January 24, 2013

• More Winter

    This morning the outside temperature was -31F. 

    Michel had asked about the ponds and rivers here in winter. On my drive into town to have the new battery installed, I paid attention to the North Branch of the Middlebury River and the changes the temperature's plummeting had wrought on the river. In mornings past, I had noticed currents of steam rising skyward. The river water was warmer than the air and it looked as if it were steaming. The colors of the water and rocks were tan and white. The rocks and boulder, grays and whites, visible as the water wended it's way around and over their presence. Gradually the water cooled over the days and weeks and no more steam rose. 

     When temperatures plunge into the sub-zero range, the river starts to freeze at the bottom. The freezing ice expands and pushes the fluid water upward and outward, making the stream broaden and the ripples in the water flatten. The ice starts to change the colors of the river to green blues and muted whites.  Boulders and rocks are covered with the rising river and no longer appear as hummocks in the early fields of spring. The edges of the river start to freeze first, there shallower depths in proximity to the frigid banks more susceptible to the chilling of the earth's surface. The surface becomes smoother. Sometimes with the smooth reflective quality of a highly polished mirror, sometimes with waves frozen gently into the surface. Towards the center of the river a thin stream of water rushes over the growing ice and finds it's way in and out of holes not solidly frozen around the rocks, still moving, resisting the encroaching change from liquid to solid. Right now, the banks of the river are snow covered. In some areas damaged by the floods of Irene's onslaught last year, the trees were ripped up by there roots, the strata  of sand, soil and deeper bedrock revealed and resistant to the blanket of snow attempting to accumulate. 

     What of ponds, he asked. Here my experience is more limited. The yard behind our home slopes gently and a small,oval frog pond has pooled in the depression in the lowest point of the land before it rises again into a forest of tall pines and smaller hardwoods that haven't developed as much as they might due to the pines over shadowing them. This pond has been frozen for a couple of weeks now. As with the rivers, the freezing starts from the edges and works it's way inward. Mica thin sheets of ice,like patches of glass to cover microscope slides, start small and gradually join with each other to make a thin blanket of ice. Patterns emerge as the air is trapped in the transitioning element. Then the snows came and covered the ice. I imagine it thickening all the time the temperatures are plummeted, the ice at the bottom of the pond rising up to meet the surface. Soon the ice is thick enough for our Labrador to trod upon safely, wondering where her swimming hole has gone. With the next thaw she will find a hole and try to enlarge it, wanting to swim again. For now the pond is quietly waiting, the frogs and newts burrowed beneath the mud. 

   

  • 8:45 pm
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