Angle of Repose I

I wrote this on a piece of bark on Cathy’s birthday many years ago, in 1982. Without realizing it, I wrote another poem on Cathy’s birthday eleven years later in 1993 with the same title on the same subject, which only proves how redundant poets, and how tolerant their wives.

I wrote a third poem on the same subject with the same title for Cathy’s birthday in 2001.

The standard angle of repose for snow is around 38 degrees, although it can be anything between 0˚ and 90˚, based on the material. Anything steeper than 38˚ and a snow slope will slide, although humid storms could make snow stickier, but also more likely to give way unexpectedly. Judging the angle of a slope is important for backcountry avalanche safety. Scree slides after 32˚.

Wallace Stegner wrote a novel with this title which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972.

I was in the Hunku Valley in Nepal in 1984, which is a giant’s sandbox, filled with zeugen, pedestal rocks, surrounded by large triangles of sand and scree. The trail goes up and down over these pebble barchans. Some are half a mile high. You look right down the scarp slope to the valley below, and the entire slope starts to avalanche. You realize that your footsteps disturb the slant of the talus, and that what begins as a gentle slide can rapidly turn into an inexorable life-or-death plunge. The stones have come to rest at around 37˚, eroded off the two-mile mountains on either side. I don’t understand how the stones become isolated pyramids, rather than just tails, stones slid down and massed against the cliffs, felsenmeer. They must be moraines, shaped by very clever glaciers, or seif dunes, mounded by wind.

Our personal angles of repose depend on how comfortable we feel, which has something to do with how loved we are, how we accept each other, and it is this meaning which the poems discuss.