My walk yesterday was through the crust of snow that fell the night before. Getting out into the morning I could feel the air warming and the snow changing to rain that was immediately freezing on my jacket. When water becomes super cooled it can exist in the liquid state but below its freezing point, thus freezing on contact with any surface it hits …me, for instance.
Passing a small Beech tree I marveled at the effects of the freezing rain on the leaves that still clung tenaciously to their branches; the dried leaves quake in the breeze, brushing against each other to sound like a Shaman's rattle. The frozen surface of the brown leaves turned them into burnished copper. The Hemlocks dip with the new weight of ice crystals collecting on their feathery fronds; a glittering of fans over me as I pass through their grove.
My dog,Rosie, and I head down towards the trail we have named “the gorge”. This trail is narrow and rocky and follows one of the three streams that flow through this land we claim as our own. Entering into this darker wood with its high bank on one side the rain no longer hits my jacket with a PING as the denser foliage of the coniferous trees shield us from above. There is a different energy along this trail, quiet, calm. It’s always green in this “gorge” with the bright green of the mosses that grow on all the rocks and the Christmas Ferns along the trail remain a deep green all through the winter months. I look for tracks along the stream bed; the small pads of the Mink as it runs along impossibly thin ice that hovers over the flowing water. A raccoon came down to the deeper pool and the tiny skittering of the weasel tracks show her scampering from rock to rock in search of small rodents or insects hiding in the crevasses. I love this trail. The footing is difficult but the mood is always easy.
I can see a fog rising off some of the snow still in the field. Sublimation. Fog also hangs heavy over the mountain, clinging to the various ridge lines and obscuring the summit one minute and twirling and swirling upward exposing the summit the next. Having grown up on the coast of Maine there is a term, “pea soup” that refers to surface clouds so dense you can see only a few feet in front of you. I remember walking along the beach in this opaque fog. A beach at low tide in a pea soup fog creates a very small world; one with visibility of only a few feet all around you. You exist in the moment of one footstep at a time within a monotonous landscape of sand. Shadows loom up ahead becoming recognizable only when they enter within a few feet, emerging as a large piece of driftwood or another person walking in the opposite direction. It was the only time that I felt I was truly present in the moment. Unable to see anything in my future and the past lost to the fog. I traveled, one step at a time, through a dense cloud of water.
Today the lake looks like molten mercury, smooth, charcoal gray and still. No loons break it’s surface or call across the shores now. Winter is here and they have gone to the sea until next spring.
Soon there will be ice forming on this body of water. My husband will watch it closely and determine when it is safe enough to walk down with skates in order to glide across the black mirrored surface. Once the snow falls I will walk across the lake to the opposite shore and the trails on the other side. The frozen water allows me to walk on top of the lake! Amazing!
I am remembering a friend who once was in love with a man from Barbados. He came to Maine during the winter to witness “the big chill”. We took him to a small pond by the beach to experience skating. He pulled up beside me and grab me around the waist whispering in my ear,
“Mary, how do they do this?”
“Do what?”
“THIS!?” he said as he gestured to the frozen surface of the pond. He opened my eyes to just how miraculous “this” is; this body of water that we can walk and play upon!
Water. It is all around us. A wave of water bursting between our mother’s legs introduces each of us to this world. We are water. We can’t live without it.
