Calm

Smoke rises almost vertically from the mill this morning. Never in my recorded history in this place have I seen such calm. Not that it’s a windy place, but every day there has been enough wind to make the cold seem colder. But today I walk in minus eleven degrees with my coat half unzipped.

(For information about wind chill, see http://www.nws.noaa.gov/os/windchill/index.shtml I have walked in temperatures of 0 to -20 with winds of 5 to 15 mph.)

I passed a brown dog beside the road, sitting, shivering—a short-hair domestic breed not built for cold. I say, “Hi, cold dog,” to which her ears lower, sensing a safe creature, no danger. Perhaps I relieved her boredom, and she felt loneliness wane in nearness of another soul, the comfort of two in the same predicament, put out in the cold. “Were you tossed out for some misdeed?” I ask. “Is that why you sit here shivering?” She lets me pat her head. “You should go run and sniff for new life. That’s what I did in your shoes.” Then I slap my leg and shout. “Come with me!” Her tail wags. We walk together and I watch lethargy leaving her. She sniffs a tree, trots into the woods and returns as if to tell me what she found, her tongue emerging for the first time since I met her, as if to post a blog, or say, “I think I smelled a beaver, but it might have been a mink or weasel. I’m going back. You come too.” But I did not understand, and soon the dog went away after scents I cannot know. I have to believe that this dog did not give in to the shivering lethargic symptoms of hypothermia, but carried on somehow, if not back to the one who put her out, then to another or to solo exploring. Maybe she feels, while darting after smells in the woods, that life does not end with rejection, but goes on if you make it. Maybe from here on she will want to live as well as she can for now, just sail ahead confidently, trusting her little ship to currents of the time.

For humans, hypothermia begins when the core temperature drops to about ninety-five degrees, and we shiver uncontrollably. We may become argumentative and detached from our surroundings; mind slows. We become “cold stupid” and sleepy like the dog was when I met her. At ninety-three degrees, amnesia sets in, and we can’t even remember where our glove is. At ninety-one degrees, apathy takes over; we no longer care; muscles become stiff and unresponsive. And I have seen them like this in a warm room.

Most creatures deal with the cold. They fly south, hibernate, or learn to breathe without icing their glasses. I’m inspired by them every time I see one in the morning who has made it through the night. But the ones that take my breath away sometimes and leave me wondering how anything can be so tough, are the trees. These spruce and balsam firs, with their delicate cambium layers just under thin bark, cells that if frozen will die, standing in one place, growing high into the wind—they dazzle me. They stand out in the open, dormant but exposed, not dug into a burrow or snow mound like some cowering thin-blooded hibernator. Redwoods die at five degrees above zero, but these trees survive in minus forty in blizzard winds. Spruce branches arc gracefully downward allowing snow to slide to the ground, and the fir boughs flex to shed snow. Lesser life would just break.






I don’t see many icicles. It takes the thawing of snow on a roof to send water dripping over the eve to freeze again. Once in a while, on a south-facing eve, a dark strip of exposed roof absorbs the sun and melts some snow, but that is rare. What we have here on this east-facing eve must be a roof over a weakly insulated ceiling, allowing heat to rise into the attic. Whatever caused it, this picture is unusual. I am turning away, like a local resident, from the ordinary wonders that I captured me during the first month, to shoot the bazaar and “beautiful.” And this makes me ask why a beautiful picture has to be unusual.








Shadow of a tree cast on thin ice. A poem lives here. I can sense it.