Thoreau Farm

Today, a week into the changed sky of daylight savings, broke clear and cold. After days of melt, yesterday’s front had scattered a scrim of snow that purified the old drifts, and the returned cold had tightened them. Another day of winter, though one so fully lit as to deceive through the windows. But once I stepped outside and felt the air’s tensile strength, I knew winter was back, if only for a short stay.

“Before I go,” this day seemed to say, “think about the gifts a winter day brings. Instead of pining for spring, breathe in the immediate; consider the cold day.”

A while ago, during my winter reading of Thoreau’s 1854 journal, I’d come across paean to such a day:

To make a perfect winter day like this, you must have clear, sparkling air, with a sheen from the snow, sufficient cold, little or no wind; and the warmth must come directly from the sun. It must not be a thawing warmth. The tension of nature must not be relaxed. The earth must be resonant if bare, and you hear the lisping tinkle of chickadees from time to time and the unrelenting steel-cold scream of the jay, unmelted, that never flows into song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold; hard, tense, frozen music, like the winter sky itself; in the blue livery of winter’s band. It is like a flourish of trumpets to the winter sky. There is no hint of incubation in the jay’s scream. Like the creak of a cart-wheel. There is no cushion for sounds now. They tear our ears. –  Journal, 2/12/54

Sure enough, the jay screamed; and the chickadees gathered in tiny riot around the birdfeeder; even in stripes where the sun had uncovered the grass, the ground was hard.

On my way to the woods, I stopped a number of times and listened. Thoreau was right – the was no “cushion for sounds now.” Each bird had immediate voice. A distant motor thrummed as if nearby. Somehow, as I walked on, I was nearer to the crunch of my steps. “The tension of nature” was surely not “relaxed.”

But the day changed, as the late season will, and during an afternoon walk, this little song of shift blew in. We were walking through an expanse of fields not far from the sea, and I was watching the clouds in the northeast. They boiled up dark, and the wind seemed to draw them on; from their bellies indistinct vapor seemed to trail. In summer that mist would be veils of rain. “That could be snow,” I said. And, some minutes later, it was – at first, one flake and another; then, a thickened froth. I could hear the little slaps on the left side of my face as the water-heavy flakes hit.

In two minutes, the upwind, left sides of our bodies were white like tree trunks facing a storm. We reached the car, shook off the snow and climbed in to watch the tantrum pass. The wind rocked the car, and from our inside eddy we watched the fields whiten like a time-lapsed photo.

Then it was done. Five minutes later the snow had melted; winter was whistling away, a whole season in a day. Oddly, there had been “incubation” in this flurried snow. The light in the sky was growing again; in a few days the vernal equinox would balance us before spring.

By Corinne H. Smith

Tradition holds that robins mark the return of Spring. When the month of March comes around, people begin to report with some glee of the robins they’ve spotted. The sight of these colorful birds yard-bobbing for worms assures us that winter is finally over. (Never mind that some robins now seem to stay with us year-round.) I used to believe in this myth myself.

But when I lived in Illinois, I noticed another, truer feathered symbol of Spring: the red-winged blackbird. Or more specifically, the males of this species. In late February or early March, these guys came north to stake out their territories. I would drive around the open prairie or through partial wetlands, and I would marvel at the sight. It was as if a delivery van had passed by, and someone had tossed out a bird every twenty yards. Individual male red-wings were perched in small trees, on fence posts, or hanging onto last year’s cat-tails. They distributed themselves evenly. Each one left just enough footage on either side so that he wouldn’t encroach on the neighboring birds’ spaces. When there were disputes, two blackbirds would be seen swooping at one another. By a certain time, however, all the land lining the Midwestern highways was claimed.

Henry Thoreau thought red-wings won the springtime coin toss, too. “No two have epaulets equally brilliant,” he noted on May 14, 1853. “Some are small and almost white, and others a brilliant vermilion. They are handsomer than the golden robin, methinks.”

When Thoreau embarked on his Journey West in 1861, he reached the Mississippi River in late May. There, he wrote in his notebook, “Red wing b. bird the prevailing to Mississippi R.” The birds would have been busy with their young by then. He still could have picked out their voices coming from the marshy edges of the riverbanks.

I wish I could mimic them. I can whistle like cardinals and chickadees, but I cannot recreate the call or song of the red-winged blackbird. There’s a buzzing in it that appears to be beyond human duplication. Thoreau was similarly intrigued. He defined the sound in his journal on April 22, 1852:

The strain of the red-wing on the willow spray over the water to-night
is liquid, bubbling, watery, almost like a tinkling fountain, in perfect
harmony with the meadow. It oozes, trickles, tinkles, bubbles from his
throat, — bob-y-lee-e-e, and then its shrill, fine whistle.

Twenty-first-century birders hear “conk-kar-ree,” “konk-la-ree,” or “o-ka-lay.” But to Mr. Thoreau’s ears, the red wing said “bob-y-lee-e-e.” Nevertheless: once you hear the sound and can link it to the bird, you’ll never forget it.

I recall clearly the March day when I was traveling through western New York. I decided to stop at Niagara Falls, just to watch the water. The main portion of the park was still closed for the season because of the thick ice and snow on the trails. Chunks of ice roared past us and quickly disappeared over the rim. It was mesmerizing to watch and try to follow one ice floe until it was lost from sight. As always, the waterfall was incredibly loud.

Suddenly I heard another sound, a more delicate sound, a sound I was familiar with. Yes, it was March, but was I merely imagining my bird of Spring? I looked around, wondering where a red-winged blackbird could be hiding. He turned out to be in plain sight, sitting at the top of one of the lone bare trees growing out from the rocks. And he was singing at the top of his lungs, competing with one of Nature’s largest sound-makers, streaming right behind him. I couldn’t help but smile and wish him a successful year. He sure chose a great place to raise a family.

Every year in early March, I fire up my computer and imagine my way to Alaska for what I see as the rite of spring. There, through the mountains, along the tundra and over the Yukon River’s thick ice, the dogs are running. These dogs are not the “Boses” that Henry Thoreau cites from time to time as further symbols of the habit-ridden town; these dogs are sled-dogs, dogs born to run, and this is their annual chance at the Iditarod, the world’s premier mushing event. Beginning just outside of Anchorage and aiming for thousand-mile distant Nome, the “last great race” supposedly replicates an early 20th-century emergency run to deliver diptheria serum to a town that might die without it. The mushers and dogs became heroes, and each year some 60 sled-dog teams and their drivers tap into that heroic spirit for their nine or ten or more days on the trail to Nome. Really, the race pays homage to the spirit of the various solitaries drawn to Alaska’s vastness and promise. In winter, the only way of travelling distances through this interior was by dog-sled.

Even as the dogs (who run best at around zero degrees) and their human companions press into Alaska’s marrow-chilling heartland, around here, crocuses often open their cupped hands to the sun.

This year, however, there’s an odd inversion at work. Today, we’re back in the land of horizontal snow while most of us pine for spring. Schools are cancelled, tennis nets recently raised in hope droop, the northeast wind drifts snow around five kayaks dragged near the Sudbury. Yesterday’s snow-in-the-air that wouldn’t stick has given way to the return of winter’s coat.

And, some five hours behind us in their day, this year’s dog-teams have hit the midpoint turn to the north along the Yukon, where…the temperatures have been in the 40s all night long. Yesterday, along sections of the trail, they flirted with 50 degrees. Even in my furless state, I can imagine that this isn’t great weather for the dogs with their winter-thick ruffs. The next time it’s 50-degrees here – will it ever be 50 again? – I can deepen my sympathy by layering on my parka and going for a run.

Musher Jessie Royer and her dogs in this year’s Iditarod – photo by Sebastian Schnuelle

Still, the dogs look happy. The Iditarod’s website is rife with photos and videos of these running dogs as they arrive in teams of 12 or 16 at the various checkpoints – often hamlets of 40 or 70 people in Alaska’s roadless interior – and the dogs are the embodiment of life. If our lives are often quests to find what we “are meant to do,” here are some models, I think.

http://iditarod.com/

Long silly for dogs, I watch them lope along through winter’s fading landscape and see joy and possibility; they are the advent of spring.