A Winter At Arms

By Curtiss Clark

A Cooper’s hawk has been visiting the tray feeder outside our kitchen window, not for the sunflower seeds, but for the juncos, tits, and sparrows who have risked exposure to come eat the seeds. The weather has been harsh. We can now hear the food chain rattle at the window, and turning to the sound, we see the small cloud of pinfeathers hanging in the air after the strike and the predator and prey ascending to a high branch where the unpleasant details of their metabolic merger will be negotiated.

There’s something different about this winter that requires that life be lived close to the bone: risk roams at-large. And I’m not just talking about juncos and hawks. People feel the threat. I know of eight barns in this area, some more than a century old, that have collapsed in the past three weeks, done in by a conga line of storms dumping sleet, ice, and snow in 10, 15, and 20-inch doses faster than a guy can find a pair of dry socks. Barns, for me, are the ultimate emblems of security and refuge, and to have winter knock them down in such an offhand way rattles me.

In a radical reversal of our normal temperament, Kate and I have been looking forward to the hours we are obliged to sit in offices. We know that our sore muscles will have a chance to recover there before we must once again take up arms (shovels, pickaxes, hammers, chisels, and an overpriced roof rake) to do battle against the elements, which, if left unchallenged, would bind us all in a cold, constricting carapace to watch helplessly as winter insinuates ice into our gutters, moisture into our walls, and the dripping sound of water torture into our restless nights.

The kind of physical labor required to move the hardened snowpack on and around the house and blocking access to the barns is not beyond us. We work this long and this hard in the spring and summer maintaining and expanding gardens, prying boulders from the soil, and pushing wheelbarrows of stone, dirt, and plants up and down the slopes of our yard. But those are seasons where the whole ecosystem seems bent to the shared task of raising new life up out of the ground in support of our feeble human efforts. Spring and summer strengthen and encourage us with shoots and blooms and a warm pat on the back from the sun. Winter’s main contribution to our efforts in recent weeks has been liberal drafts of ice water down the back of the neck.

It is a conceit, I suppose, to presume that the seasons care about us any more than they care about small birds risking their lives to retrieve a scarce meal of exposed seeds in snow-glazed landscape. There is, after all, something bigger going on.

If this winter feels like someone left the door open, it is because that is, in essence, what has happened. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, over the past several weeks, the arctic region has been exceptionally warm and the lower 48 have been exceptionally cold because of an unusual, but very natural, climate pattern known as an Arctic Oscillation, which in turn has influenced a North Atlantic Oscillation. Both are opposing pressure patterns in the mid- and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. The result is a stationary high pressure parked over Greenland, which has caused the jet stream to whiplash straight south before snapping up through the mid-Atlantic states to New England, leaving the door open for all that arctic air to head south and mix it up with the warm moist air encamped across the southern tier of states. The unpleasant details of this merger have been negotiated right over our heads here in southern New England.

So it’s not really about sunflower seeds, or ice in the gutters. It’s a battle for world domination by forces that can sweep up a continent inside of a week. As with all titanic battles on this scale, risk roams at-large for all living things. Rather than retreat to our uncertain shelters, Kate and I get some satisfaction in taking sides in this contest, sticking our necks out, come snow or ice water, taking up arms — no matter how much the damn roof rake costs — in defense of our home and especially our fine old barns.

(More than 75 essays in the Field Notes series by Curtiss Clark can be found at www.field-notebook.com.)