Heave, Ho

It’s like the baby alien, bursting out of John Hurt’s abdomen – smiling for the cameras, then high-tailing it for the bowels of the Nostromo.
I’m talking about frost heaves.
Frost heaves are just the symptom though, of a deeper, and more disturbing phenomena.
No, I’m just kidding.
Frost heaves are actually alien cocoons, deposited by visitors from outer space billions of years ago, and timed to hatch just prior to their next visit: high-tech locusts, of sorts.
Nah, I’m just kidding again.
Frost heaves are really just the Earth’s version of adolescent acne. Our Earth is younger than it looks, and is actually going through puberty right now. Because of our recent economic woes, we can’t afford the eight billion dollars worth of Pro-Activ that it would take to be acne free.
Today, as I drove along Halfway Pond Road, rocking back and forth and up and down as if I was on a small ship on a stormy sea, I started to see ‘frost heaves’ in everything, from my personal life, to the universe.
There are scientists who believe that the universe began with a big frost heave: first there was nothingness, then the nothingness started to swell, and bubble, crack and distend and – in a blinding flash of light..
Others - with less education, believe that our universe was a kind of small car cruising down an alternative route in an alternative universe, when the pavement cracked open, and a pothole as big and deep as a black hole, swallowed that fuel-efficient universe entirely.
Certain religious fundamentalists hold that the world could have been created in six days, but frost heaves delayed the delivery of certain animals.
Still others believe that frost heaves are like Beano, held every Wednesday night in the basement of the French-American Club in Jay, Maine.
I actually met a guy named Jo, from Jay, who said he was the state record holder for heaving frosts. I think he might have meant heaving frosties, which is less impressive by far, but which proves (I think) that we have nothing to fear from frost heaves. If Jo from Jay in Maine – where they claim to have invented the Frost Heave, isn’t worried, why should we be?
Personally, I love the frost heave. It reminds me of, well me.
I was born in a little wooden shack, on a lake in northern Minnesota. My mother was an avid ice-fisherperson and, though she was in her eighth month, off she went to Lake Wherethehellarewe to get her weekly quota of Northern Pike. Overnight the weather changed, and when she woke up she was adrift on a large ice flow. Maybe it was the weather, but I was born that same day. My father used fishing line to yank me out. They were going to rescue us, but several days later the weather changed again and the lake was frozen over and - after a few more days of ice fishing, we drove the Winnebago home over some pretty rough roads.
Was that believable?
No? Well actually I was born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, on land, on a seasonably warm late spring day. But I really do relate to frost heaves. My head is filled with bumps and cracks and evidence of unseasonable weather. My face was once pocked with pustules and now bears the tiny scars of a tumultuous teenage-hood. And I have that flushed, phlegmatic look that seems to portend future eruptions.
You too?
I think we all carry the seasons around with us: the warm and the cold, the wet and the dry, the confident and the neurotic, the plausible and the fantastic. I think we all recognize – even though we may not publicly admit it, that the seasons of our souls are not nearly as predictable, as consistent, as the seasons of the Earth – however much we’d like them to be. So to see the roads erupting – like an adolescent’s once unblemished skin, is comforting. To see the ground bubble and burst through the tar is to realize that our own neuroses and uneven-ness, are as natural and normal as the allegedly more predictable seasons we pass through.
The lesson of frost heaves might be that, no matter how hard we try to pave over it, the core of our being is defiantly irregular, consistently unpredictable.
We are all little baby aliens, chewing through the ice, pushing through the tar, anxious for the winter to end, so we can head to the beach and heave a few frosties.