Into the Blizzard Read Online Free Page A

subways should. An elevated track to South Gatwick. A lot of sky. This is how travel in the future will occur, within a depleted environment. I was the only one not looking at a screen or typing on a smartphone. I punched out my four train tickets from a machine, tickets I’d purchased with a credit card online from Toronto. But it was hard to figure out where and when to get to Salisbury. So I asked a turnstile guard. One train to Clapham Junction, he said, and then turned his hip as if indicating a stopover: a half-hour wait for a Salisbury train. The men a hundred years ago had to ask the same things in this very spot. They received, perhaps, the very same answer.
COMICS
    The soldiers were on their way to train in Salisbury. Politicians and generals thought the broad clay plains were similar to the terrain the men would fight on in France. The weather had been mild and dull, with below-normal rainfall. The turnip crop was poor, and rod salmon fishing on the Don was a failure. But the weather was about to change.
    I bought my first Cornish pasty from a legitimate kiosk that was all black with gold trim and lit with tremendous amounts of electricity. I had spent the night on the plane next to a huge man—we had both bought the extra-legroom seats. I was late boarding because I never line up, and he had already placed a tube of potato chips and a shirt on my seat. He never said a word, but I knew he was English. He was watching football highlights on the screen. He reminded me of Nick Fury, the British comic book character who was always losing his temper and bursting the buttons off his tunic before killing a lot of krauts.
    When I was a kid my grandfather sent us comics from England, wrapped in a roll of butcher’s paper. This was my first mail. I carefully tore off the postage stamps and soaked the scrap in a glass of water overnight. Then I slipped the stamps from the paper and dried them on a windowsill so that I could later insert them, with the lick of a glue hinge, into my stamp collector’s book. And this is what I am doinghere, collecting a gallery of individual scenes that matter to me, into a scrapbook of what I think has survived of an antique war.
    My siblings and I devoured the comics. My grandfather, I knew, had served in the Coldstream Guards and fought in the Second World War. When I was twenty-two and backpacking through Europe and Africa and told my mother I was to see the pyramids, she said, You’re not the first one in the family to go to Egypt. Your grandad was in a tank division. He fought Rommel.
    My mother was sent to Workington as a six-year-old. She was an evacuee because she lived in a shipyard the Luftwaffe might bomb. Rommel, the Desert Fox, was in the comic books my grandfather sent. The British admired him.
    While in Egypt I mailed my mother a letter with a postcard of the pyramids. I rented a camel and was led around the tomb of Chephren. I proceeded down the long hall inside the dark tomb and bent over to enter the room with the king’s sarcophagus. The doorway is intentionally short so you have to bow to Chephren. A friend had given me a chunk of rough labradorite to toss into a corner of the king’s chamber. He wanted to confuse the archaeologists. There was graffiti on the walls here, some of it from Napoleon’s time:
Scoperta da G. Belzoni 2. mar. 1818.
I’ve seen photographs of the Newfoundland Regiment in Egypt, parading around in the same manner as I did. Even theregiment’s doctor, Cluny Macpherson, who invented the gas mask, had his picture taken on board a camel. It was funny to see these photos, though I thought, too, how the comic strips the British created about the war did not have this type of humour. A confusing thing in the comics my grandfather sent was that they had both world wars in one edition. As a kid, the only way I could distinguish the wars was by the shape of the tanks and the structure of the soldiers’ helmets. These black-and-white comic books were a