Snow falls on Lakeview Avenue where in childhood I awake to bells ringing on a four-hitch team of draft horses taking short choppy steps as the beasts snort and shake their heads with noses steaming in the chill and draw a wide-scraping snowplow while balls of manure fall and their smell stings and enriches the morning air.
Snow falls past evening streetlamps lighted all over town, lamps lighted up Swede Hill where snow coats the bare white oaks and maples and woody open spaces of Reservoir Park and nearby falls on Bush Elementary School and pastes its windows white as flurries fill its low-slung wide entrance two feet deep.
The lamplight down North Main glows golden amber against flakes that strangle the lamps out Fluvanna to Bemus Point. The golf course at Moon Brook Country Club slopes into an eighteen-hole dim midnight pasture while the wind cries Fore! and no one hears. The airport shuts down with three small planes still outdoors, their wings deep-frosted, no room left in the hangar; the flight lines stretch lost and lightless while a far deer driven by hunger crosses in the dark.
Snow buries Stanley and Sarita Weeks in Lake View Cemetery. Each far apart frozen tombstone throughout the graveyard bears a deep white granny cap, the burial ground crushed by earth-piercing darkness despite white fluff on the whole great garden of plots from Buffalo Street to Marvin Parkway.
Snow whips and whites out my seventh-grade rooms at Washington Junior High, and across town covers the ice of Lincoln Junior High's closed and unlighted skating rink as two strong-minded teens finish a last few laps in the dark and then unlace their skates and, driven off by late-night bluster deepening, abandon the rink to the dark. Downward at JHS the blizzard blankets empty benches as the stadium's great hoarse mouth sucks down the wind. Snow falls on Love School at the bottom of Eighth Street hill where green-eyed Peggy Cassidy in a butter-yellow room teaches fifth graders and takes me as a suitor before the sky falls on her again and still again until she dies in a mental ward.
Snow falls all night on the Prendergast Library and buries the roofs of the Jamestown Sun and nearby old Post-Journal buildings. Flakes flood the traffic light at Third and Main and flood the four horses that jangle warning bells as they draw the plow that clears the curb by First National Bank. Flakes mantle the palace ghosts of lost or torn down movie houses, the Palace on Third, the Winter Garden on North Main, the Roosevelt in Brooklyn Square.
Snow falls all down East Second and slaps down on your icy and wearying slip, slide, and slog up unplowed and unshoveled Winsor Street hill's thick mountainous steeps as you pass East Sixth and then Bush, and then steep Seventh Street branching upward, then Orchard and then Peach until-if you last-topping out with heart thudding and breath pumping at Falconer Street.
Snow falls ever deeper as Allen Street rises from Institute and climbs against the night blinding it from curb to curb. Snow falls far off on the danger and rage whipping the impassable slants of Hunt Road, not a car to be seen heading homeward, just darkness dipping and rising on darkness.
Snow falls on Jones Hill and high against the night on Jamestown General Hospital and it falls on Pine Street and soft-lighted tall windows of The Town Club. It feathers vastly the dark white Chadakoin Valley from The Armory to Steele and Harrison and Chandler Streets and crusts the river itself with ice and covers the train tracks two feet under, though the Empire State Express doesn't stop here anymore.
Snow falls on the home plate and far fences of the old Falconer ball park where phantoms of the late Jamestown Falcons face all comers and still crack out three-baggers and home runs in the night. Snow falls up Fairmount to Lakewood and over the vast arctic tundra of the frozen lake from the Boatlanding to Stow and across to Bemus, and up at Chautauqua snow sweeps Bestor Plaza and over its great green Florida Fountain and fills the night lanes and drowns the closed summer houses and hotel porches and sweeps in darkness by the bell tower silent but for the wind.
This passage is from Donald Newlove's forthcoming book ''In Search of Lost Jamestown.''