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I’d been working in the emergency room for about three weeks, I guess. This was in 1973, before the summer ended. With nothing to do on the overnight shift but batch the insurance reports from the daytime shifts, I just started wandering around.
The narrator looks back from an undetermined time to the summer of 1973. Emergency room staff often deal with a large range of serious and life-threatening conditions, such as knife wounds. And yet, as these sentences suggest, life in the emergency room, like the battlefield life of a soldier, can be quiet, even dull, between emergencies. The narrator works the overnight shift with little to do but dull paperwork. He seeks out Georgie and his stolen drugs to alleviate his boredom.
He was right, a gun-blue storm was shaping up. We got out and walked around idiotically. The beautiful chill! That sudden crispness, and the tang of evergreen stabbing us!
As the sun sets after the county fair, the narrator and Georgie are lost. Cold winds begin to blow, and Georgie predicts that it is going to snow. The narrator describes the setting through his drugged senses, conjuring vivid images. The storm clouds have a specific color, gun-blue, a deep gray with hints of blue. The adjective gun-blue also suggests aggressiveness and danger. The narrator mixes sensory experiences. Beautiful is an adjective usually used with sight not temperature. Tang often describes a taste, but evergreen refers to trees, suggesting a smell, instead. The smell of the evergreen trees is so strong the narrator can taste it. Its tang is so sharp, it feels like stabbing.
Or maybe that wasn’t the time it snowed. Maybe it was the time we slept in the truck and I rolled over on the bunnies and flattened them. It doesn’t matter. What’s important for me to remember now is that early the next morning the snow melted off the windshield and the daylight woke me up. A mist covered everything and, with the sunshine, was beginning to grow sharp and strange.
The narrator and Georgie have spent the night in the truck during a snowstorm. But here, the narrator questions his memory. Due to either the passage of time or the influence of drugs, the narrator is unsure of the time and place where the story’s events occurred.
But, he says, those details are not important. What is important is the beauty of the morning. The newly fallen snow is beginning to melt and there is a mist covering everything, making the landscape both “sharp and strange.”
