Reading a Winter Landscape
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 05:40PM The amount of snow and the frequency with which it is accumulating is causing everyone around these parts to marvel. Or grouse, or despair, or rejoice--depending on what it is a person has to do and when. You see, we don't usually get this much snow. Oh, we get dumped on with big storms from time to time, but it usually happens all at once and then it melts and doesn't come back.
This year is sure different.
I have felt all the attending emotions in turns. But one thing is certain--no matter what I feel about it, the snow is there.
It's weird--the difference between the summer and winter landscape out here. Weird, because there is such a dramatic difference. In the summer, I'm living in a veritable jungle. It is hot and humid and the vegetation forms a thick wall of green all around our property. You can't see my neighbors' houses across the road through the trees. The underbrush in the woods can be impenetrable in places. It feels huge and enclosed at the same time. Huge, because the treelines of the wooded parcels are tall and they border wide pastures. Enclosed, because the treeline is thick and the interior of the woods is dark under the proliferation of leaves.
Winter arrives and the land becomes a palimpsest, with another layer of text revealed by the unlikely hand of a covering of snow. All the downed limbs and curling grapevine and bittersweet form a cursive script across the white board of winter. When I look out across the land I can see all the hills in succession through the black lines of tree trunks. There is the blackberry patch just beyond the stretch of woods behind the drying shed. Funny, it seems so isolated in the summer, but really it's just right there. I can't see the back meadow because of the steepness of our first hill, but I can see the far hilltop of our neighbor to the south's land. He cut some of the trees two years ago to make pasture for cows and now the bald head of the hill shines against the sky.
The hills curve into one another, like a child's drawing of hills on a flat piece of paper, one hump after another. In the woods, it becomes clear how the water flows through the culverts and why some places are always wet. Bird nests are all of a sudden everywhere, abandoned cones with a dollop of snow on top. I think to come fetch them for a collection, think that I won't forget where they are, but of course I can't find them again once the snow is gone.
Every time it snows, I can see from my upstairs window the ruins of an old barn that lies just across the old township road from the cabin. The big rectangular foundation stones appear out of nowhere. I love the sight. I don't know why. The stones are beautiful. They belong to my neighbor to the north, Dottie. John asked her if he could take some of the stones to use in landscaping on our place. At first she was reluctant. "The deer bed down there," she said. But later on the same day that he asked her, she called and said go ahead. John broke his first tractor hauling just three of the smaller stones over, one at a time with a front loader--the weight of the sandstone testament to why they've lasted as long as they have. The same kind of stones sit under the four corners of our cabin and the red barn. The old bones remain strong. Maybe that's why I love the sight of them so much. They steady me.
In his book, The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and its Peoples, Tim Flannery gives a reason for the marked difference between the seasons on this continent. Climatic changes are greatly magnified in North America because the continent is shaped like an inverted wedge--a wide base deep in the sub-Arctic that narrows to an isthmus just eight degrees north of the equator. The wedge is reinforced by the north-south mountain ranges--the Rockies in the west and the Appalachians in the east-- that help funnel frigid arctic air southward in the winter, and Gulf-warmed tropical air northward in the summer. The hot and cold air masses battle it out as anyone living in Kansas will tell you. I learned from this book that ninety percent of the world's tornadoes occur in North America!
The deciduous forests are also a hallmark of the climatic extremes. They thrive wherever there is a "truly tropical summer followed by a chilling, Arctic winter." (Yup, that's us.) The conifers can't take the summer heat and the broadleaf evergreens can't take the freezing winters. All of that is obvious, I guess, to anyone with a sixth grade science education, but I never thought about the whole continent in this way before. I never thought about being tucked into the horn of a trumpet before, at the mercy, or creation, of how the wind blows.
Flannery says that the trumpet "plays two tunes." The first is the seasonal variation, and the second is a longer note "played out over geological time, shifting the continent from greenhouse to icehouse modes." Small changes in the global climate are magnified in North America until glaciers and sheets of ice appear...or, who knows what else with how the climate is changing these days. To know that the continent I live on has this tendancy is a little unsettling. Not that anyone will be in good shape as the Earth continues to warm.
I am always a little befuddled when people scoff at global warming because we had a cooler than normal summer last year, and we're having record snowfall now. Climate change is a better name for what's happening, since it doesn't mislead people into thinking that it is only going to get hot. I must confess to being one of those people who secretly wish that it would get hotter--because I prefer being warm. I know that's silly. I know it doesn't take into account the gravity of the situation. But I am looking forward to our "truly tropical summer" and hope it gets here real soon.
Ah, but the snow, the snow is still here. There it is, out my window, blowing and swirling and accumulating. I can't see my boots anymore.
Alas, there is nothing to do but read the text before me, even as I dream of summer stories in my head.
