I am very pleased you decided to come along for a walk on this winter day, even though it is near freezing. When it is this cold, a walk is painful. Your feet ache with cold, your breath is hesitant. But it is important to keep on, to push ahead.
Last winter, you came with me across a frozen lake. Once, we crossed an old cornfield to converse with a lone, gnarled giant oak tree on a brutally cold and crisp winter day. And not long ago, I shared with you the beauty of nature’s inner self accentuated by a fresh snowfall in the garden outside my house.
But today we will take a different journey. It is much later in the season, and we walk far afield to feel the waning pulse of the season, at the cusp where the chill of death flows into the promise of new life. You’ll see what I mean.
Early in the season, fresh snowfalls and bitter cold are welcomed sisters. But then winter drags along, one gray day bleeding into the next. Your body’s engine is slowed, its fluids sluggish with the cold. But it is precisely at this time of the year that hope of warmer days looms around the corner. You must force yourself to go outside and seek images to jump-start your psyche. A good place to do so can be at a boundary.
Boundaries between farmland and forests, between streams and wetlands, sharpen that dull edge of the season. It is time to look for the stories nature holds in such places. And even the most seemingly insignificant things, such as a dried, dangling seed pod on a milkweed stalk, tell an exquisite story.
Although we long for spring, we need deep cold and snow. Those clear, cold winter nights carved into our flesh by the cutting sweeps of arctic air dipping down from the far north, unwelcomed as they are, prepare the land and life to be. And by morning you know their handiwork by the windswept snow sculpted and packed tightly.
Trudging across this rolling cornfield to that distant line of trees, sinking almost to our knees in wind-whipped snow, isn’t that bad. The icy gusts that blast across these hills have eased. There is little rustle of dead cornstalks, no whistling and crackling branches, only a dead silence, allowing the land to speak to us. This is a good day to be out here. I can almost guarantee you a surge of inner warmth, a refreshing of spirit, even a tinge of spirituality.
Across these hills, an eerie mist, vapors of frozen fog, soften, even blur, the patchwork of cornfields and woods. Winter has spun near the edge of this great lake a checkerboard quilt, squares of shattered, batted-down cornstalks, their pale presence made strikingly obvious by intermittent, dark squares, fragments of forest.
Consider the striking polarity of this scene, the abruptness of the land’s incipient personality at this spot. At first glance, this arrangement of the land is neat, clean and tidy. It is as if some master builder sewed together the patchwork squares and rectangles of farmland and forests.
Cross the cornfield and walk toward that wisp of forest sneaking into view when the mist suddenly clears. Follow a winding path I know from summer across the withered, broken corn. I can tell the contour of the path by the zigzag line of dried milkweed stalks jutting above the snow line.
This is the time of year when milkweed pods split open and winter winds blow their silken seeds far and wide. Through this cold, the little brown seeds are alive; those that survive sprout years later, becoming new milkweed plants that sustain future generations of monarch butterflies and other milkweed insects gracing our summers.
Nestled in the snow between cornfield and forest is a suicidal advance line of seedlings and saplings, including red osier dogwood and willows. The forest is trying to stake its claim, little by little, beyond itself. It is a doomed effort; each year the line is pruned back, pushed aside and tidied up for replanting corn. But when left to its own ingenuity and guile, the forest would creep into the corn. So this is not a natural boundary.
A natural boundary is much more irregular, weaving back and forth, loaded with the natural tension that flourishes when colonist species set foot into the cornfield and the front line advances.
Viewed this way, boundaries are fascinating windows of discovery about nature’s proclivity toward expansionism, a rightful attempt to reclaim lost land. The plant and animal species that do this form a toughened infantry, expecting great casualties but sometimes making small gains, year by year.
This scene–a sullen composite of leaden sky and frozen hills–seems to be wasteland. There is death here, but not despair, for life continues, muffled and slowed by the cold. There are pockets of life hidden under the soil, ensconced in crannies in the forest. There are even mosquitoes and butterflies sleeping in crevices of loosened tree bark, under logs and in the mulch.
Life clings on through winter, readying itself for spring. You must do your best to glimpse beyond the deathly pall, the mummified earth tones of the woods and those crisp, angular shadows from trunks and branches streaking the snow, to know that life here is only put on a temporary hold, muzzled like an intimidating but tethered Great Dane.
Even in its threadbare state, the forest speaks of life. Perhaps a quarter mile square, it has birches, oaks, maples, aspen, even a few beeches. Along one side, a band of cottonwoods stands out tall and bold. The heavy snow has almost obliterated from view an old stone wall that separates one side of the forest from the cornfield. But here and there, a rock sticks up above the snow. And along this broken wall line, oaks and an occasional shagbark hickory have sprouted and matured, perhaps more than 50 years ago.
We stand on hallowed ground, where nature still flourishes, allowing us to penetrate a boundary of understanding between a cornfield and a surviving piece of forest next to it.
Near the wall, perhaps 30 feet away, a humped, brown shape lies in the snow. It is the frozen carcass of a deer, a natural death. If you touch the carcass, you’ll see that it is rock-hard, like the stones next to it. Frozen carcasses and even big stones in a wall eventually breathe new life into these hills.
A loud knocking suddenly ricochets through the woods. A dark silhouette is shuffling through the trees, some 30 feet above. It is a pileated woodpecker, one of our biggest woodpeckers, moving swiftly. It is interested in those old birches with their tops missing, blown off in an ice storm or lightning strike years before.
This creature is both a skilled artisan and hunter. It chisels holes in dead or dying trees with uncanny wisdom, choosing trunks most likely containing wood-boring beetle grubs and ants. That insistent rapping sound slicing through the cascades of snow echoes an ancient process of these forests. Ants and beetles process dead wood for nourishment and shelter, breaking down dead trees into food for living trees.
The big woodpecker stays here all winter, criss-crossing this landscape, stepping from one island of forest to others, back and forth, seeking food and tree cavities for shelter, coping with winter’s deathly challenge to hold on, to survive.
A woodpecker is largely recycled wood-boring insects, and wood-boring insects are recycled deadwood. Deadwood is the skeleton of living trees, and living trees are recycled mulch, carcasses, sunlight and water.
When you think of it this way, songbirds, squirrels, beetles, moths, cicadas, katydids, bats, crickets and much more are all recycled and reshaped plant tissues. Life and death are close partners in the design and persistence of a forest.
The woodpecker does not need the vast tracts of hilly cornfields, but it needs a forest and its trees, even small parcels of it. In the breeding season, this creature makes its nest in tree cavities and hunts for wood-inhabiting insects to feed its young. The woodpecker’s food supply depends upon the natural cycle of birth, growth and death that establishes a healthy woodland.
There are other impressive beings that live here. Last summer, a red fox was spotted skipping along the boundary. A colony of beavers lives in that distant stream that skirts a neighboring piece of forest.
Beavers can be good for the land. By chewing through birch, aspen and other trees, they create opportunities for other life, including birds, rodents, dragonflies and paper wasps. In the distance, the beaver family den is still visible, a steepled latticework of gnawed-off tree trunks jutting up from the blackened ice of the coffee-hued stream, now crusted and iced with snow, entombing life beneath the ice.
A beaver den snags and helps a lot of life; some stream fish set up lairs within this submerged tangle of packed branches. By stifling the flow of water, beavers create breeding opportunities for other creatures. Slowing down the water dampens the proliferation of some mosquitoes while encouraging other less intimidating gnats to blossom, which in turn helps sustain the three or four species of dragonflies I have seen on the stream in summer.
And you must also remember that rerouting the water’s journey encourages frog life, including the spring peeper, whose tadpoles are growing in the belly of the stream, beneath its canopy of ice.
Come April, the ribbon of forest bordering the water will ring with the calls of these tiny tree frogs. Dragonfly nymphs eat tadpoles and water insects, even tiny crayfish. An awesome message is becoming clear.
In both forest and stream, under the ice and snow, in the muck and mulch, even in arboreal cracks and cavities, life is waiting for spring and summer, holding on, through the brutal cold and pounding storms near this great lake.
It is time to turn our thoughts toward what will be in a couple of months and beyond. Life springs back.
The deer carcass will thaw, its flesh breeding throngs of blowflies, carrion beetles and other creatures. This heap of frozen meat will be spared from vultures that have moved south. But it may be gnawed by a passing feral cat, dog or hungry skunk. Yet its full fate truly awaits spring, as with much of life here. Sap will flow again where nuthatches have chiseled into live wood, attracting the season’s first sugar hunters, winter-weary honeybees, flies and angle-wing butterflies.
What is happening in these woods assures this new life. Fallen, broken logs are snug chambers for overwintering queen paper wasps mated last autumn. Next summer there will be at least one paper nest of the bald-faced hornet suspended in a tree near a border of these woods by the season’s end. Dead logs say so. Within and under every log is a refuge for many small creatures who help keep the balance of life intact in the woods. Logs hold big stories about life.
The challenge out here is to embrace these thoughts of life’s muffled presence and what will be. How do we get beyond the crunchy snow to grasp the enormity about just one patch of forest?
You have chosen to face the biting cold head-on, forsaking the fireplace and warmth for that which muffles much of life this time of year. Now darkness is approaching and we must head back, leaving behind the silence of these hills, the stillness of the forest.
I hope the grand illusion of this season is clear. It is only on the surface that the season appears to be a down time. Life is waiting, preparing itself.
Winter is good for nature. The landscape purges its elders, a necessary passage; the seeds of replacement are already planted, the gate through death’s broadly sweeping door setting the path toward a renewal.
When we return from our walk and sit by the fireplace, I hope we are both different than when we started out. Perhaps it is a lesson about boundaries.
Living on Earth is a privilege, an honor, one we must not take for granted. Such enlightenment blossoms when one goes forward to search at a boundary between field and forest when the crispness of waning winter accentuates the details.
Back in the house, bathed in the fire’s glow, we are separated from the cold. We have crossed a boundary, forsaking the cold, pressing up close to the hearth. Perhaps it is, too, that today on our walk across the cornfield to the edge of the forest we discovered another kind of boundary, a spiritual warmth burning a hole through the cold and mista confirmation that life goes on through winter, and warmer days now are not far off.
