The world did not end on January 1, 2000, nor did America's obsession with the end times. Those with faith, and those "of no faith," will continue searching for life's ultimate closure. Perhaps the closest I've come to seeing into the end was by Lake Michigan's shore nearly four years ago. "Some say the world will end with fire," wrote a great and agonized New England poet, "others say with ice." You would think that a resident of the Athens of America would know something about ice. But I had to go to Chicago to see what a world ending in ice might be like.

While 1,100 of my closest friends and I attended InterVarsity's conference, Following Christ/Shaping Our World, held in the Chicago Hilton and Towers overlooking Lake Michigan, we experienced a little snowfall. Actually, it was the blizzard of a New Englander's nightmares, the kind you talk about around the wood stove in Vermont country stores for decades to come. I had heard of Midwestern blizzards from my mother, who went to school in Chicago, but these stories I regarded as legends from the distant past that should be treated with some skepticism. I began to become a true believer when I woke up one morning to find the snow travelling horizontally past my fourteenth-floor window, with about twelve feet of visibility — though I'm probably overestimating. That was cool, but even better was the tiny, thread-like stream of snow that was inexplicably sifting through the multiple panes of glass and barriers of weather stripping to slowly accumulate in the corner of the windowsill.

It went on like that all day, though I and all the other conference delegates, safe in the climate-controlled Hilton's womb, really had no idea what it was like outside. We would occasionally meet people on the elevators who were quite literally snow-encrusted, who looked as if they had just walked across town, or maybe run the Iditarod without all those dogs getting in the way. "Wow," we would say, "you must have had a long walk."

"Just two blocks," they would chatter through blue lips. "We needed to get here to the health club to work out."

After the last lecture on the last evening, a group of us ventured onto the streets. The blizzard had ended, and we found ourselves like conquerors in an empty city, the enemy having fled. A brief trip into Grant Park and powder snow up to our thigh tops convinced us to stick to Michigan Avenue. It wasn't as if there were traffic, anyway. Nothing moved on the streets but snowplows.

And were there ever snowplows. Ranks of snowplows rumbled down Michigan Avenue in line abreast, throwing out plumes of snow like destroyers charging through Atlantic waves. At all the intersections miniature front-end loaders cleared away snow from the sidewalks, carved lanes through the built-up drifts, and hacked away at drifts deposited in parking spaces. With the precision of swing-dancers they would wheel about and dump their frozen cargo into the outstretched buckets of giant front-end loaders, who in turn deposited their loads in waiting dump trucks, trucks of overwhelming size, which as they filled would peel off to join the convoys of similarly burdened trucks making their way through the city to dump their load into the lake, and then return to make the circle again and again. Block by block, sidewalk by sidewalk, the City of Chicago reclaimed itself from Nature.

We made our way down to the shore of the lake and looked out past the enfolding arms of the breakwater to Lake Michigan. Behind us was the most perfect skyline ever built, both dark and bright as it rose austerely above the snow of Grant Park, the low-lying clouds rose-pale with the reflected city light. The lake was covered with a snow pack, fading into an indistinct horizon; directly in front of us along the pier the pack had broken away, leaving a lane of bleach-clear water. Off to the right on a point of land the dome of the Adler Planetarium, crowned with a red light blinking in fitful pulse, perched over the snow-covered lake like the arctic laboratory of a mad scientist. We seemed to stand on the edge of the polar sea, staring out in a vain attempt to see farthest north, or infinity itself. Rosy night sky and white lake met somewhere out beyond our vision.

We stood silently for a long while, and then turned away to the lights of the city and the voices of friends. 

L. Penseur, a resident of Cambridge, Mass., is a regular contributor to the stunningly good magazine Re:generation Quarterly, where this essay originally appeared in slightly different form. He is a little miffed that Following Christ 2002 will be held in the somewhat-less-likely-to-be-snowbound city of Atlanta.