This Hill, This Valley

by Hal

  I was out in the crispness of a chilly early morning, today, and went to a small, shallow pool at the lower end of the pasture. It is the kind of quicksilver pool that mirrors naked willow brush and the bright berries of black alder. Under a moon, it mirrors the stars and a small, inverted sky. This morning it had the touch of Winter upon it.

  Frost lined the willows and beaded the grass. The bright berries of the black alder were doubly red against the black branches of the bush, Christmasy in their brilliant contrast. And on the water were the long, sharp ice needles with which the night’s late hours had been knitting an intricate pattern of crystal. Some of those needles were a foot long and slim as any knitting needle. Had there been even a breath of wind to ripple the surface they would have been broken to bits. But the shallow pond was glass-smooth and the ice needles lay in an intricate crisscross pattern on its surface.

  It requires still, cold hours to form such needles, with the temperature not too low. I seldom see them. But when the night is precisely the right temperature, somewhere around 25, and the air is breathless of breeze, sometimes they form. If they form early in the night they increase, knitting stronger with each hour, until the whole surface is covered. Then I find only a scum of ice in the morning. What I saw this morning was that rare, tentative stage that happens only a few times each season. Tonight the temperature has fallen another five degrees and tomorrow morning the pool will be iced over, edge to edge. But I saw the miracle this morning, the crystal needles, which are cousins of the snowflakes.

  Autumn ebbs away into Winter, but there is flow rather than ebb in the unseen wind tides that now lap at the hills and send their invisible breakers to hiss softly in the upper woodlands. They are the tides that curl about this earth, forever restless and eternally moving, tides that obey some subtler master than the moon.

  As I sat beside the fire this November evening I could hear those tides sucking at the chimney, hear the swish of their unseen waves breaking against the corner of the house, feel the quiver of the panes shaken by the breakers of this vast, invisible ocean. I sat and listened and I could hear the rise and fall of the wind waves, the rush of one after another in crescendo until the peak had struck its battering blow. Then there would be a pause, a gathering of new force, and again the succession of waves began, to build once more to climactic height and fall away again in the darkness.

  Night is the time to hear these tides, a night when the moon is late and the stars are dim with the scud which I imagine is the spray of wind waves crowding swiftly one upon the next. I have lain in bed and listened to them and been lulled to sleep as by the rush and boom of the ocean itself. But I have seen the wind-tides, or thought I have, at dawn and at dusk, at this time of year, breaker-white. They go rippling through the pasture and across the open knoll beyond with its tall red-bronze grass. They swish through the underbrush beside the river with the sibilant song of cove water being crowded up an inlet. They bow the naked maple tips with the murmuring hiss of moontides on rocky reefs.

  Seeing and hearing them, I know that I am a shell-less sea creature living on the bottom of an ocean of air, a kind of elemental newt endowed with comprehension.

  Each year at about this time comes a day when I go out into the raw air, feel the frozen ground underfoot, and look north apprehensively. I say to myself: What if this should be the year? What, I mean, if this should be the beginning of a new Ice Age?

  It is a fantastic thought, and I know it. No new Ice Age is going to come overnight. All evidence indicates that previous Ice Ages were hundreds of years in coming, with a slow accumulation and advance of the glaciers down from the polar regions. There was ample warning for those who heeded it. Birds and beasts simply moved a few miles south each year, and whatever men were here retreated likewise. The temperature drop was gradual, a few degrees a year. Some even say the advance was at least as gradual as was the eventual retreat of the ice, and some estimates indicate that it took 10,000 years for the glaciers to melt back from the area where I now live to their present habitat north of Canada.

  But, as I said, there comes a cold, dismal day, when I stand and look to the north and think that there were mammoths-here once, and perhaps saber-toothed tigers and more than likely polar bears, all of them frowning at the ice sheet, which they knew all their lives. Can it be that I and all my kind are itinerants who dwell here between great cycles of refrigeration? In relation to the age of the earth, we have been here only briefly, possibly between the pulses of some strange, rhythmic chill.

  I look, and I shiver, and I come back inside and know that I am only rounding out another November,

  This has been a chill day, despite full sun. The crisp maple leaves rattling down the road in the gusty wind were the cold-stiff fingers of Autumn clinging to the memory of Indian Summer.

  Winter does not wait for the solstice, nor does it come in the night and settle down, firm-rooted, to take over the days and weeks unrelieved. Winter creeps in, possessing a night or two and the day between, then retreats, only to come again. It frosts the valleys, and day eases the frost; it spangles the air with a few flakes of snow, then whisks them away before the ground is whitened. It rattles the door, then hides around the corner when the sun streams warm through a south window. Winter is as tentative as Spring, but as inevitable.

  Late November brings an end to full-fledged Autumn. The lasting warmth, the balmy days, the hazy in-between time, seldom endure much beyond Thanksgiving. Then it is that the pines and hemlocks stand out in cold-season strength of green; then the white reach of the birches is clear and clean against the sky. The squirrels have stripped the nut trees of their fruit, the bittersweet has dropped its orange seed and left the husk. The goldenrod is a sere brown curve in the wind and the dead oak leaf flutters, rattling in the quiet night.

  The season changes so slowly that I must pause and listen to hear the silence. Autumn creeps away in sandals woven of milkweed floss; Winter makes no noise until it owns the land.

  DECEMBER

  THE TEMPERATURE ON THE front porch was 16 above zero when I got up at 5:30 and the highest it reached all day was a chilly 22. But I had outside work that must be done. I had to secure the pipe and faucet at the watering trough, make sure they do not freeze and burst.

  I had delayed this much too long, for the faucet was frozen tight. So I got out the heating tape, a length of electric heating element well insulated, and wrapped the pipe with it and ran a weatherproof extension from the garage and plugged it in. Half an hour of warmth and the water ran free. Then I attached the thermostat and set it at 35 degrees and wrapped the whole arrangement with strips of old inner tube to keep out the wind and water. And that job was finished for the Winter. Thanks to electricity and the simple laws of expansion and contraction embodied in the thermostat, there will be warmth on that pipe when needed.

  How simple is that arrangement compared to the elaborate and inefficient efforts we used to use to keep pipes from freezing. Only twenty years ago pipes were packed in straw and bound in burlap, and even then they often froze unless a good stream of water was kept on the move through them. And the watering, troughs for farm animals had to be de-iced every morning and several times a day. Now a simple heating element in the tank prevents the ice. Gone, too, happily, is the old hand pump that had to be thawed with a steaming teakettle of water every morning. I doubt that there is a farm within ten miles of me that still uses a hand pump.

  My watering trough is a Salisbury kettle, a hemispherical container four and a half feet in diameter and made of cast iron more than an inch thick which rings like a bell when tapped with a hammer. It weighs, I am told, more than a ton. It has two trunnions and on one side, midway between the trunnions and two inches from the top, is a drain hole. It carries a foundry mark: Salsby, 1807. It is an antique. There are quite a number of them in this area, but the going price for them isn’t very high; they are rather awkward to cart home in a station wagon or a wheelbarrow.

  I asked around, wh
en I first came here, trying to find out these kettles’ original purpose. They were cast at one of the local forges a century and a half ago; this district, in those days, was an iron center and made armament for the Revolution, but the industry died out long ago. Nobody seemed to know much about Salisbury kettles except that they probably were used in some local industry.

  Then, a couple of years ago, I found my answers—in Colorado, of all places! There I met a man who came from New York and was an authority on whaling. When he learned where I lived he spoke of the old Salisbury iron furnaces. And he told me the furnaces had a part in the whaling industry of the early nineteenth century. “They cast the trying kettles,” he said, “which the whalers used to cook the oil out of the blubber. They hauled them over to the Hudson river by ox-team, and the whalers who sailed out of Poughkeepsie and other towns there bought them. Set them up on the deck of a whaling ship in a brick furnace. That’s what the trunnions were for—when they’d cooked out a load of oil they tilted the kettles and drained off the oil through that hole in the side, tossed the cooked blubber overboard and started all over with fresh blubber. They carried a full cargo of wood for the fires on their way out, and replaced it with barrels of oil on the return trip.”

  So that’s the reason for my watering trough, my Salisbury kettle. This one was flawed, and probably the others I see around were also flawed. One of the trunnions on mine is only about an inch long, too short to support it on the brick furnace. So it was a foundry discard. And now it sits in my barnyard and Albert’s cows drink out of it all Summer long.

  The cold continues. A few more days of it and there will be ice on the river. A week of temperatures in the 20s brings ice on that water. Two weeks of 20-degree temperature and I can walk across the river.

  Old-timers tell me that in their youth the ice was seldom less than five inches thick, often ten, and that the river usually was iced over well before Christmas. Charley tells of putting up ice here, sawing it, drawing it, hauling it to the icehouse, packing it in sawdust so there would be ice next Spring and Summer to cool the milk and keep the meat. That wasn’t too long ago. Charley’s not an old man, only a few years older than I am.

  But I find that I can discuss ice-harvest with Charley and know what I am talking about. I, too, helped cut and store ice. It was during my freshman year at college. There was a pond on the campus which froze early and deep. Student labor was recruited to help with the harvest, which was used by the medical school to preserve cadavers for dissection. There was an icehouse near the medical building and for at least a month I spent every afternoon wrestling big cakes of ice in that icehouse and, occasionally, helping with the sawing. That ice helped pay my way through college.

  I had all but forgotten that phase of my education until Charley and I began talking about the river ice. But when he spoke of the ice saws, the way the cakes were skidded onto the wagons, the struggled get those cakes into the icehouse, the way it was packed in sawdust, the bone-chilling damp inside the icehouse, and even the fog when the workers warmed up a bit—then it all came back.

  Snow came during the night, the fine, dry snow that packs hard, and it continues this morning. There is about five inches of it on the ground and the trees stand stark black against it. The river is a black current flowing through a white valley. But the ice is forming. In coves where the current is slack the ice already reaches out twenty feet from the shore.

  First snow really should be damp and clinging. It should line the trees, every branch and twig, and the pines should bow formally under its weight. There should be a night of snow followed by a morning of sunlight to give the transformed world a proper dazzle.

  But this snow is not that kind. It is cold and dry, and it lies only briefly on the trees, whipped away in white swirls as the wind gusts through them. And there is no sunlight today to give it glitter. This is a gray day, a sky full of sifting snow and a white earth where the drifts slowly gather behind each rock and fence post. The wind is mild, never reaching more than fifteen miles an hour, but it has a bite. The snow plow hasn’t yet come through, but Albert went up the road with his truck and the snow swirled like a cloud around him and his tracks drifted full soon after he had gone. It is a white, unblemished world, a cold world where even the blue jays are huddling in shelter.

  The big spruce outside my window sighs and quivers and has its own snowfall, the fine snow coming down in periodic clouds, shaken from its branches by the gusty wind.

  The snow continued through yesterday, but the fall diminished by dusk and stopped completely before we went to bed. When I looked at the thermometer at nine o’clock it was eight above zero. When I got up this morning it showed exactly zero. The air was still, so calm I could hear the crackling of ice a quarter of a mile up the river where the current swirls around the island and there is still an open patch. Opposite the house it has frozen completely over and the night’s wind sifted the new ice with snow. The eye finds no river at all, only a shallow ravine with a white floor.

  The sun rose clear, so now I have my sparkling world, so bright it hurts the eyes. But it is a distant sun cutting only a small arc of the sky. Now, two hours after sunup, the temperature has risen to five above zero, but if it tops ten all day I shall be surprised.

  I was out soon after sunup, shoveling paths, and Pat came barking and puffing steamy breath and full of frolic. Pat loves snow. He thrust his nose into it, snorted, blew a cloud of crystal, then lunged into it like a swimmer making a shallow dive. He rolled and wallowed and got up and shook himself, then rolled again. Then he stood, nose quivering, and tested the air in all directions. This, he decided, was a good world. He barked once more, just to hear the echo, and dashed down to the river, sniffing for tracks. Then he came back and asked for his snack of breakfast. I finished the paths and fed him, and we both came here to my study, I to work, he to drowse in comfort. It’s a day either to work or go prowling on the mountain, but I have a job to be done here. Besides, I doubt that it will get above ten outside all day, and I have to get used to the cold by degrees. I’ve already had a lungful of the day.

  I was wrong. Yesterday afternoon the temperature got up to twelve above zero. Then it tapered off again and at bedtime it was two below. Barbara and Pat and I went for a walk in midafternoon and the snow whined underfoot. That is one of the coldest sounds I know, colder even than the boom and creak of expanding ice on a lake.

  I am glad we had the fall of snow before the cold clamped down. Snow is nature’s insulator for the roots and bulbs. Weather scientists have taken accurate measurements of this, and one record shows that at a time when the temperature was 27 below zero at the surface it was 24 above zero only seven inches below the surface of the snow, a difference of 51 degrees! Chronicles of exploration in the mountain West have a number of stories of men trapped in blizzard and killing cold who saved their lives by burrowing into the snow.

  The blanket of fallen leaves in the woods provides some protection for the plants there, but I doubt that a foot of sodden leaves is half as effective as six inches of snow. Certainly the worst of Winter killing occurs during snowless cold spells. And a part of the leaf protection is a result of slow decay, which generates a small amount of heat. But that decay, like all bacterial activity, is slowed down in the presence of cold—so when most needed it is least effective. I know that all the farmers dread a snowless cold spell. A few years ago we had two weeks of below-zero weather with no snow on the ground and it heaved the ground and broke off the roots of many fields of alfalfa, ruining them.

  The cold began to abate today. In early afternoon the temperature had risen to 20 above zero, and tonight it stands at 10.

  The depth of our cold is passing. The temperature touched 30 today and the snow began to melt. One reason for this melting even with the air temperature still below the freezing mark is the warmth remaining in the earth. The snow melts from underneath and the drifts soften and sink. There is also a surface melt by evaporation directly into the air, es
pecially when the air is dry and there is a hint of a breeze. The moving air absorbs the moisture and carries it away, and the drifts slowly diminish.

  I doubt that there is a more beautiful curve in all nature than that of a snowdrift fresh-formed by the wind. I went out on the hillside today and could trace the path of the wind by the shape of the drifts. It flows with remarkable fluidity, shaped not only by the contours of the land but even by a grass clump or a weed stem. And there are no angles to it. Only curves.

  I once visited a laboratory where tests were being made in a wind tunnel, and to demonstrate the flow of air my guide injected a few puffs of smoke into the tunnel. At once, the flow of the wind became visible in the most magnificent swirls around the test models suspended there. I see something of the same kind in the drifted snow, except that these curves and swirls are frozen into tangible shapes. Here motion is caught and held, frozen motion of a grace and lightness beyond man’s devising. My hillside today was a whole gallery of abstract forms, more beautiful than those in any display of free-form sculpture I ever saw.

  The silence is upon us, no fly-buzz or bee-hum anywhere, not even in the attic. A month ago a few sluggish wasps were fluttering at the windows there and dive-bombing the electric light. Now they are somnolent or dead. And outside the dawn clamor of the crows no longer echoes; only an occasional lone caw is heard. Blue jays, for the most part, go about their business in blue silence. The chickadee is the most vocal bird hereabout, and though he sings a brief, sweet note his loudest sound is the tap-tap-tap as he cracks a sunflower seed on the feeding station.