Author Archives: Sandy Stott

By Corinne H. Smith

In the “Time is But a Stream” post of December 31, 2013, I wrote about the Susquehanna, my neighborhood river. I included a beautiful photo of it taken by my friend Bob Hollis on the blue-sky afternoon of December 21. Ever since, I’ve continued to look at the river, to think about it, and to consider Thoreau’s metaphors about rivers and eternity and how time flows by and with us. And we, with it.

Then the “polar vortex” hit. When I next peeked at the river from our second-story office window, I saw solid white instead of fluid gray. It had frozen over. Single-digit temperatures had turned this mile-wide liquid stream into a chunky ice-covered meadow. What an amazing sight it had become! And so quickly, too. I could barely stop admiring it. I could barely stop smiling at it. I had to go down to its edge and take a closer look.

Susquehanna River, Jan. 8th, 2014

Of course, the Susquehanna wasn’t completely frozen. Areas of open water lay next to the nearest bridge. And somewhere beneath the ice, a current was still heading for the Chesapeake Bay, fifty miles away. Fish and other critters must still be surviving in its chilly depths. But when I looked downstream, all I could see was the jagged white stripe of a cold and arctic landscape. “Surreal” was a word that came to mind. I almost expected penguins and polar bears to materialize on the horizon.

This wasn’t the first time I had seen changes to a major body of water in winter. On my first-ever visit to Concord, Massachusetts, in December 2000, I found Walden Pond under a seamless layer of snow. If it was truly the “earth’s eye,” as Henry Thoreau considered it, then it had quite a blind or albino gaze that day. I’d also seen a snow-covered Mississippi River separating Illinois from Iowa, during the years when I lived in the Midwest. You had to know where the river was, back then. Otherwise, the space was just as flat and white as the buried cornfields beyond its steep banks.

No, it was ice that capped the Susquehanna this week, not snow. Occasional sunlight sparkled off a myriad of sharp and crusty points. It was as if the roof of a cave had landed upside down in our midst. Or, closer to home: it resembled the shaggy crystals that hang along the sides of a kitchen freezer that hasn’t been defrosted in a while. (I know of what I speak.)

This unusual sight was enough to prompt a few Thoreauvian metaphors and philosophies to swirl in my head: how unforeseen challenges can suddenly change the consistencies of our lives; or how time can seem to be suspended, or even stopped, when we least expect it. And yet we all go on; we have no choice but to somehow “go with the flow/floe,” and pause when it pauses. Yes, the river was even more beautiful and interesting and thought provoking to me than it had been before. I felt as if it were putting on this special show for me alone.

Then, a few days later, the local media took notice. The state of the Susquehanna was a top story on the six o’clock news. Was the ice dangerous? How were the ice chunks moving downstream? Would they cause flooding when the air temperature rose and the ice began to melt and move? Were any of the river-edge residents in the adjacent cities and towns in jeopardy? Authorities were said to be “watching it.” Well, so was I. Join the club, I thought. Where were you when the first ice patch materialized?

While their concerns were no doubt valid, they bothered me. It seemed narrow-minded and nearly rude to focus on the hazards of the ice, and not the marvelous beauty of it all. As is too often the case, the newsfolk brought their negative brand of reality into my icy fantasy world. The Susquehanna may flood, or it may not. And we’ll just have to deal with what comes with our now-warmer temperatures. Either way, Thoreau was right. What a piece of wonder a river is!

Susquehanna River, January 12, 2014

In my 22nd year, I spent an end-of-the-road winter in a wood-heated house with no insulation or plumbing. Well, there was a hand pump, but its leathers froze when true cold arrived, and, that winter, true cold never left my midstate New Hampshire valley beneath the mountain I saw as a friend. So, I burned my semi-dry wood, melted snow and adapted to bathing once a week on a plywood sheet in the dooryard. I learned to choose windless days for that.

My nearest neighbor was a half-mile away, and most days I wandered the valley and ridges on snowshoes and thought about what I might write. Writing had been, ostensibly, the reason for moving there, but really I’d moved into winter’s absence because of an absence of ideas in the aftermath of college.

Rescue from aimlessness arrived when it snowed sufficiently. Then, my neighbor, Donald, who was also the town’s road agent, would pull up in the town plow and hire me as co-driver. Really, I almost never drove; my job in the shotgun seat was twofold: keep Donald awake; dig the wheels free when he slid into a ditch. I grew reasonably adept at both, telling Donald long, convoluted stories about hippies – with my long hair and beard, I was the valley’s sample – and their reasons for wanting to drop out into valleys like ours, or making dopey jokes, which made him laugh enough to stay on course…most of the time. When Donald slept or caught his blade on the edge of a ditch and we yawed into it, I’d dig out the wheels, while he napped or strung a come-along to a tree across the road. Then, we’d struggle out and return to freeing the 65 miles of town road that were Donald’s domain.

But this is a story about a storm when Donald never arrived. In fact, it was an 8-inch snowstorm that no one plowed, and I was reminded of it during the recent uber-cold snow that fell on us all. Here, in Maine, the temperature topped out at minus 2, even as snow filled the air; in the evening it was minus 7 by 9:00, and that was a few miles from the sea. Inland, temperatures dropped as low as a stunning minus 42.

More Rare Snow – in this case a Snowbow

A long life of weather-watching has given me a broad sample of experience, but this week’s frigid snow is only the 2nd such snow of my life. The other was the day that Donald stayed home.

That morning I dug myself out from bed’s thick covers to start the stove. I’d grown acclimated to waking to sub-freezing temps indoors, but as I felted kindling into the firebox, I felt uncommonly cold. I lit the paper understory, fitted the circular lid over the firebox and opened the drafts. Then, I shuffled over to the window to look at the thermometer. The window was frosted and iced thickly over, and I grabbed a butter knife and set to scratching. Zero seemed a good guess, and so I cleared the ice from the window near where zero might lie. Nothing. No trace of red. Scratch, scratch – minus 10. Nothing. Scratch, scratch, scratch – minus 20. Still, nothing; whoa. Scratchscratchscratchscratch – minus 30. Is that a hint of red? Scratch, scratch – 33 below.

Well, that was my thermal lowpoint (and it stands still today), and I dressed and went out into this wonder. It was absolutely still. But the trees were in voice, or, more accurately, full complaint. Snaps, groans, pops and general tension echoed all around me; it felt as if the whole sky weighed more than usual. My nose-hairs webbed immediately and my breath caught in my throat. The winter I knew felt transformed; the cold had made the land alien.

Later that day it snowed a windless snow, a snow so light that 8 inches later I cleared it from the doorway with two sweeps of a broom.

This week’s snow was that light.

By Corinne H. Smith

In my five-and-a-half decades of taking breath on this planet, I’ve lived within the boundaries of some of our major American watersheds: the Chesapeake Bay, the Ohio River, the Great Lakes, the Upper Mississippi River, and the Connecticut River. But it’s only in this last year that I’ve paid almost daily attention to the water course now flowing closest to me, the Susquehanna River. Mostly because my weekday office sits just a block away from it.

Though I rarely go down to its edge, I often look at the river from our second-story windows. I’m amazed at how its appearance differs daily, even from this distance. In dramatic weather, it changes hourly. Here its mile-wide span must surely affect our own east-bank weather, especially on those days when fog or snow flurries swirl around our building. Not bad for something that begins in Cooperstown, New York, as a stream small enough to jump across. (Yes, I’ve done this.)

Henry Thoreau seems to have written most often and experienced his most introspective moments when he was near water. I don’t believe this was by accident. Yes, he documented the seasonal growth and infinitesimal changes in his local flowers, plants, bushes, and trees. But he knew that – the sky, notwithstanding — nothing on earth illustrates drama better than a body of water. He learned this information firsthand, after paddling the Concord and Merrimack Rivers for two weeks and after living at Walden Pond for two years.

Many quotable passages about rivers and lakes can be found in Thoreau’s writings. Here are a few of my favorites:

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.” ~ “The Ponds,” Walden

Walden’s Fringe

“For the first time it occurred to me this afternoon what a piece of wonder a river is – A huge volume of matter ceaselessly rolling through the fields and meadows of this substantial earth making haste from the high places, by stable dwellings of men and Egyptian pyramids, to its restless reservoir. One would think that, by a very natural impulse, the dwellers upon the headwaters of the Mississippi and Amazon would follow in the trail of their waters to see the end of the matter.” ~ Journal, September 5, 1838

“A river is superior to a lake in its liberating influence. It has motion and indefinite length. A river touching the back of a town is like a wing, it may be unused as yet, but ready to waft it over the world. With its rapid current it is a slightly fluttering wing. River towns are winged towns.” ~ Journal, July 2, 1858

Naturally, nothing can beat the following quote. And in my mind, it has absolutely nothing to do with the act of catching a fish.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” ~ “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Walden

Metaphor was one of Thoreau’s favorite literary devices. An ever-moving river makes a terrific symbol for time and eternity. Here Henry gives us two concepts (and many more, if you read the rest of this passage in the book). The first is that each one of us could be the hook at the end of the thin filament of a fishing line, cast into the current of Life. We each make an inconsequential drop into the watery world. Plop! We’re just that tiny, in the grand scheme. But we’re invisibly connected to the other little plops – uh, people – who are traveling downstream, too. We’re all in this together.

The second idea is about living Life fully and deliberately: “drinking” at this stream. Thoreau goes on to say, “I would drink deeper.” I interpret this wish as saying, “I would like to stay on this earth as long as possible and do more exploring into it. There seems to be not enough time to do and see everything that I want to.” We all feel this way sometimes.

No matter where he went and what others he saw, Thoreau’s favorite river remained the Concord. Maybe its attraction was not just that it was his hometown waterway. Maybe it was the pace of the Concord that was more to his liking. Its current is often barely discernible. Just like the courses of our daily lives and the progression of Life.

As this year winds down, I think I’ll spend a few minutes sitting beside the Susquehanna, just watching. I can contemplate the passage of time: the past, the present, and the future, all at once. I can consider my own small cast and what adventures may lie ahead for me at the next curve. The river doesn’t know 2013 from 2014. It just flows on from one day and month and year to the next. It heads for the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, doing what it has done since the last glacier receded. When it meets an obstacle, it either passes around it or, if the object is light enough, it carries the weight along until it can find a place to drop it.

The Susquehanna
credit: Robert Hollis

Another nice example to follow.