Author Archives: Sandy Stott

The other day I read a scientific report from the ends of the earth. Here, comfortable in earth’s midsection, I pressed myself to imagine the pole to my north. This is a favorite game. When given choice, I walk north by inclination; I am always walking toward winter, spending time when I can on the elevated islands of the farther north that are the White Mountains. In a day, I can make it a good way into Labrador on my favored Franconia Ridge. And when I awaken from the nap I customarily take on Lafayette’s summit, for fleeting seconds, I’m often unsure where I am. Then, as I sit facing north, I think my way in that direction, into the land and sea of always-ice.

For a long time, the compound, “always-ice,” seemed a given to me. There would always be ice. If I walked far enough north, I could always find its extreme. Now, report after report says that this extreme is in jeopardy, that the far latitudes are subject to our creeping middle. More and more, the sea is opening; more and more Greenland is sluicing into it. Imagined ice is melting like an ice tray put mistakenly in the refrigerator rather than the freezer.

The report, a report card on the year 2012 from NOAA (our National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) had this to say

• http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2012/20121205_arcticreportcard.html 

The Arctic region continued to break records in 2012—among them the loss of summer sea ice, spring snow cover, and melting of the Greenland ice sheet. This was true even though air temperatures in the Arctic were unremarkable relative to the last decade, according to a new report released today.

“The Arctic is changing in both predictable and unpredictable ways, so we must expect surprises,” said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator, during a press briefing at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco, Calif. “The Arctic is an extremely sensitive part of the world and with the warming scientists have observed, we see the results with less snow and sea ice, greater ice sheet melt and changing vegetation.”

None of this is news to anyone paying attention to the science of our climate. Activist and author Bill McKibben sounded an alarm more than two decades ago with The End of Nature and he continues his work today. What got me thinking after reading this report, however, was a new clarity about my dependence on extremes. I, like many, live a middling life, one might call it temperate – I get up daily, go to my work as a teacher, where I try to both roil and calm adolescent waters; much of the time I live in a mild world. But I need the example of extremes to be sure I am alive and alert. I need to measure myself in response to them, to consider the questions they ask of me, whether it’s climbing into extreme weather, considering extreme writing, or imagining other lives. Extremes keep complacency from rooting too deeply in me. I depend on that polar world even if I only visit its local islands in the New Hampshire sky.

Shaken by the vanishing of extremes on which I depend, I’m rereading Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986) to understand just how important those dreams are. And I’m thinking also about Henry Thoreau who lived in the middle and thought and sometimes acted on the edge.

December comes, the dark month on the heels of November’s lightedness; it’s the month when we string trees with winking reminders, when we hang reflecting globes from branches, anything to shed or catch a little light. And as I walk out along the river or into the woods, I find myself wondering about all the life that’s gone to ground, that rests or sleeps as I walk by.

In Estabrook Woods, I pause along the trail that passes Stump Pond, and through the leafless trees, on its far side, I see the gray hump of the longstanding beaver lodge; I wonder if a next generation still lives there, and, if they do, what today’s like under that woody dome.

All of this puts me in mind of Donald Griffin, prominent 20th-century scientist and Lexington resident, who died a decade or so ago. One day, while ambling in these woods, I’d come across the unusual sight of a car backed down close to the edge of Stump Pond. I’d broken off from my path to have a look. There, rooting around in the back of his station wagon, I’d found an older man with clear eyes and a bristling brush cut of gray hair.

“I bet you wonder what I’m doing,” he said.
“Um, yes,” I answered. “I’ve never seen a car here.”
“Ah,” he said. “I’ve gotten too old to lug all my gear in here, so the school [Harvard University owns and manages the core of these woods as research field station] let’s me drive this far in for my research. I bet you want to know what that research is,” he said.
“Well, yes,” I answered.
“Take a look,” said Griffin, gesturing to the small screen of a compact laptop, and he pressed return. A small beaver appeared on the screen, and it was clear he was inside some woody structure. Before the beaver, there was a dark patch of water, and suddenly from it came a much larger beaver.
“That’s the mother,” said Griffin. “Now, watch this.” First, there was a moment of what seemed to be disagreement between the two beavers; then, without pause, the mother seized the little beaver with both forepaws, lifted him and ducked him under the water, holding him there for long seconds. When she lifted the small beaver out, he squalled and pawed the air in protest. Mother was having none of that and plunged her child back under water; I counted to ten and whispered,     “Whoa, how long’s she going to keep him under?”
“Pretty remarkable, eh?” said Griffin. “Must be some sort of training going on here.”

Griffin was an early crosser-of-scientific lines, venturing into the territory of animal consciousness when most of his stiff-minded peers saw such speculation as Science’s equivalent to literature’s pathetic fallacy, wherein supposedly pathetic writers see all sorts of evidence for human awareness in natural phenomena. Consciousness, the ability to think about your thought and life, to mull over its past and plan for its future, was, for most scientists, deemed an exclusively human province. “Perhaps not,” said Griffin, and here in his late 80s he was still filming and analyzing animals for deeper signs of this consciousness and so their nearer kinship with us.

“Kind of makes you think there’s a lot going on under that dome, don’t you think?” said Griffin, pointing to the gray humped mass of a beaver lodge across the pond.
“How’d you get those pictures?” I asked, and Griffin’s face wrinkled with a smile; he settled in to what seemed to be a favorite story. The vertical jut of what turned out to be a pole rose from the lodge, and Griffin told me that it was a pipe he’d inserted carefully into the lodge; down the pipe’s throat he’d slid an infrared camera, and, after a short period of acclimation, he’d noticed that the beavers paid the pipe and camera no attention. Here then, to Griffin’s knowledge, were the first unsullied, recorded actions of beavers inside their lodge; here was raw footage that might cast more light on his central question.

“Well, that sure looks like the mother’s thought out what she’s doing,” I said straightening from watching the screen and feeling my cooled muscles protest.

A few minutes later, I was on my way back to town and its knit of work and thought, but burred to me were Griffin’s images and story.

Today, as I walk along, whether the domes I see are heads or beaver lodges or simply bumps of earth, I’m guessing that even in dark December there is a lot going on inside. Memory’s mind is also a lodge into which we like to peer, looking for signs of its order and our intentions.

In late November, night’s grip on the sky eases early. But along the rivers and ponds, beneath their banks, cold darkness often holds on, and if you are of a mind to find it, skim ice spreads its first hands – sometimes you can see it form even while you linger, your back and high head in the sun, your feet in the still gloom. What is it about watching the world turn solid that transfixes us?

Here’s what Henry Thoreau thought one late fall day when the ice arrived: “The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water…” (Housewarming, Walden)

For me following Henry Thoreau’s fascination through these few pages of “Housewarming” is akin to returning to childhood. Then, I kept close eye on the nearby pond I walked by on my way to school. Rabbits Pond was an unremarkable scrap of water not far from the middle of town, but like all water it had also its romance – its few small fish in the summer, its hours of skating in the winter. And, like all water, it drew occasional visitors – ducks and geese passing through, the odd heron; once, story has it, the pond was even the scene into which an irate future movie star named Bogart pitched his dormitory supervisor from the nearby independent school.

When the coming winter’s ice first formed, we would gather beside the pond and begin our calculations – when would it bear us? When could we lace on our skates and glide over this new world? The thin blades of our skates would provide the final test, but as children impatient to cast off into this season, we had earlier ones. And here we mimicked Walden’s “child,” Henry Thoreau.

Though fond of food, I was among the slightest, and so, after some tossed rocks had skipped pingingly off the pond’s new surface, I would lie down on the shore with my hands outstretched on the ice. And like a seal pup I would begin to wiggle and paddle forward, feeling the ice flex, wondering wondering. Usually, it held. And a yard or so from shore I would lie there looking across the smooth expanse and its perfect glassiness. As the cold seeped up through my thin jacket, I would look down into the “parlor of the fishes” and wonder some more. Sometimes, when the light was right, I’d see another me looking up. A few days later, if all was right with the weather world, we would be skating and whooping over the pond.

First ice still brings back being a kid, still summons the excitement of the little worlds that will soon be open to you, even as others are sealed off for the winter.

We’ve not reached it yet, that moment that Henry Thoreau waited for, when the new ice will bear a body’s weight, just. Or at least we’ve not had the cold night that thickened the ice enough for me to risk a dousing with some majority of confidence. But I’m checking, and the week’s wintry forecast says that soon, I’ll be able to lie down at water’s edge and slide over its flexing skin for a yard or so. And then I’ll look down.