Where does the white go when the snow melts?
Rats! Forgot to strap on my cleats. Halfway across the road with the hound, I look back and stick out my tongue at the front door. I’m tired of all that winter gear. I’ll manage.
The forest road is littered with ice fallen down from the trees after the late ice rain. Glittering ice in late February sunshine and the freeze of the clear night. It’s some of the best New England has to offer, and sugaring is in full swing.
As I scramble up the road considering what it will be like to try to get down, I am thinking of Jay, currently engaged in a bike race. The listing of the race on the online leaderboard is “DISTANCE: 1000 DISCIPLINE: Bike Men.” It amuses me to no end, as this race is not exactly a 1,000 meter Olympic event.
“That guy who pushes his bike through the snow for a 1,000 miles in Alaska?” inquires the Carpenter. That one. The Iditarod Trail Invitational. “Bike racers are doing a lot of pushing,” it says on the website of the “pinnacle of all winter ultra-marathons.” Some run/walk, some ski, and some bike, and some make it all the way to Nome.
If Jay were to forget a piece of gear and decided not to go back for it, he could be in some serious trouble.
And so might I have been a few weeks ago when the entire forest floor was covered in a thick layer of ice and the daytime temps were in the teens with high winds. Nowhere to go but down and break a leg on the hard ice to boot. Epitaph: Here lies AgathaO, intrepid dame of a certain age. Harken ye, she was too lazy to get her cleats and perished of hypothermia a mile and a half from her house.
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[Continued] During the winter, a thick layer of compressed and slightly melted snow forms a hard layer of ice under the snow. Ever-more water gets packed up in a mini-glaciation event. When the snow melts off, the ice remains. If this were Alaska or higher up it might not melt during the summer, although of late that’s not necessarily been the case. Add a bit of snow and you have the trap we all get in our driveway, writ large. But that ice is long gone in this crazy season of extremes.
A new layer of snow and ice pieces have made a new crust where the sun hit them. There are some pockets of stubborn ground ice. I can make it across icy and slippery patches, hoping my boot will stick on emerging small twigs and pieces of rock, doing my penguin walk, setting my heels into the thin layer, and letting momentum take me to the edge of the trail to embrace a tree. When all else fails I bushwhack around the icy hill. Woo-hoo!
The hound is excited by my milling arms and duck walk, jumps up and down and wants to dance. I dance. We find sticks and throw them. We pull for control of the stick. It’s a fine day. Today, everything is possible.
Then I squat down to photograph beech leaves that have melted a pretty snow frame for themselves and it sobers me right up. This is the way the Arctic is melting: dark water absorbing heat and melting a larger frame for itself.
I’ve not met Jay. He’s is married to a climate scientist — my badass friend Nancy who loves the outdoors almost as hard as he does. How does she do it? Does she despair every time she sees the world around her with eyes that know what is coming? If so, I don’t see it.
For me, it’s my short little span of attention, not to mention the hound’s. There’s a new miracle around every corner of every moment: now it’s glaciation writ small, and the next moment we’re crashing through the ice into a hole because the ground under it swelled with the hard freezes and the long and irregular funky ice crystals that give ice its power to break mountains. Now those crystals have collapsed in the melt cycles we’ve called February this year. If this were an asphalt road, we’d have potholes…
Luckily it isn’t and soon we’re back up sliding and running and jumping and generally making our way homewards, having had a time of it on this icy hill today. Better than cleats.
Notes:
For you diehards — here is Jay’s gear list from last year. I noted he has tyvek tape rather than duct tape, presumably because duct tape doesn’t work in the cold and is heavy.
Nancy writes a blog, Writing with Latitude. If you like good writing and are curious how a life might be lived with fun and responsibility, her blog is fantastic.
But where does the white go when the snow melts?
Beautiful, Pleun! I appreciate the risk you took to capture the transient beauty
You point out the despair we feel as we witness the end of the atmospheric honey moon, but add that enjoying the moment of beauty diminishes the fear- perfect!
Thank you, Jacques. I will continue to risk my neck to bring you deep thoughts 😉