Walking In Snow
When the forest is thirsty, does it speak to the clouds and the sky? This is what I’m thinking, walking up the mountain in the morning. It’s winter. Cold. Gray. Diluted with old snow. Another season in time.
I am pulled by habit and looking for a little respite, especially from the tragedy of arrogance, stupidity, and cowardice that wrack our leaders. I try to decide if I am a curmudgeon. Decide not. Perhaps a new view through bare branches will help. But it is too cloudy and foggy to see much.
The clouds are formed from droplets, and most droplets need microscopic airborne particles to act as seeds. If a cloud has more seeds and more droplets, then it is brighter. This helps reflect increasing heat due to burning fossil fuels back into the black void above. Some of the particles are from natural sources, like algae, or trees, and others like sulfur dioxide and carbon are from burning those fossil fuels. The ones that come from trees are called terpenes. They form the blue haze that we sometimes see over forests… the Great Smoky mountains for instance.
My mind wanders. Everything in nature has a purpose. We now know trees can communicate in primitive fashion through the chemistry of their root systems. So I’m asking myself, why do trees emit these particles at all?
The trail is frozen, icy and rough, so I add Cat Tracks to my boots. Twenty-five years ago, I would be wearing snow shoes. Now the earth is changing.
When I reach the top, there are clouds. I am pelted with sleet. Little round pellets smaller than cookie sprinkles. I look up and say a small prayer of gratitude to the universe, then smile at the rotten weather. On the way down, I see an old set of wolf tracks that I missed on the way up while lost in thought.
The wind veers, then dies in the afternoon. Now it’s snowing. Big beautiful flakes and fast. By the time I hit the east side of the Cascade River, there are six new inches on the ground. Wolves like the snow. It’s easier to hunt because their big feet serve as snow shoes allowing them to go after floundering prey.
There is a reason that “blanket” and “snow” are used together. Sound travels miles in the cold, but now the world is quiet, pure, and timeless. There are no tracks. One can smell the snow: a faint tincture of ions, moisture, pine, and cold. I taste the big flakes. Trying to discern the particles on my tongue. Did the forest ask for snow? I want to believe this. It exhaled, and the clouds answered with snow the forest needs.
A tannin-colored river flows beneath frozen sculptured waterfalls. Light fades in the late afternoon. Monochromatic with black balsam. The only color from blades of khaki-colored grass peeking above small drifts in a forest meadow.
Wandering in the snow may not seem comfortable to most. For me it is a way to disengage with one world and engage with another more ancient. Walking through the snow, I am at peace.
My destination is an old cedar higher up on the river bank. It has been here since before the country was founded. When I reach it, I say hello, and unglove my hand to stroke its crenelated bark. Though I am suspect of my nativistic views, I wonder how have we disconnected so much from the earth.
I ask the cedar for a few bows, then find a small balsam nearby. Its canopy dusts the white blanket, but inside, at the base, is an eddy in the snow. I remove a few branches and weave them into walls, push snow against them, then place the cedar to form a bed. A junco stands watch in a neighboring poplar. I imagine she is counting the soft, slow fall of flakes.
This is the world that sustains me. All that we depend on lives between the short space of sky above the mountain and my nest beneath the balsam. The air, the breath of the forest, the tiny particles around which form each single snowflake, the moisture for the trees, moss, and ferns. It is all connected. I don’t pretend to understand it. I can grieve the changing world, and still cherish it, and revel in my own wonder.
I crawl into my nest. Then into my bivy sack. Time for a short winter’s nap. To dream of the wolf, and the junco counting flakes. I am grateful. It’s been a good day. Now I am simply a particle at rest, exhaled from the forest’s breath. Tomorrow I am fierce.
Thanks for all you do!
We are all connected. Savor the Earth!’™
– Hobie,
L. Hobart Stocking
651–357–0110
SkyWaterEarth.com
hobart@skywaterearth.com
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