The pumphouse and the mailbox are still at the bottom of the hill, right where I left them. I know, because I walked down to check. The rain that’s forecast to freeze onto everything is starting, and I was curious about what it would be like outside.
The snow is doing a strange thing: Pausing for days, unchanging. My tracks from the first day it sat here are still there, sharp and clear. My tracks from the next day are there if I look closely, but less perceptible. The snow has frozen harder and harder each day, so I leave less and less of an impression. Walking back up, I didn’t see the marks from walking down at all.
I remain surefooted on this snow thanks to the spikes I’m wearing on my boots; I keep a set of an accessory called yak-trax with my tire chains. Mine are secondhand from someone else and don’t fit quite right—I think they’re a little small for my foot size; my mother thinks they’re a little too big. Whatever the reason, they migrate into a position where they’re giving perfect traction from the mid-foot through the heel, and leaving an inch or two of the toe with only normal shoe-tread. I actually like this better than if they covered the entire sole, because I can compare their effects to what the traction would be like without them.
Pausing as it does, the snow is telling tomes of tiny unimportant stories which normally pass invisibly by. It’s littered with brown needles from the fir trees—“evergreens” continually lose a thin shower of needles, like humans continually dust their environments with scraps of skin and extra hairs. Brown means the needles were dead anyways and falling at their proper time. There are also green tufts—little branch-tips lost to the wind, not meant to fall yet. No bigger branches, as the trees are pretty young and healthy here.
Here and there are stains darkening the snow around little bits of something. Kneeling for a closer look, I speculate it’s where the little birds and rodents have defecated on the ice as they ran by. That happens always in the woods, but usually invisibly. I poke at the crust of ice where it’s clean, and it’s too hard for my gloved finger to gouge into it. That means I’m concentrating a lot of my weight on a very small surface area to dig my shoe-spikes into the crust and keep my balance. I wonder about the tensile strengths of ice—for a thicker crust, would I need to concentrate more weight on fewer points of contact to keep traction? Would I need fewer spikes? Would a backpack with a quarter or a half again of my bodyweight make a difference in the conditions I expect to see?
Partway back up the hill, I get the impulse to look more closely at the snow, and get down at a spot selected for seeming unremarkable. The icy crust chills my knees as my weight crushes the insulative layers of my sweats and snow-pants—it’s not the materials, but the air in them, that usually keeps one warm. The individual fir needles aren’t iced too tightly to the crust; I can sweep them about with a fingertip. Looking closely at the snow, I spot something different: are those gnat wings? Pair of millimeter wings, dark speck of a body, it looks like some sort of itty bitty flying critter was out in all this after the snow froze. I found a utility knife in one pocket, tore a page from a notebook from another, and carefully excavated the dime-sized bit of snow crust around the probably-an-insect. It’s sitting on the porch to freeze a bit more solid after my gloves started warming it, but if it doesn’t blow away I’ll take a look under the microscope later and see if it reveals anything else about what it was. Tiny insects fall dead on the ground all the time, of course, but this one is unusual because I got to see it, and strange for having happened to be flying over snow. I wonder where it lived and what it ate and how on earth it survived enough winter to end up dying between two icy storms out here.
The pumphouse and the mailbox are still at the bottom of the hill, right where I left them. I know, because I walked down to check. The rain that’s forecast to freeze onto everything is starting, and I was curious about what it would be like outside.
The snow is doing a strange thing: Pausing for days, unchanging. My tracks from the first day it sat here are still there, sharp and clear. My tracks from the next day are there if I look closely, but less perceptible. The snow has frozen harder and harder each day, so I leave less and less of an impression. Walking back up, I didn’t see the marks from walking down at all.
I remain surefooted on this snow thanks to the spikes I’m wearing on my boots; I keep a set of an accessory called yak-trax with my tire chains. Mine are secondhand from someone else and don’t fit quite right—I think they’re a little small for my foot size; my mother thinks they’re a little too big. Whatever the reason, they migrate into a position where they’re giving perfect traction from the mid-foot through the heel, and leaving an inch or two of the toe with only normal shoe-tread. I actually like this better than if they covered the entire sole, because I can compare their effects to what the traction would be like without them.
Pausing as it does, the snow is telling tomes of tiny unimportant stories which normally pass invisibly by. It’s littered with brown needles from the fir trees—“evergreens” continually lose a thin shower of needles, like humans continually dust their environments with scraps of skin and extra hairs. Brown means the needles were dead anyways and falling at their proper time. There are also green tufts—little branch-tips lost to the wind, not meant to fall yet. No bigger branches, as the trees are pretty young and healthy here.
Here and there are stains darkening the snow around little bits of something. Kneeling for a closer look, I speculate it’s where the little birds and rodents have defecated on the ice as they ran by. That happens always in the woods, but usually invisibly. I poke at the crust of ice where it’s clean, and it’s too hard for my gloved finger to gouge into it. That means I’m concentrating a lot of my weight on a very small surface area to dig my shoe-spikes into the crust and keep my balance. I wonder about the tensile strengths of ice—for a thicker crust, would I need to concentrate more weight on fewer points of contact to keep traction? Would I need fewer spikes? Would a backpack with a quarter or a half again of my bodyweight make a difference in the conditions I expect to see?
Partway back up the hill, I get the impulse to look more closely at the snow, and get down at a spot selected for seeming unremarkable. The icy crust chills my knees as my weight crushes the insulative layers of my sweats and snow-pants—it’s not the materials, but the air in them, that usually keeps one warm. The individual fir needles aren’t iced too tightly to the crust; I can sweep them about with a fingertip. Looking closely at the snow, I spot something different: are those gnat wings? Pair of millimeter wings, dark speck of a body, it looks like some sort of itty bitty flying critter was out in all this after the snow froze. I found a utility knife in one pocket, tore a page from a notebook from another, and carefully excavated the dime-sized bit of snow crust around the probably-an-insect. It’s sitting on the porch to freeze a bit more solid after my gloves started warming it, but if it doesn’t blow away I’ll take a look under the microscope later and see if it reveals anything else about what it was. Tiny insects fall dead on the ground all the time, of course, but this one is unusual because I got to see it, and strange for having happened to be flying over snow. I wonder where it lived and what it ate and how on earth it survived enough winter to end up dying between two icy storms out here.