FIELD NOTES
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"The
March of Time, the Time of March."
It’s hard to take a March snow
seriously. It’s a bit like a
teenager putting on a suit and tie for the first time: there’s too much
life
about for such a stricture to be worn naturally. But snow it does
today, the 15th
of March. Given the foresight from the forecast, I knew that something
was
coming, that those few flakes which began to fall in the early
afternoon were
in serious, harbingers of a few more inches. As the birds greeted that
morning,
it was hard to hear their songs without a tinge a sadness; theirs being
the
delight of innocent ignorance. And later on, when the snow begins, the
birds
pause as if to ask, “It’s not really going to…?”.
Beneath their silence, a dry whisper from the leaf litter, a
crystalline hiss - the sound of snow falling on the winter-dried leaves
of last
autumn. It is so unobtrusive a noise that I don’t even notice when it
disappears as the leaves become muffled beneath the snow. Out near
these woods
a couple of weeks before, when new snow seemed so out-dated, my two
year old
son had been eager to show me the first bugs in flight, conspicuous
black dots
on the last white remnants. Now I see that the spiders were not idle
either: a
snow flake dances in suspended animation, trapped between sky and earth
by a
spider’s web. In a light breeze, it spins and struggles like a caught
fly, and
I wonder if the spider ran out to the first flake that its netting
captured,
mouth watering so to speak. And the killdeer, early on the pastures,
spread
their wings by the running water at the cattle crossing and scurry
across the
black, steaming ridge line of the manure pile. Their elongated peeps
seem
strange and even more plaintive over this white ground.
No doubt the stranger is in me. This land has seen many a
spring snow. It and its denizens have evolved the genetic knowledge
that this
can happen. Not that, as individuals, the spider or the killdeer won’t
suffer,
but as species such an event runs in their blood. It is what makes the
timing
of their spring arrival or awakening a crapshoot; it is what makes this
balance
between lusty Spring and the Winter’s dearth such a delicate and
hesitant
moment. It is I who call this strange, perhaps because I can hope to
take it so
lightly, because I approach this event as a spectator, rather than as a
member
of Winter or of Spring themselves.
On the morning after the snowfall, the crows cry raucously,
“I told you so”, and some small mustelid making rounds has left tracks
from
where she slept beneath the brush pile, while across the creek another
seems to
have done the same with a to and fro from ‘tween the roots of a red
oak. This
is no scene of massacre, though perhaps here or there a songbird,
starved from
its long flight, fell victim to Spring’s cruel surprises. Indeed, it’s
peaceful
in the woods, Winter saying to Spring, “Calm your horses.” That’s fine
by me,
my vernal calendar holds too many plans to be welcomed without a touch
of
regret. Midst my modern obsessions, seasons are more chronology than
moment.
And did and do the birds, with Nature’s unspoken, sublime
grammar (for, of course, the words that I have had them mouth are
mine),
express the same equivocal purview over our bloodied fields of battle
or other
venues where we choose to batter ourselves? That nature can be a mere
spectator
at our tragedies - conscious or unconscious but, no matter, present -
is not to
minimize our wounds. No indeed, it is simply cause for us to see our
magnitude,
at once grand and trivial, and to note that nothing holds us from our
fates,
save perhaps ourselves.
This
Spring snow is wonder and beauty, but surely
something that few creatures would have ordered had the Waiter asked.
Do we
fool ourselves to think that we are any more able to stay the
‘weather’, grim
as it may be, just because it falls from our own hands?
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