and the winter,

But you’ll never touch me, now I’m gone.

—

Into the clouds, into the air,

I’ll find a place to hide somewhere, down in the salty blue.

Over the deeps, I’ll fly, cut free.

You’ll know I’m there but never see;

I’ll send a song for you.

—

Gone in the winter, gone in the winter:

Burned out and snowblind, asleep on the breeze.

You will remember, me and the winter,

But you’ll never touch me, now I’m gone.

But you’ll never hurt me, now I’m gone.

—

Into the clouds, into the air,

I’ll find a place to hide somewhere, down in the salty blue.

Over the deeps, I’ll fly, cut free.

You’ll know I’m there but never see;

I’ll send a song for you.

—

You’ll hear a child within the breeze,

Moving the grass, in a haze of trees,

Running around your mind.

Moving or still or in the car,

There in the church or a shopping mall,

You’ll turn and look behind.

—

Gone in the winter, free at last.

Gone in the winter, free at last.

Gone in the winter light.

—

“Gone in the Winter” by David Scott