Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - [Homestead] Verlyn hopes for another snowstorm

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: Homestead <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Verlyn hopes for another snowstorm
  • Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 08:07:40 -0700

EDITORIAL: THE RURAL LIFE
February Traces
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: February 2, 2009
Up here in the country, the world gets a used-up look a day or two after a February snowfall. Dust drifts over the fields from the dry roads, the corn stubble begins to poke through, and the plows have left a margin of gritty slush and knocked down a mailbox or two. All the more reason to look for those moments just after a snowfall, when the snow is not yet public, when it has only been tracked by an animal or two out on the ice and in the fields

I never see a truly straight track. There is always a bend in it, as if curiosity was a kind of lateral gravity, always pulling the creature off course. But then I remember that “off course” is a human conceit. Judging by the tracks I see, there is no going so hard that one has to go straight. I can’t begin to guess what was gathered in the meander of a “foxprint” along the river ice. The fox knows, and that’s enough.

I don’t know why the sight of fresh tracks in the snow elates me. Perhaps it’s just the reminder that, minus the human footprint, this is still a world of animal trails. Over the fields, the hawks are laboring in an absence of updrafts. Is that how the year divides for them? A season of thermals rising over the dark earth, and a season when the snow seems to capture the wind and hold it down? Out on the lake-ice, the anglers are sitting on upturned buckets, the bold ones having snowmobiled to their holes. And yet they tested the ice with no more sophistication than the deer I saw walking across Piney Creek in Wyoming a week ago. You ease out onto the surface and see what gives.

I’ve grown used to the sullen light at last, and I find myself hoping for another storm, another chapter in a private winter. But the south- facing slopes are starting to melt quickly, and the skunks are almost certainly starting to think about breeding. Soon the male skunks will be out on the roads, and February will have come in earnest.

VERLYN KLINKENBORG

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/opinion/03tue4.html

Gene GeRue
www.RURALIZE.com







  • [Homestead] Verlyn hopes for another snowstorm, Gene GeRue, 02/03/2009

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page