Living along a river, as I do, allows my daily life to include certain experiences that my upland brothers and sisters may never see or hear. On long hot summer nights, the whisper of a cool wind still finds a way down from higher ground along the river way. When we get either north or south winds in winter, the ice heaves or collapses atop the estuary as the great mass of water breathes with the wind. Creatures of the night stalk the banks whether the moon is out or not and during the day, the old winding river lures critters and city folk alike to her quiet. Drawn by the river's familiar but ever changing beauty and a chance to experience a degree of solitude rarely found in the city.
Each year we get to witness one of the sublime events special to a northern river, the day or two we call ice out. On rare occasions the river shatters into a billion shards and as they rush past our house, they sound like a giant wind chime or endlessly breaking glass. The tinkling can be heard for hundreds of feet and others who have had the chance to hear the phenomenon will talk about it for weeks afterward. Yesterday, the ice went out in chunks, things that looked like they ranged in size from nearly the width of the river all the way down to car-sized pieces with a few even smaller ones jostling about into traffic jams that alternately broke through under the bridge downstream and backed up again as a giant ice dam. Occasionally there were large piles about the size of beaver lodges, thrust up by the briefly intense collisions between masses of ice that would normally support a hockey team, but today ran away faster than children released from school.
The night before last we had a major rainstorm and the added push of the rising water left no quarter for the ice to retreat to, instead it was flushed away over the course of hours. Each heave of the ice dams brought more muddy water and as the water rose, even the few chunks that had been pushed up on the shore floated free and easily away. It felt as if Nature herself had become tired of Winter. This year it must have been unfulfilling for her because the week or two that the ice was thick enough to be explored was all that could be mustered to emulate the season of hard water. Instead of weeks below zero, we only got one or two nights. Instead of a dozen or more snowstorms that required shoveling, we got but three. Heck, we got more winter in a week the last two years than we had all winter this time around the cycle of the seasons.
Winter went somewhere else this year, but in Northeast Wisconsin, where people pride ourselves as hearty and able to cope with all that winter can dish out, we felt a bit of Nature's sadness over both the record temperatures and lack of snow and ice. That said, there were many folks commenting on the fact that they "didn't miss" the snow shoveling, but just as many, if not more, went on to say how much they had missed skiing, snowmobiling and even the opportunities for ice fishing.The black earth is calling many to get their seeds ready and their gardens planned. Perhaps it is not yet time to plant, but this coming week the temperatures are supposed to get to sixty and if it were not still March, many would be planting in temperatures like these. It remains to be seen whether the sigh that the ice has heaved was borne on hope for the coming Spring or tired resolution to the fact that winter has gone from the landscape just a little too early.
Each year we get to witness one of the sublime events special to a northern river, the day or two we call ice out. On rare occasions the river shatters into a billion shards and as they rush past our house, they sound like a giant wind chime or endlessly breaking glass. The tinkling can be heard for hundreds of feet and others who have had the chance to hear the phenomenon will talk about it for weeks afterward. Yesterday, the ice went out in chunks, things that looked like they ranged in size from nearly the width of the river all the way down to car-sized pieces with a few even smaller ones jostling about into traffic jams that alternately broke through under the bridge downstream and backed up again as a giant ice dam. Occasionally there were large piles about the size of beaver lodges, thrust up by the briefly intense collisions between masses of ice that would normally support a hockey team, but today ran away faster than children released from school.
The night before last we had a major rainstorm and the added push of the rising water left no quarter for the ice to retreat to, instead it was flushed away over the course of hours. Each heave of the ice dams brought more muddy water and as the water rose, even the few chunks that had been pushed up on the shore floated free and easily away. It felt as if Nature herself had become tired of Winter. This year it must have been unfulfilling for her because the week or two that the ice was thick enough to be explored was all that could be mustered to emulate the season of hard water. Instead of weeks below zero, we only got one or two nights. Instead of a dozen or more snowstorms that required shoveling, we got but three. Heck, we got more winter in a week the last two years than we had all winter this time around the cycle of the seasons.
Winter went somewhere else this year, but in Northeast Wisconsin, where people pride ourselves as hearty and able to cope with all that winter can dish out, we felt a bit of Nature's sadness over both the record temperatures and lack of snow and ice. That said, there were many folks commenting on the fact that they "didn't miss" the snow shoveling, but just as many, if not more, went on to say how much they had missed skiing, snowmobiling and even the opportunities for ice fishing.The black earth is calling many to get their seeds ready and their gardens planned. Perhaps it is not yet time to plant, but this coming week the temperatures are supposed to get to sixty and if it were not still March, many would be planting in temperatures like these. It remains to be seen whether the sigh that the ice has heaved was borne on hope for the coming Spring or tired resolution to the fact that winter has gone from the landscape just a little too early.
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