Wildwood Ways

by Winthrop Packard

Before morning the wind was blowing a wild gale from the south, rain was pouring in torrents and we were evidently on the outer edge of a winter hurricane that had been well up the coast, perhaps as far as Nantucket, when the pond began to talk about it. No; I do not think changes in temperature have much to do with it. My explanation for the scientist is that these noises begin with a drop in the atmospheric pressure, a region of low barometer moving up in advance of the storm. Taking the pressure quite suddenly off the ice would start all the air imprisoned in solution beneath it to pushing upward for a chance to get away. No wonder it groans and whoops with all that wind in its wame.

But privately I am not so sure. We have so many sure-thing theories, and so much definite knowledge to-day that to-morrow is all discredited and cast aside leaving us groping for another theory, that it is just as easy to believe myself eavesdropping at telephone talk between giants. That particular night it sounded to me like Hercules on his way up from Hades with Cerberus under his arm and a bit over-anxious lest the deities fail to have the dog pound ready for him on arrival in the upper regions—but of course that’s pagan myth. Anyway it was a great uproar. I fancy winter ice makes the same outcry on other ponds, though I never happened to hear it anywhere else.

To-day the ice was quiet enough on my side of the pond, though you could see where it had been at work. With the west wind as team mate it was dredging and grading over on the east shore. This is the every-day winter work of thick ice. It picks up big rocks on the beach and carries them off into deep water or moves them up or down the shore as it sees fit. But always it pushes back the sand and gravel and stones on low shores and steadily builds them up till you find wide shallow ridges between the water’s edge and the slope of the land farther ashore. My pond is very young, scarcely three-quarters of a century old, yet it shows marked evidence of this work all along shore. When ice is thick and the wind strong, especially toward spring when there is apt to be free water along the edge, you may stand by and see the dredging effect at work, see the low, long mound of gravel or sand slide backward up the beach while the edge of the floe crumples and grinds and crumbles, but still moves irresistibly to its work.

Over at Ponkapoag Pond, which is perhaps a hundred thousand years older, the effect of this pushing ice through the ages, working at various levels, has been to produce mounds and dikes almost beyond belief. Moreover, these are placed in such situations that it is plain to see that the water was for the greater part of that long time some feet higher than now. In my first acquaintance with these ridges I thought them dikes raised by modern men, early farmers, perhaps, who thus for some occult reason banked the pond as they surrounded their fields with the stone fences which last still. No man of to-day, however ardent a farmer, builds these great barriers between field and field. Yet even with the stone walls before the eye it is hard to believe that men built dykes along the pond shore that averaged a hundred feet across and were in some places much more. A ten-foot bank would do, and it was hard to believe that so much labor would be willingly wasted. Yet along the Ponkapoag Pond shore in one place is a barrier many feet high and broad built, not of sand, but of the rough slate rock of the region, thrown together loosely in huge rough blocks and tamped with earth. This is so much bigger than any of the field-enclosing stone walls that it puts the modern farmer quite out of the question, and on finding it I had pleasant dreams of a prehistoric race of mound-builders who might have preceded the Indians in their occupation of the land and have built these pond embankments for purposes of their own.

Again my scientific friend disapproves my dream theory in well-chosen argument that is very convincing—to him. Nevertheless I go my way with mind equally divided,—between theories as to prehistoric men-mound-builders and the probabilities of the work having been done by that great beaver which, according to the Algonquin legend, made the world out of mud brought up from the bottom of a lake.

Mind you, I am quite convinced that it is the ice which is doing this on the Reservoir shore, but Ponkapoag—that is far enough away to be in the land of legend and all sorts of wonderful things may have happened on its borders.

Whatever its work, the ice for this winter has nearly completed it. In early December its crystalline structure was that of ferns, laid flat and interwoven, making it strong and elastic. All semblance of these has vanished, and there remains but a loosely adhering structure built like the Giant’s Causeway in the north of Ireland of vertical irregular columns jammed together side by side. Moisture is all between these, and if the temperature is below freezing cements them firmly together, and it is safe to walk on the surface. The ice is almost a foot thick still, but let a warm spring sun in on it, and this cement softens, and what seems a firm foundation crumbles and fails beneath your foot. All along the edges to-day the process of disintegration was going on, and you could hear the little seeping swan song of these ice columns as they slid apart and lay flat, making mush ice in the open water where they soon dissolved and disappeared. Thus the ice waits the mandate of the spring. Some day, soon, it will fall apart as if at a word, and vanish, and by that token we shall know that the winter has really gone, and we shall go about in a pleasant glow, listening for the first voice of the spring frogs.