The Committee

“Not bad” David thought as he stepped out of Jane’s place and into the cold. Now he could tell people he’d eaten woodchuck. He felt comfortable despite the temperature, whatever it was. The sky was clear and brilliant blue. He stood on the front porch steps and stared at the big sycamore. He was tempted to take off his gloves and sketch it right then. Its trunk had to be seven feet at the base. About ten feet off the ground the trunk forked into twin three foot thick trunks which quickly disappeared into a riot of snow laden branches and boughs.

David trudged through hip deep snow to stand by the syacmore, looked straight up into the tangle of tree and snow. He searched for the slightest trace of blue sky. Possibly there were bits of it visible but the glare of the snow made it painful to focus on the canopy.

He went back to his Range Rover and started it up, sat and surveyed the farm while the engine warmed. He looked back at the sycamore and noticed a bird, some sort of hawk or falcon, perched on the lowest bough. The bird had white superciliary lines and beautiful tail banding – alternating half inches of battleship gray and brown. David wondered what sort of hawk it was, made a mental note to look it up, the sort of mental note he made several times a day and almost always forgot about.

The forecast said the thaw was coming. After over seven weeks of subzero, including today, the temperature was going to rise to the mid-40’s by tomorrow afternoon. The jet stream was retreating and warmer air was moving up from the south, simple as that. Sure worked for him, since the Arts Festival was just four days off. The cold weather was not the problem, it was a matter of clearing the roads. Some streets in town had been snowed under for months, parked cars completely buried in drifts up to ten feet high. Snowplows just made those streets worse, throwing ice, gravel, and slush on top of the drifts, carving out an opening barely one car wide to drive through.

The road into town was much better but it took a confident driver to handle the hilly stretches. After so many years of the same route the winter conditions didn’t faze David, not with the Range Rover. However he was antsy about deer. Most years there were close calls, four times more than close. His first winter there a buck ran in front of his BMW. He could still picture it, kind of like a video game. One moment there were just the woods and the snow, the next the deer bounded out of nowhere, then the sound of the impact. The deer looked peaceful in midair, still traveling in the same direction. David stopped the car, walked back, but the creature was dead. He threw up. He cried for a moment. When he told people about it he usually left that part out.

About a mile south of Susquehanna was a drumlin that divided the town from the unspoiled countryside. David reached the top of the drumlin and took in the view of the town and river valley below him. There were no vehicles in the rear view mirror so he coasted along the level hilltop and down the mile long incline into the bottomland along DeRuyter Creek. He crossed the creek and took the shortcut around the village to campus. He was 40 minutes late to the steering committee meeting. With any luck it would be over before he got there.

Everything that mattered had already been taken care of. Pygmy Dyke saw to that. For the last five years Pygmy had been in charge. David let her run the meetings and make the decisions. David only made suggestions if he was asked, took every pain not to undercut Pygmy’s authority. He regarded her as his protégé.

Pygmy saw things rather differently, regarded David as a has been and herself as a self-made woman. David had sought her out and convinced her to join the faculty. She found him easy enough to work with but that was it. Not her style, certainly not her type. They shared an enthusiasm for the annual arts festival, supported each other to survive the dreadful committee meetings.

Besides David and Pygmy the steering committee included three local business people with pretensions of caring for art and culture. They only did it so they could brag to their friends. Paul Giardino was a real estate developer who fancied that he was one of the richest men in Upstate New York, perhaps even the richest. Cornelia Cabot Holmes was in the business of spending the vast fortune she inherited. As hard as she worked at that it managed to appreciate at a faster rate. Her idea of real estate development was to zone as much of it forever wild as she could. Paul and Cornelia had been at war from the moment they met, each spending wildly to promote their respective agendas and thwart the other’s. Paul Giardino might be the richest man in Upstate but Cornelia Cabot Holmes was richer.

Veronica Verploenck rounded out the five on that year’s committee. Veronica was the only townie on the committee, perhaps the only townie willing to serve on it. Hoot Davies had served on it the previous year. That was one of the very few points that David insisted on with Pygmy – there had to be someone from Suquehanna on the committee. That was fine with Pygmy. They couldn’t be more clueless than Paul or Cornelia.

David pulled into his assigned parking spot. There was no way to tell where the parking spots were since the signs were all buried in snow but his was right next to the front door of the Art School. He went to his office and checked his mail and messages before heading to the meeting room. He knocked on the meeting room door before entering. Pygmy was at the marker board, going through some talking points. David motioned to her to continue and took a seat, nodded hello at the others.

He sat there for an hour, paying no attention to the meeting. He doodled woodchucks on a paper pad and imagined perspectives of the sycamore tree in the different seasons. When the meeting adjourned he shook hands with the others and begged off from joining them for lunch. Indeed there was a lot of business for him to attend to.

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