Friday, January 24, 2014; 2:00 pm
I have on three pairs of pants, three shirts, two jackets, a scarf, gloves. It's twelve degrees. And sunny and a little bit windy and beautiful.
I've never been to my spot in the snow. I love it.
Today, I have decided to focus on detail. The snow gives me no choice. It shows me everything. Paw prints and helicopter leaves, feathers and birds' feet.
It's so bright I can barely see the screen when I try to take a picture. The snow's albedo (I always accidentally say "libido") is so high.
The snow makes me think that most murders take place in the north in late spring or summer. That's a total guess, but I can't imagine anyone getting away with anything when there's snow on the ground. It's like the earth's natural ink pad. It records, like nature's Daily News, all that has happened, everyone who's passed through. Then, the sun comes by, the dirty culprit, and erases the evidence as if it never existed in the first place. The snow makes us honest.
I read John Haines's "Snow" for the first time the day after visiting my nature spot, and I love what he has to say about snow: "It is a shadow language, spoken by things that have gone by and will come again. The same text has been written there for thousands of years, though I was not here, and will not be here in winters to come, to read it. These seemingly random ways, these paths, these beds, these footprints, these hard, round pellets in the snow: they all have meaning."
The walk to my spot was fascinating today. I felt let in on the forest's gossip. I saw what at first appeared to be dog prints nearby, but they actually went over the first frozen stream I pass and continued one way without coming back.
I don't think a human would let his or her dog do this--dangerous for a domestic animal, daily movement for a wild one. Maybe they were the prints of a raccoon or a fox. I don't know animal tracks well enough to be sure. I saw bird prints on the rock next to it and I heard myself gasp.
I hadn't expected such delicateness.
Amazingly, the top of the stream was frozen but I saw the water moving underneath one part.
The stream was alive under the hard exterior, like blood through the solid casing of a vein. How many instances in our life do we experience this, secret goings-on that exist beneath the surface? A rage-filled heart behind kind words. Cancer coursing through a body that on the outside looks just fine.
When I got to my rock, I had to brush off snow, about two inches, to even sit on it.
It felt kind of like a violation, like I should have just let it be.
I cannot hear the stream today. It must be frozen through. I hear the faint cars, some intermittent bird calls. The rocks and twigs that I am used to seeing in full now only poke through the snow. Because the snow covers almost everything, there is just an outline, a rough sketch of some of what exists here. The rest is completely covered and out of view, hidden until the sun comes by to reveal it again.
My thumbs are frozen. My writing is slowing and so are my thoughts. I feel like an idiot for wearing only one pair of socks.
I saw two very puffed-out birds, sparrow-types, on a tree limb and it got me thinking about rhythms. When we think of hibernation, we often think of bears--beings of the natural world who exist on seasonal rhythms. But I think humans experience an element of hibernation in cold climates and seasons, too. We also stay inside like a bear in a den, eating comfort foods like hearty soups and grainy breads and wearing puffier, layered clothing that we use to insulate us as the extra fur and feathers do for the animals.
Not as many animals hibernate as I initially thought. Squirrels, rabbits and birds, for example, do not fully hibernate, though their methods for gathering foods differ from those they use during the warmer seasons. I was doing some research into this and learned that, aside from bears, the following seven animals are some of the most common hibernators: some varieties of bats, box turtles, bumblebees, garter snakes, hedgehogs, snails, and raccoons. Each has their own way of preparing for the winter and their own specific rituals for settling into the cold. I wonder if they forget in early summer that it will once again get cold. Do they have it in the back of their minds all year long that they will need to prepare again, that this abundance of food and warmth won't last forever? Or does it come to them anew each year as the seasons start to change to cold, a switch going off in their bodies like the first time, each time?
The stairs near my spot have on them many human footprints, a variety of different soles, going in both directions. I wonder how long they have been there and what the purpose of their owners was. Just a stroll though the woods? A hard, heart-pounding run? Or perhaps a photo session, like it was for the couple and photographer I saw coming out of the forest as I was coming in earlier.
Today, I decided the new perspective on my spot for this week would be from above. I climbed the gradual incline to the bridge above my spot and observed it from up high.
My rock looked less heroic than it does when I am standing right next to it. But I got a better scope for where it exists within all that is around it, my small refuge in the vast expanse of the rest of the winding forest.
I could not feel my toes or my fingers anymore. I prepared my pack to sprint back to my car through the snow, taking a different, faster view on all that was around me. I tried to keep in mind the words a Chilean friend shared with me the other day. He had been telling me a story about his time living in Duluth.
"You must like the cold, huh?" I teased him, realizing he had also now chosen to live in frigid Pittsburgh.
"I don't mind it, you know. The weather shouldn't affect your happiness. If you are happy, you are happy anywhere. That's the problem. We get too attached to things."
Like warm weather and a time when we didn't have to put on three jackets just to go for a walk outside.
Easier said than done, but he makes a good point, one that I have been trying to embody this week as I venture into the ten-degree weather. I try to separate myself from the winter in a way, to try to exist within, but separate than, to maintain balance. Maybe that's denial, though. I'm not sure. Does surviving the cold truly build character? Are warm-weather folk simply wimps or are they on to something?
I'm a Chicago girl at heart, the cold is a part of who I am. The chilled steeliness of middle-of-the-night air is branded on the insides of my nose. The metallic, clear stillness of below-zero nights on the front lawn, staring up at the glaring-bright moon while taking out the garbage cans are etched into my brain and my fingers. But I have spent the past six winters in North Carolina, Ghana, or milder Virginia and my bones somehow lost their armor against the bitter cold. I have to re-adapt, if that is even possible, and it's proving to be a challenge. Maybe it's because before I knew that winters could be warm, I didn't know to hope for heat. The cold was the only thing I knew. When you don't know what you could have, what you do have is always enough.
It's something I think about often--how our natural environments affect us, where we choose to live and why. Why do people live in Minnesota where it can be easily in the negative degrees for most of the winter? Tradition? Roots? Toughness? What makes someone able to tolerate heat or cold more easily than others? Why do some people suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (which can also be a symptom of summer, not just winter) while others don't at all? Is it all in the mind or is something physiological happening to us? What does the feng shui of the natural world do to our souls and thoughts and well-being? Despite our furnaces and A/C systems, parkas and sun umbrellas--despite how hard we try not to be--aren't we just as subject to the earth's natural rhythms as the bear in the cave?
As I ran back to my car, I thought about the color white, the blanket that surrounded me. Albedo, derived from Latin, means "whiteness". We associate whiteness with purity and goodness and clarity. When light enters the snow, most of it is reflected or scattered by air and water molecules, giving it its color. But what if the snow came down red, like blood or fire or passion? What if it came down black like volcano ash or coal or evil? What about green, like grass or algae or life? What about snow being white makes it so special, so magical, so calming (when it's not coming down in a blizzard, but even then...)? To me, it is an equalizer for the earth. It creates a blank slate for all to tread, burrow or escape. We must all leave our tracks in its domain. The snow makes the earth more primal, more serene and vast like it might have felt before we humans filled it up with our inventions and brilliance and destruction.
When I was almost back to my car, I noticed these final animals prints running up or down a tilting tree.
Who do these prints belong to? Will they be here next week when I come visit again? Or will the sun have come through strongly enough already, granting life to but also, in the case of the snowy evidence, destroying, all that it passes over?
Maggie
P.S. For more (much more) insight into the lives and patterns of bears, read Kathy Ayres's Bear Season. Kathy teaches fiction and children's lit in the MFA program at Chatham. We heard her read last week from Bear Season, essays about her experience studying and growing attached to the black bear that lives in her backyard (or is it Kathy who lives in the bear's backyard?) in the Berkshires. It was a great reading and I am definitely going to be reading the entire book. You should, too. :)
I have on three pairs of pants, three shirts, two jackets, a scarf, gloves. It's twelve degrees. And sunny and a little bit windy and beautiful.
I've never been to my spot in the snow. I love it.
Today, I have decided to focus on detail. The snow gives me no choice. It shows me everything. Paw prints and helicopter leaves, feathers and birds' feet.
 |
| this frozen pipe reminded me of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas... |
The snow makes me think that most murders take place in the north in late spring or summer. That's a total guess, but I can't imagine anyone getting away with anything when there's snow on the ground. It's like the earth's natural ink pad. It records, like nature's Daily News, all that has happened, everyone who's passed through. Then, the sun comes by, the dirty culprit, and erases the evidence as if it never existed in the first place. The snow makes us honest.
I read John Haines's "Snow" for the first time the day after visiting my nature spot, and I love what he has to say about snow: "It is a shadow language, spoken by things that have gone by and will come again. The same text has been written there for thousands of years, though I was not here, and will not be here in winters to come, to read it. These seemingly random ways, these paths, these beds, these footprints, these hard, round pellets in the snow: they all have meaning."
The walk to my spot was fascinating today. I felt let in on the forest's gossip. I saw what at first appeared to be dog prints nearby, but they actually went over the first frozen stream I pass and continued one way without coming back.
I don't think a human would let his or her dog do this--dangerous for a domestic animal, daily movement for a wild one. Maybe they were the prints of a raccoon or a fox. I don't know animal tracks well enough to be sure. I saw bird prints on the rock next to it and I heard myself gasp.
I hadn't expected such delicateness.
Amazingly, the top of the stream was frozen but I saw the water moving underneath one part.
(in case the embedded version doesn't work: click here)
The stream was alive under the hard exterior, like blood through the solid casing of a vein. How many instances in our life do we experience this, secret goings-on that exist beneath the surface? A rage-filled heart behind kind words. Cancer coursing through a body that on the outside looks just fine.
 |
| tree shadows. am I a giant or are these itty, bitty branches poking through the snow? |
 |
| a more fluid stream |
As I walked toward my rock, the snow continued to tell me more stories of the human walkers and bikers and the drops of water coming off the bridge above me, like some organic Jackson Pollack:
 |
| a small feather in a human footprint |
It felt kind of like a violation, like I should have just let it be.
I cannot hear the stream today. It must be frozen through. I hear the faint cars, some intermittent bird calls. The rocks and twigs that I am used to seeing in full now only poke through the snow. Because the snow covers almost everything, there is just an outline, a rough sketch of some of what exists here. The rest is completely covered and out of view, hidden until the sun comes by to reveal it again.
My thumbs are frozen. My writing is slowing and so are my thoughts. I feel like an idiot for wearing only one pair of socks.
I saw two very puffed-out birds, sparrow-types, on a tree limb and it got me thinking about rhythms. When we think of hibernation, we often think of bears--beings of the natural world who exist on seasonal rhythms. But I think humans experience an element of hibernation in cold climates and seasons, too. We also stay inside like a bear in a den, eating comfort foods like hearty soups and grainy breads and wearing puffier, layered clothing that we use to insulate us as the extra fur and feathers do for the animals.
Not as many animals hibernate as I initially thought. Squirrels, rabbits and birds, for example, do not fully hibernate, though their methods for gathering foods differ from those they use during the warmer seasons. I was doing some research into this and learned that, aside from bears, the following seven animals are some of the most common hibernators: some varieties of bats, box turtles, bumblebees, garter snakes, hedgehogs, snails, and raccoons. Each has their own way of preparing for the winter and their own specific rituals for settling into the cold. I wonder if they forget in early summer that it will once again get cold. Do they have it in the back of their minds all year long that they will need to prepare again, that this abundance of food and warmth won't last forever? Or does it come to them anew each year as the seasons start to change to cold, a switch going off in their bodies like the first time, each time?
The stairs near my spot have on them many human footprints, a variety of different soles, going in both directions. I wonder how long they have been there and what the purpose of their owners was. Just a stroll though the woods? A hard, heart-pounding run? Or perhaps a photo session, like it was for the couple and photographer I saw coming out of the forest as I was coming in earlier.
Today, I decided the new perspective on my spot for this week would be from above. I climbed the gradual incline to the bridge above my spot and observed it from up high.
My rock looked less heroic than it does when I am standing right next to it. But I got a better scope for where it exists within all that is around it, my small refuge in the vast expanse of the rest of the winding forest.
"You must like the cold, huh?" I teased him, realizing he had also now chosen to live in frigid Pittsburgh.
"I don't mind it, you know. The weather shouldn't affect your happiness. If you are happy, you are happy anywhere. That's the problem. We get too attached to things."
Like warm weather and a time when we didn't have to put on three jackets just to go for a walk outside.
Easier said than done, but he makes a good point, one that I have been trying to embody this week as I venture into the ten-degree weather. I try to separate myself from the winter in a way, to try to exist within, but separate than, to maintain balance. Maybe that's denial, though. I'm not sure. Does surviving the cold truly build character? Are warm-weather folk simply wimps or are they on to something?
I'm a Chicago girl at heart, the cold is a part of who I am. The chilled steeliness of middle-of-the-night air is branded on the insides of my nose. The metallic, clear stillness of below-zero nights on the front lawn, staring up at the glaring-bright moon while taking out the garbage cans are etched into my brain and my fingers. But I have spent the past six winters in North Carolina, Ghana, or milder Virginia and my bones somehow lost their armor against the bitter cold. I have to re-adapt, if that is even possible, and it's proving to be a challenge. Maybe it's because before I knew that winters could be warm, I didn't know to hope for heat. The cold was the only thing I knew. When you don't know what you could have, what you do have is always enough.
It's something I think about often--how our natural environments affect us, where we choose to live and why. Why do people live in Minnesota where it can be easily in the negative degrees for most of the winter? Tradition? Roots? Toughness? What makes someone able to tolerate heat or cold more easily than others? Why do some people suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (which can also be a symptom of summer, not just winter) while others don't at all? Is it all in the mind or is something physiological happening to us? What does the feng shui of the natural world do to our souls and thoughts and well-being? Despite our furnaces and A/C systems, parkas and sun umbrellas--despite how hard we try not to be--aren't we just as subject to the earth's natural rhythms as the bear in the cave?
As I ran back to my car, I thought about the color white, the blanket that surrounded me. Albedo, derived from Latin, means "whiteness". We associate whiteness with purity and goodness and clarity. When light enters the snow, most of it is reflected or scattered by air and water molecules, giving it its color. But what if the snow came down red, like blood or fire or passion? What if it came down black like volcano ash or coal or evil? What about green, like grass or algae or life? What about snow being white makes it so special, so magical, so calming (when it's not coming down in a blizzard, but even then...)? To me, it is an equalizer for the earth. It creates a blank slate for all to tread, burrow or escape. We must all leave our tracks in its domain. The snow makes the earth more primal, more serene and vast like it might have felt before we humans filled it up with our inventions and brilliance and destruction.
When I was almost back to my car, I noticed these final animals prints running up or down a tilting tree.
Who do these prints belong to? Will they be here next week when I come visit again? Or will the sun have come through strongly enough already, granting life to but also, in the case of the snowy evidence, destroying, all that it passes over?
Maggie
P.S. For more (much more) insight into the lives and patterns of bears, read Kathy Ayres's Bear Season. Kathy teaches fiction and children's lit in the MFA program at Chatham. We heard her read last week from Bear Season, essays about her experience studying and growing attached to the black bear that lives in her backyard (or is it Kathy who lives in the bear's backyard?) in the Berkshires. It was a great reading and I am definitely going to be reading the entire book. You should, too. :)
