After a pathetic November that featured weather straight out of an Al Gore picture, winter proper came to the Northern Forest this week. Here again was December snow – the kind people love – a love kindled through memories and fantasy and stories of an older time.
The storm arrived at 5 a.m. on Wednesday here in Corinth, carried into the region on winds too light to feel. One minute the pre-dawn sky was ordinary, and then suddenly, the air was in a Christmas way. The snow fell heavy and vertical in the manner of an elementary school play where stagehands dump Styrofoam peanuts from a platform onto actors below. On the way to work, my headlights against the falling snow created a science-fiction moment; it felt as though the truck were a space ship cruising at warp speed through a mob of streaking stars.
We’re presently in a clipper weather system, where north winds are being funneled down aggressively from Canada. In the past 48 hours snow has fallen in every form imaginable: big dollopy lace drops, hard frozen rain drops, feather drops that fluttered like moths against sun cracks in the iron sky. Children have swarmed the sliding hills like otters at a pondside slick: bruised knees, bloody noses, belly laughs. Parallel tracks into the forest indicate that adults have taken some after work play time too – see them skiing through the negative light, the conifers wrapped in snow garland, the hardwood trees puddling in long shadows on the ski trail before them.
It’s cold now – hardly twenty as this newsletter reaches your inbox – and we’re reminded that there’s a price to pay for winter’s splendor. Driveways are iced, fingers are frozen. Fierce wind is howling through meadows and kicking snow skyward in tornadic white sheets. The men and women in the log business, armed with electrical cords, blow torches, and cans of ether, are bending their heads against the dawn and marching through snowbleared log yards to do battle with the gelled diesel in their work rigs. Large-scale sugarmakers are bussing gear into remote sugarbushes before the snow pack gets too deep.
There’s great poetry in winter’s contradictions – its pleasures juxtaposed with its toil. But you live and work here, you still live and work here. And so you already know this.
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