AUNT SUE'S SNOWBANK
For weeks the country folk, wise in weather lore, have been
shaking their heads of a morning or an evening and saying, "The
air is full of snow!" No one of them can tell you how he knows it,
but he knows. "It feels like snow," and that does not mean that
the air is of a certain coldness or chilliness, dampness or
dryness, though there is definite balance of these conditions when
we say it. It means that there is in it another quality, too
subtle to be defined, that touches some equally subtle sixth sense
which life in the open begets in most of us. Fulminate is full of
fire, but it needs a shock or sudden pressure to liberate it. So
as the northerly wind drifted steadily down from the Arctic with
no opposition in the air currents that would give the requisite
counter pressure, the sky held up its store and we all continued
to go forth, sniff, shake our heads and prophesy. The cold drifted
farther and farther south till Jacksonville recorded, shamefacedly
and reluctantly, the same freezing temperature that New York had.
All this while "Aunt Sue's snowbank" lifted in dun clouds a degree
or two above the horizon in the southeast of a morning or a night
and disappeared again. Who Aunt Sue was or why the snowbank should
be hers is more than I know, but her snowbank thus appears in the
sky before a coming winter storm, and has been known as such to
the country folk of my neighborhood for many generations. The
early English settlers of "the Dorchester back woods" brought with
them many a quaint proverb and local saying. Some of these you can
trace back to Shakespeare's day, and beyond. Others, like the
sturdy men that brought them, have no record in the Domesday Book,
but no doubt as long a lineage for all that. One of these proverbs
that is probably as old as weather wisdom says:
"Long foretold, long last;
Short notice, soon past."
So as the air and Aunt Sue both prophesied for weeks without
fulfilment, all the weather-wise world knew the storm would be a
good one when it did come. Meanwhile the steady, increasing cold
put all the woodland into winter quarters. The ground froze, as we
say, meaning that the moisture in it became ice to a depth of
several inches, making an almost impenetrable ice blanket through
which the most severe winter weather will work but slowly. Beneath
this, or even in it, all burrowing roots, animals and insects are
safe from freezing. Where the ground is packed hard, the flinty
combination of ice and grit goes deepest, though even in exposed
situations only to a depth of three feet or so. The woodchucks
asleep in their burrows, the snakes, torpid in their holes, are as
safe from frost-bite as if they had migrated to the shores of the
Gulf of Mexico. The rootlets of small, perennial herbs may be
encased in ice to their tips, but they do not freeze. The heat
which the surrounding moisture gives up in changing to ice,
combined with their own self-generated warmth, keeps them just
above the freezing temperature and they live through it in safety.
The same rootlets laid bare to the frost of a single October night
die. The ice which seems to menace them is in fact their armor. So
it is with countless numbers of burrowing insects. The frozen
ground which seems so dead is full of waiting life which the very
frost that threatens to kill instead protects. Last September I
watched two larvae of the rather common moth, Protoparce sexta,
the tomato sphinx. Great fat green fellows as large as one's
thumb, they were, each with a spine-like thorn cocked jauntily on
his rear segment. They had fattened on my tomato vines until they
had reached their full growth and were ready to go into the cocoon
stage, in winter quarters. They dropped from the vines and began
to wander hastily, but seemingly aimlessly, on the ground beneath.
But careful watching showed that each was poking at the ground
every few lengths as he crawled, seeking a situation that suited
him. Before long each had started to burrow, going into the earth
slowly and laboriously, but steadily worming a way in. Each went
out of sight, leaving a hole just his own size behind him, such a
hole as I might have made by pressure with a round stick. A week
later I dug them up. They had gone down five or six inches, turned
head upward, and there they were, each a conical brown pupa that
bore little resemblance to the naked green caterpillars that had
gone down into the earth a week before. Barring the accident of my
spade, which neither could foresee, they were safe from cold and
enemies. The ground would freeze solid around them, but that
instead of harming them would simply put the seal of safety on
their abode. Nor were they dead things to be resurrected by the
Gabriel horn of spring. When I poked them they wriggled with quite
surprising vigor, showing that they were very much alive and
keenly conscious. They were not even asleep, else their jump at a
touch would not have been so prompt.
[Illustration: The Pines in Winter]
The frost goes deepest in the densely compacted earth, probably
because of the density; the fewer the air cells the better the
conductor. In fluffy soil, especially in the peaty margins of the
pond where the earth granules are large and loose and there is
much moisture, freezing produces a singular and beautiful result.
The ice seems to crystallize away from the peat in which the water
was ensponged, not in a compact body nor yet in feathery crystals,
either of which one might expect, but in closely parallel, upright
cylinders from the size of a knitting needle to that of a slim
lead pencil. These are often several inches long and stand erect
at the surface by the thousand, touching but not cohering, ready
to crumble to fragments at the pressure of the foot but shielding
the peat below from the cold. The ice on the pond may be solid
enough to bear you, but when you step on this peaty edge you go
down into the liquid mud beneath. Here you have reproduced in
fragile miniature the same result as happened at the Giant's
Causeway on the sea margin at the northeast corner of Ireland.
There a long vein of once liquid basalt, freezing suddenly ages
ago, left a great ridge of close-packed, vertical rock crystals
running out an unknown distance into the sea.
*****
With the good old rock-ribbed New England earth in winter quarters
and the surface vocal with Jeremiahs clamoring for snow, it had to
come. The incantations of these raised a witch whirl in that
mysterious source of all our storms, the region along the tropic
of Capricorn, in the Gulf of Mexico. Up the coast it came, with
the weather bureau flying storm flags in its honor from Palm Beach
to the Penobscot, boring into the freezing temperature and clear
air that the North wind had spread around us, obscuring all the
sky in the dun clouds of conflict. The young moon threw her
clasped hands to a point of slender flame above her head and
drowned in it. Aunt Sue's snowbank had circled the horizon and was
rising steadily toward the zenith.
The sky does not give up its moisture readily this year, else the
snow prophets had had their way weeks ago. The morning after that
night on which the young moon drowned should have seen the air
whirling with white flakes, but only in mid-forenoon did the
clouds give up, and then grudgingly. All it had for us was a few
granules, first-form crystals consisting of the tiniest crossed
ice needles ground out of shape by the pressure between the
opposing forces of the air. In the woodland the eye caught a glint
of one of these now and then, but I had to go to the lee shore of
the pond to know that the storm was really beginning. There the
northeast wind, swept the ice for a half-mile, collected these
tiny snow nodules and sent them whirling along the smooth black
surface to bank them in miniature drifts against the southern
shore. They did not seem to come from the air, instead the ice
seemed to give them up under the pressure of the keen wind. It was
as if the edge of it scraped them off. The winding streams of them
were very like the spindrift I have seen swept in tortuous, level
flight from the black waves of the mid-Atlantic by a wild sea
gale. Very white they looked as they flew along the black ice, yet
when I picked a handful of them from the pond margin I saw that
they were anything but white. Instead they were dirty, in places
fairly black. The air had seemed crystal clear for weeks, yet the
snow had found in it the soot of a thousand factory chimneys and
brought it to earth.
The air seems full of a magical new life always after it has been
snowing for an hour or two. People who are out in it may have cold
feet and tingling ears and fingers, yet they feel the intoxication
of this renewed vitality till the very teamsters, half-frozen
though they may be, shout cheerily to one another and laugh with
the delight of it all. I fancy it is because the cleansing snow
has swept all the impurities out of it in its fall, and all
breathe its oxygen disentangled from soot and dust.
*****
An hour or two more and visible snowflakes were falling in
increasing numbers. The grind of winds in the upper air must have
lessened a little, for the crystals came down no longer crushed
into grains but with their primary, six-pointed star form intact.
These swirled over the treetops, but straight to earth behind all
wind breaks, and hung a film of flowing lace between the eye and
all distances of the nearby woods. Such a curtain the makers of
stage scenery imitate when they wish to let the audience see
through the veil into fairyland and through it we see all
beautiful things become more dainty and we know in our hearts that
all wonder-tales are true, so long as we see them made real
through the magic of this illusory veil. So through this floating,
fairy film of snowflakes it is easy to see gnomes and sprites
dancing and all the people of northland legends grow and vanish.
The children may believe in Santa Claus in bright weather with the
ground bare, and good luck to them. It is only when the snow falls
in the woodland that we elders hear the jingle of his bells in the
tinkle of ice-crystal on twig and see his reindeer lift through
the air of the woodland glade and prance to vanishment over the
treetops in a whirl of the storm. For a little the world is young
again and Santa Claus no myth, even to graybeards in the
Dorchester backwoods, when Aunt Sue's snowbank comes tumbling home
through the pine tops. On such days weather-wisdom is justified of
her children and prophets of storm have honor, even in their own
country.
*****
Most of all woodland trees, the young pines seemed to love this
dry, light snow, holding up every limb and every cluster of green
needles to receive it, stretching them upward as if in yearning
for it. I think it is quite true that in the December cold, when
there is a feel of snow in the air, the limbs of young pines do
bend a little more toward the vertical. I know that the upward
pointing needles do press a little closer to the stems on which
they grow and thus more readily tangle and hold the ice crystals
that fall upon them. The tender young shoots of this year's growth
are clothed with these close-set needles for a space of a foot or
more, averaging ten groups of five needles to the inch, all
pointing upward to the very tip, where they press around the buds
for next year's growth in a close-inverted cone. They themselves
keep the cold winds in a good measure from this young bark and
these prized buds. But they do better than that. When the snow
begins to fall they catch and hold every flake that touches them,
skewering the interstices of the crystals on their needle points.
The first real flakes of this storm showed as soon on the top
tassels of these young pines as they did in the bare fields.
As the storm progressed, the lower needles of the spike caught
such as got by the filled tops and soon all the needles of the
young trees were filled with fluffy white snow, until the trees
from tip to butt were no longer green but white, most royally
robed in spotless purity. There was no soot in this whiteness, all
that the air held had been swept from it by the very first of the
storm. No cherry tree in the full fragrance of May bloom could
show such dainty beauty, such endearing florescence as these young
pines on the borders of the deep wood. Nor could the pines do
better for their own protection than this. Ice which encases their
tender rootlets in the frozen ground and holds them warm and safe
through the most severe cold, came out of the sky with the storm for
the safety of tender twigs and young buds. Snow crystals hold
entangled within their mass eight or ten times their own bulk of
air. It is this entangled air, whether in the fluff of a woolen
blanket or in a snowfall, that fends from the cold. The first
clear night after a snowfall is almost sure to be a bitter one.
Calm follows the storm, the sky is clear and the radiation from
the snow-clad surface of the earth is great. This radiation lowers
the temperature, and as we look at our frost-bitten thermometers
in the early morning after, we do not wonder that the mercury has
shrunken to the zero mark or below. But what do the young pines
care? This radiation is only from the very surface of the
evaporating snow crystals. Robed in this regal ermine fluff from
top to toe, they hold their life warmth secure behind the
entangled mass of non-conducting air and are safe from all
disaster.
Our pines have suffered much from a mysterious "disease" for the
last few years, and the most careful study has failed to find any
fungus blight or insect at the bottom of this. We have had summer
after summer of severe and long continued drought. It is now
believed that this has weakened the trees so that they could not
withstand the winter cold and have been "winter killed." With the
drought we had several winters of infrequent snowfall. We did
better last winter and the disease seems to be on the wane. Next
to plenty of rain in summer, a winter in which we have frequent
falls of light snow will be the best medicine for the pines that
we could have.
It is the air entangled among the snow crystals, then, which makes
the snow blanket, as we often call it, so sure a protection from
cold. The ground may have frozen to a considerable depth before
the snow comes, but if it stays throughout the winter there is no
frost in the earth beneath it when the spring melts it away. No
sooner is the ground protected from further freezing from above
than the greater warmth below begins to melt the frost and change
it to life-giving moisture. Because of this warmth from below the
sap stirs in the trees long before the temperature in the air
above the snow blanket has given it any warrant for such action.
It pushes up until the frost-bound trunk denies it further passage
and there waits the first brief respite in the air above. Hence in
March, though the snow may be still deep on the surface and the
mercury in the glass fall well toward zero at night, the fires are
started in the maple sugar camps and the pails hung to the trees.
We know that no sooner will the sun warm their trunks than the sap
will begin to tinkle in the pails, dripping with the sweet promise
of the spring which is already pulsing in the subsoil.
It was not a big storm, in my woods, after all. It lasted less
than twenty-four hours and hardly six inches of light snow fell.
Proverbs are half-truths, anyway, and "long foretold, long last"
has proved less than half of itself this time. But though the day
is clear and the sun bright, Aunt Sue's snowbank is lifting its
purple mass in the southeast again and, with the other Dorchester
backwoodsmen, I am wagging my head solemnly and joining in a
jeremiad concerning a big one next time. I should like to have
known Aunt Sue. I picture her as a stout, keen-eyed, wise-headed
house-mother of the old English stock. Surely she is the patron
saint of the young pines and of all others who know how to enjoy a
good old-fashioned winter. As such I hope someone will paint her,
seated on a good big snowbank, attended by cupid pines robed in
such ermine as they now wear, and with the soft radiance of a snow
rainbow around her head for an aureole.