28Jan2009

28Jan2009: On the morning of the January ice storm, as the trees creaked, groaned and growled under their burdens of ice, I struck out into the teeth of the storm, much to the consternation of my sons, who envisioned their poor deranged mother crushed beneath ice-covered, woodland behemoths. Yet I cannot think of a better way to fully experience the power of weather than to be out in it.

To see the silent sawyer at work on Spruce Hill is worth having to trudge 4 miles in a dangerous ice storm. The ice works to seal every single twig, branch and blade of grass in its wintry envelope. The wind rises and rolls across the flatlands east of the pond and when it collides with the tree line at the eastern field edge, entire trees crackle in unison under the added stress. Some shed their icy bindings, some shed themselves of what weight they must, and some--no longer able to hold on--crash to the Earth in a shattering, splintering, exploding collapse of wood and ice.

In the hour it took to walk from the county road to the ridge top fields, the precipitation had changed states 3 times. The freezing rain had stopped, snow squalls came and went, and just before the snowfall started again in earnest, a cloud of dense fog rolled across the ridge top and encased my world in a cloud so thick and white, I lost sight of the line of trees in the fencerow at the isthmus, only a couple hundred yards away…another example of how magical the Spruce Hill microclimate can be.