Waning Winter

It’s three degrees down in the hole this morning but it could be the beginning of the end.  The forecast calls for a high of 37, the first above freezing temperature in weeks, and more of the same fills the 10-day.  Successive days with frigid temps are important in an ecological sense.  Life in our part of the world has adapted to deep cold and so it plays a role in everything from insect control to seed germination.  And genuine cold has a way of bonding us together even as we demonstrate independence.  Bonafide winters weave their way into our culture, get preserved in our paintings and the music and poetry we write.

Goodbye, sweet cold.

You leave with blessings untold

And memories to hold.

In the days ahead we’ll watch as roadsides of white are reduced to dirt splattered piles of slush.  Ice on the river will break apart in rising waters, pristine powder blanketing woodlands will become blotched mosaics of grey and white.  The ski trail will turn to mush.

Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue

'Cause you know, winter, I’ll always  love you

I really hate to see you go

You know I love the snow

Don't pass me by, don't make me cry*

Our furnace puked last night so this morning we joined a lot of Texans who are still without heat. It’s not a code red, the furnace only runs briefly on the coldest of nights after the warmth from the wood stove has waned.  There is a simplicity and reliability in a wood stove that is rare today: give it a chimney, feed it some wood, it warms.  There are no relays or computer chips, no external power requirements, and few moving parts. It just performs, and most delightfully.

It’s no fun to be cold

But worse to be hot 

Cold can be reconciled with clothes

But even with none

Hot cannot

Our driveway is on an uphill slope to the county road.  With frigid cold and a good snowpack there is suitable traction.  But as thaw comes the packed snow becomes a sheet of ice covered with a film of trickling water.  There is no standing on it, let alone driving, and we become stranded until further notice.

The snow grows thin

In an icy interim

While the world awaits 

Beyond our gate

We are stranded without skates

We skied today, early, while the track was solid and the glide long and smooth.  We moved leisurely, locking in the scene and memories of the season, marveling at the still fresh mounds of white hummocks at the creek edge, the vegetation laced with frozen mist, the smattering of animal tracks.  We took it all in, as if paying respects to a dying friend who lived not long enough.  In places, the ski track held a glare of ice from yesterday’s sunshine, and such was the case on the only downhill run on our loop.  Our skis sounded like Olympic luges as we quickly reached speeds threatening our capabilities and control grew marginal.  We remained vertical but not stylish.  It’s good there were no onlookers. 

In the spruce patch we found remains of a red shouldered hawk which had been dispatched by a great horned owl.  It was in the precise location where we had found one a few years ago during a similarly satisfying winter.  All the evidence was there: the headless carcass, the feathers strewn about, the meat picked cleanly away by something clearly lacking teeth.  We’ve had a pair of owls and a pair of red shoulders in the area for a while, but last night there was a disturbance, an interruption, and a magnificent energy transfer from one key predator to another.  

It occurred to me, out there breathing air delivered fresh from the arctic via the polar vortex, that I might inhale a bit of argon or some component of the atmosphere that had passed through the lungs of a polar bear or musk ox, and in that way was connected to the occupants of a wild and desolate place far away.  Is that the fragrance of windswept frozen tundra I detect?  And when I touch the ice on a frozen Spring Creek am I not, in that instant, tangibly linked to every great ocean and ice sheet on earth, touching the shores of every continent, traveling all the great rivers, meandering up tributaries to their trickling origins? How connected it all is, how obvious a minor disturbance affects the whole.

There once was a bear in the arctic

And the warming there made it cathartic

So we shared some argon

Found connection to build on

And together sought war against Exxon

*Credit Ringo Starr