Old Plymouth Trails

by Winthrop Packard

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.