Read Online The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels - Free Book Online

knows this. Faith is the promise of what might be. It is the blood brother of hope. Belief is pragmatism in isolation; it is what exists even if the world doesn’t know you’re there and never will. That’s something more like the place I knew.
    *  *  *
    Our igloos lasted till Easter, the packed crust holding its form and the burrows inside abandoned. Eventually, their roofs collapsed or melted through. Rain got to them. Mud and black twigs pushed up from underneath. We kicked at them, resentful of the lost thrill. And then that day came, the day no one around here ever really believes will arrive, a day drunk, stumbling home from late winter, glasses cracked, salt-stained boots kicking the cans of hard times down the storm sewer. Sun and warmth, riding like a white-hatted parasite on the spiny back of a cold breeze, euthanizing the briny, primordial ice clenched to the curb until it bleeds its last.
    For one day in Ohio, we get something whispering low in our ear, something hard to appreciate unless you’ve been through the Delta lows and Alberta clippers. The sun comes with an offer, one we are never sure we deserve. We have waited, we have waited, we have waited, and finally it comes and we have no choice but to accept this, our fate: the discomfort of grace.

THE LAKE EFFECT
    Have you ever seen Lake Erie in the winter? It’s the strangest thing. It freezes, as water will do in places this cold, but it doesn’t freeze flat and calm, like Norwegian fjords or Frostian ponds. It freezes in gnarls of turmoil, as if someone said, “Hey, Great Lake, if you keep twisting your face like that it’ll freeze that wa—”
    And then it does.
    The water gets all heavy and slushy but continues to churn, defiant, dauntless, pissed off, slower and slower, and then, just like that, it loses the fight, froth and waves and swells caught midmotion. I once stood on a wind-whipped Cleveland beach and saw a plastic diaper sticking up from the crust of ice at the edge and wished that the water had been able to churn one final time to save us both—the lake and me—from the unpleasantness. It was ugly as hell and it made me smile.
    *  *  *
    The winter of my sixteenth year, my dad got tickets to a football play-off game in Cleveland, the Browns against the Oakland Raiders. He and my two brothers and I rode up in one of his company’s beat-up surveying vans, all of us bundled against the cold. My dad always bought vehicles with a profound antithesis of style: three-on-the-tree, pie-pan hubcapped, olive-drab tin boxes with a blank plate where the AM radio belonged. Hard vinyl bench seats. No carpet. No ceiling padding. Even with the heat on full blast, the inside of the van felt like a meat locker. The interior was caked with dried mud and smelled strongly of last summer’s mosquito repellent, cut with the sweet lumbery pine of the wooden property stakes that clattered around in the rear. My older brother, Ralph, had tied his orange plastic, kid-size Browns helmet to the top of the van with clothesline. Slapped together on the cheap, we looked like everyone else driving into Cleveland that day.
    There was never any color in the thirty miles of sky between Akron and Cleveland. It was a masterpiece of monochrome. Until you hit the city limits. There, the celestial flatness was spiked by a huge steel-factory smokestack with giant, fantastical flames roaring out its top. It looked exactly like hell and smelled worse. That’s how we knew we were in Cleveland.
    The temperature that day was four degrees; the windchill was thirty-six below. At the time, it was the second-coldest NFL play-off game ever played, which is uncannily correct. When you live in a place like this, you come to understand that we are never first. In anything. Not even misery. The second-most-frigid game in history? Yes. Exactly.
    We parked as close as we could get to the stadium, which stood like some