Byron Brumbaugh

Winter’s not over yet!

Where would I find enough leather

To cover the entire surface of the earth?

But with leather soles beneath my feet,

It’s as if the whole world has been covered.

-Shantideva

It’s cold again.  Not the bitter cold hovering around 0℉, like not that long ago, but more like about 10℉.  It’s cold enough to penetrate through my gloves and make my fingers ache and my cheeks are numb.  It snowed a little yesterday, but only enough to leave a dusting of white powder on the trail.  Most of the ice is gone, due to the recent warm temperatures and rain, and what’s left is easily avoided.  It’s nice to be able to walk along without slipping on or crunching through the snow.  Waldo is prancing along beside the trail, in his sable birthday suit, happily engaging with whatever he finds on and off the trail.

Waldo always seems to be having a good time.  He trots along, always on the lookout for a good stick, eyes bright and tail wagging.  I can’t think of a time when he doesn’t look like he’s having a wonderful adventure.  Always eager to meet new people and dogs, always ready to play any game one of us can think of, always interested and engaged with nature, he seems to be very happy.  Oh, things happen that startle him, and sometimes he’s put off a bit when we pass a surly mongrel, but in no more than a second, he’s back at his baseline, in a Pollyanna mood.  I can’t say the same.  His essential mood seems to be one of joie de vivre, while mine is a little more restrained.

There are times when I’m tired and grumpy, frustrated by life giving me something I don’t want, or preventing me from getting something I do want.  Sometimes I’m fearful of what tomorrow will bring, or rueful of something I did and shouldn’t have.  None of that is very pleasant and I’m moved to try to manipulate the world to make my experience a happier one.  I feel that the world has given me a bum deal and I want to change it.  But I’m really quite powerless to change the world and my efforts are mostly in vain.

In reality, the world is not responsible for how I feel.  I am.  No one injects me with a bad mood serum, or puts a gun to my head and tells me, “Feel bad or your brains will be blown out!”  In fact, all emotions I feel are self-created.  I am a product of evolution whose ancestors developed emotional responses to aid in their survival, back before homo sapiens developed the ability to reason.  I still have that primitive brain, buried deep below my cerebral cortex.  My ancestors developed the biology and ability to generate a fear response so they would run away from danger, anger that primed them to have near superhuman strength in defense and a need for companionship that urged them to come together in groups that improved their chances of survival.  I still feel those emotions as they did.  But I have also gained a reasoning ability that interacts with those emotions.

The end result is that when something happens, like I stub my toe, my reasoning brain interacts with my more primitive brain to develop a response.  The purpose of this response is to help me deal with what has happened.  Unfortunately, I often generate a reaction that is not only not helpful, but usually, injurious.  I curse at the pain in my toe and develop anger, blaming what I stumbled over or whoever might have put it there.  That doesn’t help the pain at all, and can even make it worse, and instead increases my suffering by also giving me a bad mood, replacing whatever good mood I may have had before.

The wondrous thing is, we don’t just have a primitive brain that governs how we emotionally react to the world.  We also have a cerebral cortex that can step in and decide that we don’t have to act on how we feel.  It can also intercede with our emotional responses and decide that we want to feel something else other than what our primitive brain says we should.  We have the power to change what we feel, simply by putting our attention on something we enjoy, rather than on what we don’t.

Waldo doesn’t just show me that it’s possible to be happy at baseline.  Watching him be happy also makes me happy.  Focusing my attention on his happiness morphs my mood into one of happiness.

Even when I stub my toe.

At least it’s easy to walk out here.

The trail is slushy.

Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.

-Roger Caras

In just a few days, the temperature went form around zero to the high thirties.  The world changed from being all snow and ice to something more akin to slush.  Oh, there’s still plenty of snow and ice around, but its surface is now a wet mushy water-and-ice slurry.  What didn’t melt is now covered in a sodden milky mess that binds, somewhat, to the underlying ice.  That’s enough to provide some traction, as long as you show a modicum of caution.  In practical terms, as long as I don’t push it, I can walk with a normal gait, which means there is little of the additional work that slippery ground and deep snow require. The sound of crunching snow underfoot is replaced by a sloshy swoosh as I walk along and that’s a darn sight better than slipping and sliding while flailing my arms about.

It’s February now, so early spring is not far away.  Soon, I should be seeing the tender shoots of Japanese knotweed poking their heads above the ground, although the greening of deciduous trees is still months away.  It’s slim pickin’s for Waldo as he searches for sticks, but there are some that thrust their bare boney fingers up above the snow.  He seems to like long ones, sometimes up to ten feet or so, and he grabs them by one end, dragging the rest behind him, leaving a shallow serpentine trough essing its way along in his wake.  Soon, he’ll have a plethora of twigs to choose from, but not yet.  Waldo sees a twig sticking up in the air and he lurches for it, almost pulling me off my feet.  I jerk back at the leash and yell, “Damn it, dog!  Stop pulling!”

Waldo and I have been together for a bit over three years now.  We’ve both made adjustments and compromises along the way.  We still do.  But we’ve also formed a bond that is deep and strong.  Seeing to the needs of an animal creates a personal caring that transcends merely making sure that animal is healthy and happy.  There’s a partnership, with deep emotional roots in the subliminal psyche, that’s formed – a sharing of the everyday mundane events of life that is exactly where life is really lived.  This isn’t just about love, although that emotion certainly is there, it’s about sharing all those things that make you human and the animal an animal.  The entirety of my humanity melds with Waldo’s caninity in a profound, although incomplete way.

There is a story about a Buddhist saint who decided to emigrate from India to Tibet.  This monk heard that Tibetans were a calm and peaceful race and he worried that he would not be challenged by the stress of having to deal with difficult people like those in India (of course, he needn’t have worried).  In Buddhism, it’s not enough to know how to remain tranquil in the serenity of a monastery.  To be a well evolved human being, one must learn how to live in the hurly-burly of the everyday human world without being dragged into the furor and drama.  Only then can one claim to have made real progress on the spiritual path.  So, this saint decided to take along an Indian who he knew to be irascible and difficult.  He could have, just as well, taken along a border collie – at least for the difficult part.

What I’m getting to is that, in addition to the love and companionship, laughs and joys, that a dog can give you, they also challenge you to be a better person.  It’s inevitable that a dog will force you, sometimes kicking and screaming, through the entire spectrum of emotions, including anger, fear and disgust.  Waldo is always just being a dog, but there are times when I unthinkingly react to his instinctual behavior with frustration and aggravation.  These reactions have nothing to do with Waldo and everything to do with my inability to react to the universe, at times, in positive and constructive ways.  It doesn’t take a great deal of introspection, at those times, to learn something about myself and seek a more positive way to deal with life.  I sigh and give Waldo his head.

The amazing thing is, although I have seen Waldo angry at other dogs on rare occasion,  and fearful of a wide range of things, like the waving branch on the tree that fell across the rail-trail a while back, he has never, ever, reacted to me in anger or fear despite my reacting to him in negative ways.  He just looks at me as if to say, “What?  Am I going to have to deal Mr. Attitude now?  Come on, we’re out here for fun!”

Waldo is not just my friend, he is also my teacher.

I don’t know what he sees, but it was important enough to drop whatever twigs he could find.

Snow in the morning.

The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches.

-E. E. Cummings

The snow gives a dry crunch as I compress it from five inches to something like one inch with a step.  It’s about 9 AM and small granulated-sugar-like flakes are falling.  A blizzard has us in its grip, with winds gusts of around 40 mph.  The storm was forecast, so I knew better than to try for the rail-trail.  Even if I was willing to fight all that deep snow, which I am not, I wouldn’t be able to find a place to park the car, because the city would be busy keeping the streets relatively free of ice and snow and wouldn’t be clearing parking lots until tomorrow.  In the past, I’ve tried parking my car off the side of the road for the two to three hours Waldo and I walk, and it was towed by the police.  Their excuse was that I abandoned it.  At any rate, we stayed home and just walked around the grounds where we live.  Waldo won’t care – he just wants to be outside.  To him all outsides are good.  The only downside is that we won’t be able to burn off all his frenetic Waldo-energy and he’ll be a little antsier throughout the day.  But he tolerates it well.

When we don’t hit the rail-trail, we usually walk a little over a half-mile five or six times throughout the day.  Each loop normally takes us 10 to 15 minutes to complete, when the weather is nice.  Our first jaunt on this morning, several hours after the storm began, was a struggle even then.  The snow was already deep enough to make me lift my feet high from one step to the next.  The entire walk made me feel like I was going up stairs.  It didn’t help that there was still an underlying uneven sheet of ice left over from the last storm, so the going was a little slippery.  Between taking big steps and slipping on the slick bottom layer, I worked up a good sweat and was huffing and puffing in no time.  I had to rest every few hundred yards and it took us a little more than half an hour to complete the trek.

Waldo was in his element, bounding around like a gazelle, and I think he was, if not a little pissed, at least frustrated by my slow progress.  But it did give us more time outdoors, which he dearly loves.  He spent most of his time looking for sticks.  All the good ones were hiding under the snow, but that didn’t provide him with much of a challenge.  He would disappear under a bush for a moment, then reappear with a branch he tore from the main stem.  Prancing proudly forward with his prize, he then swaggered off to the end of the leash, brandishing the thing back and forth in some imagined glory.  That dog can find a way to have fun no matter what the weather is doing.

All the other birds and animals must have decided to hole-up.  Not only did we not see or hear any, we couldn’t see any evidence of their passing – no tracks, no spore of any kind. Usually, I see rabbit raisins left on the ground where they have grazed on the grass, but there was not even that.  There may have been some buried in the snow that I couldn’t see, I suppose.  Between the wind and the continually falling snow, it wouldn’t take long to bury whatever might be on the surface.  The snow came down heavy enough that three hours or so after doing our loop once, there was no evidence of it the next time we passed that way.

The wind was blustery.  I’m quite sure Waldo and I were out in some of those 40 mph blasts.  The temperature was hovering around 0℉ with wind chill, and the cold icy crystals of whiteness from the wind-blown falling snow mixed with that whipped up from the ground to cut into my exposed cheeks like shards of glass.  Combined with the moisture from my breath that condensed, then froze, on my mustache, it all soon grew into icicles hanging down over my lips.  When I looked at Waldo, I couldn’t see any icicles.  If he had any, he shook them off, except for those on his feet.

In between gusts of wind, the air still swirled around anything in its way, creating gentler eddies.  At one point in the storm, I looked out the sliding glass door of my balcony to see flakes of snow hanging in midair as if frozen in time.  That only lasted a brief moment and then the wind carried them elsewhere.  Toward the end of the storm, after dark, the wind died down some and the flakes became large, seemingly massless, puffs of spiculated whiteness, like a small wisp of cotton.  They fell gently toward the ground and lingered on whatever they hit momentarily, before becoming incorporated with the accumulated whiteness that covered everything.  By the end of the storm, we accumulated some 17 inches.

At last, it feels like winter has fully arrived.

And even more snow at night.

Covid Garden in twilight, lit up with solar batteries. In reality, it is darker than it appears here. The magic of cellphone cameras.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more.

-Lord Byron

We got started on the rail-trail a little late today – 3 PM.  That’s not a bad time of day to walk as it’s the warmest time of day.  That’s something I look out for because the temperature now is around 10℉.  The shadows lay a little longer on the tarmac, but they are always long this time of year, even at midday.  There’s not much wind, which is a good thing as wind not only makes it feel colder, its teeth find ways to get past the insulation you swathe yourself with.  Yesterday was a warm day, with highs in the thirties, and that served to make the omnipresent ice more walkable.  Despite the late hour, which means we will be finishing our trek after sunset, I decide to go for the usual 6 miles.  Waldo heartily agrees and surges forward to the end of the leash, urging me onward.

One can get lost in the vast stillness of a windless winter afternoon.  Without the rustling of leaves, the buzzing of insects and the other sounds of the living world, there’s nothing for you YOUR mind to latch onto and your attention just floats out into the universe, wanders around in free-association and never congeals into coherent thought.  This is not a bad thing at all.  You experience the world and yourself, not in verbalized thought, but directly, one impression leading to another without stopping to objectify, define, solidify or evaluate.  You are just present.

Several years ago, I was on a canoe trip on the Boundary Waters of upper Minnesota with my brother, two nephews and a grand-nephew.  We chose to go in late August because there would be fewer bugs, most notably, fewer mosquitoes.  I remember one day, paddling down a large lake, Lac La Croix, and I came to intimately know and understand the expression, “deafening silence.”  There was not a breath of air.  No waves slapped against the canoe or the shore.  There was no insect drone, no birds calling, absolutely no sound at all.  I felt like I imagine I would feel in a sensory deprivation tank, at least in terms of sound.  It made me want to slap the water with the paddle just to reassure myself that I had not gone deaf.  It was eerie and a little unsettling, as if, by hearing nothing, I lost contact with my world, and in a sense, my sanity.

Being on the rail-trail with Waldo is not nearly that still, that quiet.  It could never be with a border collie dancing around, doing his doggy thing as he boldly goes where his senses lead him.  But it is still enough in the winter that your grip on the tether that binds you to your usual world slips a bit, allowing Mother Nature to poke your soul with a finger of raw immediate experience.  The brisk cold air, the stark boney BONY skeletons of bushes and trees, the whiteness that covers most everything, the slippery ground underfoot, the yellows and browns of decaying leaves and the fresh cold aroma of winter air washed clean by a recent storm all tickle at your awareness as if to say, “This is what is real, not that imaginary self-created world you think you live in.”

I would guess that anyone out in nature would get some of this feeling and it is likely what draws people out into the woods to camp and hike.  Being retired, though, my mind is freer of thoughts and worries that beset me when I was still working.  My cup is no longer full and can be filled with experiences I would not have paid as much attention to in the past.  The piquancy of being out in nature is what amazes me, though.  I spontaneously react to what I experience there with a profound sense of wonder, beauty, magic and reverence – even when it’s cold, blustery and slippery.  The universe we live in is a truly amazing place and, I believe, under appreciated by most of us.  If this were not so, we would all see to it that manmade climate change would never happen.

As we get within about 5/8 of a mile from returning to our car, it’s getting dark. We pass the Covid garden, now all bedecked with small glowing multicolored LED lights.  It is small and somewhat barren due to the winter.  There are a few people, whom I don’t know and have met only in passing, who have taken on the burden of keeping the garden in good shape.  It was started in 2020 during the Covid lockdown and has slowly blossomed since.  It now sports some small plastic windmills, several solar-powered lights, a chair and a bench to sit on, some imaginative artwork, as well as hibernating greenery that will display a variety of colorful flowers, come spring.  I am not alone in appreciating the art and beauty that Mother Nature has given us and I see this garden as a celebration of it.

And then there’s Waldo.  I look down at him as we return to the car.  No doubt about it.

Waldo loves the outdoors more than any of us humans.

Close to a city street in the dark.

Sometimes, you can see the ice…

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.

-Gretel Ehrlich

It snowed last night, leaving about an inch of the white powdery stuff on top of the sheets of ice Waldo and I have been battling with the past few days.  It covered up the really icy spots so you can’t see them.  The snow is light enough that it doesn’t stick to the underlying ice in some places.  The end result is a lot of surprised slipping and sliding – but not everywhere.  Most places were warmed throughout the day to provide just enough glue to provide adequate purchase, if you’re careful.  So, we walk along, me with an occasional sudden wild lurch and flailing arms, Waldo with a splayed four footed shuffle, but we’re able to keep to our feet.

It’s so quiet and still out here.  Without the rustle of leaves, the chatter of squirrels, the call of birdsong and the buzz of insects, the place seems dead.  But it’s not.  It’s just waiting, forever waiting, for warmer times.  The wilderness has taken a hiatus, it’s recharging, preparing, bracing itself, for the surge of activity that’s sure to come in the spring and summer.  We humans have cut ourselves off, more or less, from this natural rhythm by building cocoons with controlled environments.  Not only our homes and work places, but even our cars insulate us from the harsher parts of nature.  We do it so well that during an entire day, most of us spend only a few minutes out in the unprotected air of Mother Nature.  We’ve nearly severed the umbilical cord that connects us to the world.  Or so we think.

But we fool ourselves.  We can never completely disconnect from nature because we are nature.  Nature is in our organs, our cells, the blood that flows through our veins and arteries.  It’s in our brains and in every thought and emotion we have.  We are a product of the natural world and, until we find some way to transfer our consciousness to a machine, we can only pretend that we’re not bathed in the natural world, that we are separate and different in some essential way from everything else in nature.  We are animals, just like every other animal in the most essential ways.  We need to eat and drink, inhale and exhale, shelter ourselves from the elements and take care of our corporeal selves.  This can only be done by immersing ourselves in nature, to get our air, our food, and the stuff of which our shelters are made from nature.  We not only don’t need to completely insulate ourselves from the rest of nature, we really can’t.

I like to watch Waldo as he lopes down the path.  He’s consumed by the natural world and loves being in it.  He’s not just connected to it, he’s a part of it — a molecule of water in an ocean-wave of life swirling around him.  As I watch, I can see him become totally absorbed in his instinct to smell the ground around him, to be attentive to what’s right in front of him, to indulge his canine nature by running and playing, exploring and feeling the world around him.  To him, home is a place to go to eat and sleep, not a place to be.  Outside is where he exists, inside is merely a place for respite, for recharging.  I’m no different from Waldo.  We’re both animals, both mammals, both naturally occurring organisms.

I’ve found that, when I’m out walking with Waldo, if I open myself up and pay attention to what is happening around me, to be a part of nature and not just passing through it, what I’m really doing is connecting to my true self.  I’m experiencing my own real nature, instead of the artificial and fictitious self that I’ve invented.  I’m feeling how the role I play effects the world around me and how that world impacts on me.  Directly.  In real-time.  I see the footprints I leave behind in the snow.  I feel a cold gust of wind as its icy fingers numb my exposed cheeks.  I see my misty breath as it hangs in the air and watch as the dry air greedily consumes that moisture.  I move through the winter landscape, leaving evidence of my passing and feeling the fingerprint of nature left behind on my soul.  I do not exist as an independent entity, I am merely a small part of a larger natural universe playing with itself.

And when Waldo and I play, the joy is more than doubled.

…sometimes, you can’t.

This stuff is not easy to walk on!

The weather is the weather.  You have to deal with whatever is out there.

-Matt Cassel

In the days after the snowstorm, things warmed up a bit and then it rained, with temps in the forties.  It wasn’t enough rain to melt all the snow, just enough to make the ground kind of mushy.  Then it got real cold, with a “feel-like” temperature of about -7℉.  This effectively solidified the snow and slush and turned what had been hardpack footprints into irregular glassy and very slick ice.  On the rail-trail, I could see where the treads of the snowblower (that finally showed up) carved shallow chevrons in the ice, but could see no other evidence of its having been there.  Except, in places, there were, if you looked carefully, small green dots of salt.  But this was not all along the route and where it was present, it wasn’t enough to make the ice go away.  It just made it kind of crunchy.

Enough time elapsed since the snowstorm that the many people and dogs who passed along the path covered it with footprints that were now all lumpy ice.  In most places, I can find a patch of undisturbed whiteness, mostly off to the side of the trail, so I can walk without sliding around too much.  But not everywhere.  When I get to a particularly slick part, I slow down and take small steps, keeping my weight over my boots and minimizing the sideways pressure that would, more than likely, lead to my falling on my ass.  This causes Waldo to pull harder on the leash, as if saying, “Why we slowing down?  Come on, let’s go!  Let’s go!”  That doesn’t make it any easier to keep my feet under me.

Somehow, it feels more esthetically pleasing to have snow and ice on the ground.  Very cold temperatures without them just doesn’t feel right, like something is amiss.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather walk on bare tarmac than irregular snow and ice.  But looking out over the fields in temperatures around zero, with no fluffy white blanket covering all, just makes it feel like nature is somehow broken.  Like Mother Nature’s overlooked a very important part of what it means to be winter.  Without the snow, the denuded boney trees are still there.  Large nests, apparently now abandoned, easily seen in the upper branches, are still there.  It’s easy to see between the trees for long distances, something that can’t be done except in colder months.  The yellow-brown grass is there, giving witness to the low temperatures.  Everything that says winter is there is present, except the flaky whiteness that covers all and, in my mind, is the essence of winter.  It makes it feel like we’re walking in an abnormally cold day in late fall, instead of an average day in the depths of winter.  But the snow did come, even if late, even if not as deep and not as lingering as usual.

I think Waldo misses the snow when it’s not there too.  He loves to bolt through the stuff, jumping high over the deepest parts in great arcs, and pouncing forcefully with his front paws when he lands, as if smiting some nonexistent prey.  He runs along and, when he wants some water, drops his jaw and scoops up a mouthful without breaking pace.  He rolls over onto his back and wriggles about, making snow-doggies and he will, every once in a while, stop and thrust his nose deep into a snowbank until his whole head disappears.  Yep, you gotta have snow if you’re gonna have winter!  But we make do with what we get.

Climate change has made twenty-first century weather bizarre, for sure.  Heat waves and droughts leading to huge wildfires that burn thousands of acres, more frequent category five hurricanes and terrible flooding, just to name a few.  We’ve been lucky that here in the Northeast, its effect, so far, is to make the snow come late and a January that has days in the upper forties followed by days below zero.  We can, and damn well better, do something about climate change, but the weather, one just has to take it as it comes.  Cursing at it has no effect whatsoever.

In some ways, life is like the weather and its wide swing of temperatures.  One day, you can be sad, the next, irate, then afraid, followed by a day of elation.  Just like how you have to take whatever weather that comes, your emotions come and go and there’s not much you can do about it.  It’s part of being human.  If you accept whatever emotion you have, without attaching too much importance to it and getting overwrought, and just take whatever you feel like you take whatever weather nature brings you, you can more peacefully deal with the ups and downs of life.  The weather will change and so will your emotional state.  Stay on top of the waves of passion, good and bad, ride them like the surf, and don’t drown in the ocean of despair – or fear, or anger, or ecstasy.  Avoid getting dragged into the drama by not taking your feelings too seriously.

I try to follow Waldo’s lead as best as I can.  I can’t see that weather differences change his attitude at all.  He’s always eager to go for a walk on the rail-trail, no matter what the weather.  He struggles in the heat and hurts with ice in his feet, but he is always ready to go and thankful to be there.

And he seems all the happier for it.

Even with four-paw drive, you have to tread carefully.

Where are all the sticks?

To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake it is necessary to stand out in the cold.

-Aristotle

Finally, we got our first real snowstorm of the season.  It left about five inches of the cold, white, fluffy stuff on the ground.  The snowfall was recent enough that they haven’t plowed it yet.  So, it’s work plodding through it; a struggle that leaves a trenched wake punctuated by vaguely boot-shaped holes.  It’s cold enough that the snow retains a powdery consistency — light and easily pushed aside.  Even the hardpack I leave underfoot has more of a suggestion of solidity than the real thing.  Because of its lack of cohesiveness, my boots bite into it effectively, giving me plenty of traction, even with Waldo pulling at the end of the leash.  Other than the fact that I am working up a sweat lifting my feet high enough to clear the snow for the next step, the worst part of it is the uneven surface left behind by those who trod here before me. That shifts my weight enough that I have to use seldom-exercised small muscles to maintain my balance and adds to the workload.

Waldo, he’s in his element.  He bounds through the white powder, leaving his own paw-holes and trenches, moving with grace in wide arcing, soaring leaps that end in a forepaw pounce at undisturbed snow, targeting some imagined beastie that is not there.  His one complaint, if he has one at all, is that all the sticks are buried under an opaque ivory carpet, keeping them well hidden.  He’s not long deterred, though.  He saunters over to a bush and tugs at the lower branches until he’s able to break off a small twig to carry around between his jaws.  Then he runs up to me and nudges my glove with his nose.  I try to explain to him that the twig is too small to play with, that there’s not enough there to play tug-of-war, or, even if I could get it away from him, it’s not big enough to throw.  But he’s not listening.  I try to distract him with a snowball, but the stuff is too powdery to pack well and I just make a cloud of white crystals that hang in the air around me when I try to throw it.  Waldo then bounds out in front of me, at first searching for what he thought he saw me throw, then, giving that up, looking around for the next object of entertainment.

There are a few other people that we meet on the trail, including some with dogs.  On passing those with their canine charges, I smile and say, “Doggy duty knows no bad weather!”  They smile and concur, both people and dogs obviously enjoying the outdoors as much as Waldo and I.  Most of our walk, though, Waldo and I are alone, just Mother Nature and us.

One thing about a snowstorm is that it removes almost all color.  It turns vistas from a Kodachrome moment into a more homogenized black and white Ansel Adams’ landscape.  But man, what nature can do in black and white!  Everything is softened, much of the fine texture is removed, leaving behind a blemish free smoothness that rolls on, in places as far as you can see.  Like an undisturbed mud puddle begs for a good splashy stomp, the unsullied smooth white fields and meadows cry out, plead with you, to please go thither and leave a swath of disordered whiteness, even a snow-angel or two.  Maybe leave a huge heart, or a peace symbol or whatever else your artistic inclination may engender.  But, alas, the fields we can see are all on private property and beyond our reach.

After a little more than a mile, Waldo stops and starts biting at his left rear paw.  I know what that means – he’s developing ice between his pads and toes.  That’s not a good sign.  If the snow is hardpack it won’t grow in his paws, but this powdery stuff, at these temperatures, can.  Chunks of ice jammed in his feet can cause frostbite.  If it’s bothering him enough to want to bite it out, his skin is getting cold enough that it can become necrotic if allowed to continue.  When he was a puppy, I could pick him up and carry him home, but he weighs about 55 pounds now.  I’ve tried putting him in booties in the past, but he doesn’t tolerate them and pulls them off.  Regretfully, I decide to turn around so he can warm up his toes, before bad things happen.

I’m surprised, but Waldo seems most agreeable to turning around.  But, then, I know that we won’t be home for long and he’ll be agitating me to go outside again.  That’s okay, I’m getting tired of fighting with the snow anyway.  We’ll just bite back at this winter landscape thing in smaller bits today.

It’ll still be there, waiting for us to return.

The thing about snow is that it turns into ice.

It’s cold.

Now is the winter of our discontent…

-from Richard III, William Shakespeare

And now it’s bitter cold, with highs in the upper twenties and lows in the low teens.  The sun is at its highpoint for the day, in a clear, pale-blue sky, but still not far from the horizon.  Shadows of skeletal trees splay long on the asphalt.  Glassy ice-covered ponds and puddles, ensconced in decaying leaves and twiggy, leafless brush, shine a bright reflection of the surrounding hibernating flora.  Streams meander in bright, silvery, serpentine belts of mirror, winding their way, motionless, into the distant wood around tree, rock and hillock.  It’s quiet, so very quiet.  I can hear my pantlegs rubbing against each other and the soft pad of my boots as I walk along.  Waldo’s misty breath hangs in the air with each pant, visible for only a few seconds before its moisture is ravenously sucked up by the cold dry air.  Nature is on hold, awaiting warmer, sunnier days.

Rabbits, squirrels and birds must be huddled in their winter quarters; none are out to be seen.  Just a few days ago, they showed themselves cavorting in pairs, in the grass, up tree trunks and in the sky.  They must have come to the conclusion that this was a day to snuggle in their nests, to hold tight to their breasts whatever warmth they could engender.  I probably would too, if it weren’t for the fact that I have a nice warm comfy place to go to when I’m done walking.  Waldo, he doesn’t seem to care one way or the other about being in the cold.  He’s eager to hit the trail and gleefully bounds around until we get home.  Even once there, he spends much of his time out on the balcony, surveying his dogdom from on high.  He does come in to warm up on occasion, though.

It’s still safe to be outdoors, but right now, in the icy cold of the Covid pandemic, we humans should all be staying home, like the rabbits, squirrels and birds — as much as possible.  We should be jealously holding our health close to our chests like our animal friends do their warmth on a cold wintry day.  Also, we need to do whatever else we can think of to protect ourselves and others, like get vaccinated and wear masks when around others.  The Omicron variant is raging, with the daily numbers of the newly infected rising to double of any peak seen before.  It looks like it’s not as deadly, percentage wise, as the Delta variant, but it can still make you very sick and kill.  Hospitalizations are soaring in large numbers, although most just need supplemental oxygen.  The number of intubated ICU patients has not, thankfully, surged as much, but there are so many sick from the disease that even at lower percentages of serious illness, the numbers are large.  Those who have died from Covid have not shown a dramatic increase in number with the Omicron variant, but plenty are still dying.

We really need to hold the course, this pandemic is not over.  Each and every one of us should be doing whatever we can to remain uninfected and avoid spreading the virus further.   The more people who are sick, the more virus there is out there and the more opportunity the virus has to mutate into something even nastier than what we’ve seen so far.  Studies have shown that getting the virus is no permanent bulwark against getting it again.  It appears, for example, that, for now, if you get the Omicron variant, you will have some resistance to getting the Delta variant – for six months or so.  The Delta variant does not seem to offer much resistance to getting the Omicron variant, however, and it is not unusual for someone to recover from Delta to turn around and get Omicron.

I know, I know, pandemic fatigue is eating at all of us.  Thank God Waldo and I can still safely go out for our daily walks.  I don’t know how I would deal with a border collie who couldn’t be exercised.  But, if I needed to, I would find a way.  We must do everything we can to stop the spread of this disease.  We need to continue to be careful, very careful, and avoid as much exposure as we can.  This is not the time relax our vigilance and take unnecessary risks.  Eventually, like every other pandemic in the past, the urgency of our response will fade, if not completely disappear.  But that time is not now.  To quote Winston Churchill, “Now, this is not the end.  It is not even the beginning of the end.  But it is, perhaps, it is the end of the beginning.”   Things will get better.

For now, get vaccinated, mask up and avoid gatherings as much as possible.

Cold? What cold?

I could swear Fort Meadow Reservoir was out there somewhere…

There it is, fog, atmospheric moisture still uncertain in destination, not quite weather and not altogether mood, yet partaking of both.

-Hal Borland

It’s the first of January and it’s 49℉ outside!  Fog lies thick on the ground and the tarmac is shiny-wet and bepuddled from a light rain falling earlier in the morning.  The entire Universe has been reduced to a circle of a quarter-mile in diameter.  The trail up ahead bends into the mist and disappears into mystery, as if a magical veil has fallen across it, hiding where it leads.  Sound penetrates a shorter distance than light, deadening even the ubiquitous city noise of cars and machinery.  Waldo is the expert on smells, but my guess would be that even odors have decreased range due to the super-humidity.   To me, the predominant, although faint, smell is one of dampness and decay, which is directly under my feet.  The air is still and heavy and lies on my shoulders like a wet blanket.  How can this be happening in January?

But it is January.  And a good day to walk your dog.  Most of the people Waldo and I pass are at one end of a leash, the other end being pulled by a canine of some variety, size or type.  This, too, is surprising for this time of year.  It’s as if dog owners, en masse, awoke and realized this was an opportunity not to be missed.  Or maybe it was the dogs who saw the chance for a spring-like break and pestered their caretakers mercilessly until they consented to a walk in the foggy woods.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many dogs with their people out here before.

I like walking in the fog.  The here-and-now takes on a presence that is more manageable, more tangible, more comprehensible, than on a sunny day when you can see and hear seemingly forever.  It’s as if reality presents itself in bite-sized chunks, making it easier to focus on what’s right before you and ignore the rest.  Because you can’t sense the rest – it’s all lost in the mist.  It can’t distract and confuse you, can’t vie for your attention and compete with the immediacy of what’s right in front of you.  It’s kind of reassuring, and even welcoming.  Maybe, too, it makes it easier to set aside your mundane issues and concerns, to take a break, as if they were all in another world somewhere else.

I have a commercial multiengine land pilot’s license with an instrument rating and I used to love to fly around in the clouds.  The only reference to my location was revealed indirectly by the needles and readouts displayed in front of me – none of my attention was directed out the window.  To fly on instruments requires a constant scan of the altimeter, airspeed indicator, artificial horizon, turn and bank indicator, gyrocompass and radio navigation instruments.  There is no time to appreciate the view (there isn’t much of that anyway — just white mist) and the reason I liked to do it was that it was a technological challenge.  Even so, there was a certain beauty to flying along, following the directions of the flight controller on the ground and the instruments in front of me.  Then, dropping through the bottom of the clouds, bam! there, right in front of me, lined up perfectly as if by magic, was the runway I was aiming for.  There were limits, though – usually a minimum visibility of 2 miles and a ceiling of six hundred feet.  I would not be flying in conditions as thick as these.

Maybe the weather today is an apt metaphor for what awaits us in 2022.  God knows we have a lot of problems before us — Covid is raging, climate change is worsening, politics is divisive in this midterm election year, inflation is blossoming and we have a supply-chain problem driving down the availability of so many goods and services.  Trying to see what the new year will offer is like looking into the fog, trying to see what is around that bend in the trail lost in the mist.  Maybe, just maybe, the best route forward through 2022 is to focus on what’s right before us, the immediate concerns we all have.  A little less attention spent on the things we can’t control and more on what we can, might just make us all a little more companionable, caring and satisfied.  And a lot easier to get along with.

What’s right in front of me, right now, is a three and a half year old border collie, who is romping and cavorting, clearly having a good time.  My plan for 2022 is to put much of my attention there, to ensure that he continues to enjoy life by housing him, feeding him, giving him doggy-loves and taking him for walks.  Waldo, he is already in the moment, concentrating on what is in front of him.   I don’t think he ever pays much attention to what is more than a quarter-mile away.  His focus is mainly on the ground an inch or so under his nose.  The fog doesn’t seem to phase him in the least.  But then, nothing much ever does.  And, judging by his wagging tail and brisk pace, he is a very happy puppy.

And that, by itself, makes me happy.

It’s okay, Waldo. Trust me. The trail does keep going.

Gonna eat you!

Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.

-Confucius

I woke up with a mild sore throat, some sinus discomfort and a little nasal congestion.  This rapidly progressed to include a low-grade fever and a mild cough.  The sinus pain for the first day was bad enough to make it difficult to sleep well and the nasal congestion became a rhinorrhea flood.  All in all, I was feeling a bit too rocky for Waldo and my usual daily six-mile jaunt and I decided to take it easy.  But the dog still has to go out and do his business, so we went on more half-mile walks than usual, staying around the property where we live.  Waldo took it well, but I know he missed being out on the rail-trail.

It rained that first night — well, more of a heavy mist, really.  The temperature was right around freezing and ice was everywhere.  Windshields had about an eighth of an inch of clear lumpy ice glued to their glass like epoxy.  Because it was clear, light would go cleanly through it, but the uneven surface defocused it so you really couldn’t make out well-formed images on the other side.  The grass was covered by a thin sheet of rime ice that looked white, but was contiguous and it crunched underfoot.  The asphalt and cement sidewalks were coated in black ice that was very slippery and I had to step carefully.  Waldo, not so much.  His four-paw drive kept him upright better than my bipedal stumble-and-shuffle did.

The trees, now that was something special — particularly at night.  The freezing rain coated all the branches, large and small, with an eighth inch of transparent ice, as if they’d been dipped in clear glass.  During the day, this made the tree tops, where the really small branches are, appear white.  But at night, there was magic.

It was after dark and as I crunched my way along on the grass, being gently (mostly) pulled forward by Waldo, I gazed up at what winter left behind of a large old Norway maple.  Its leaves were all long gone and the icy limbs refracted the ambient light in a way that made them stand out all shiny.  On the other side of the tree, about as high as the middle of the fullest part of the tree, was a small lamp.  Not a street lamp, but a dimmer light on top of a pole.  It was placed there, no doubt, to illuminate the grounds, dimly, for anyone sauntering around in the dark.  At first, as I walked along, the lamp and the tree were not on the same line as my eye and the light’s nearness just served to make the tree look like it was made up of long shiny needles poking up into the air.  Very pretty.

Then, as the lamp came into alignment with the tree, wondrous things happened.  I’ve noticed before that if you look at a light through the branches of a tree at night, the light reflects off the surfaces of the branches in a way that makes it look like they surround the light.  Dozens of circles of small thin twigs completely, but intermittently, engulf the light as if it is being suspended in a porous, woven, woody ball.  In order to get the most dramatic effect, it works best if you position your eye so the light is blocked by a good-sized branch, in order to dim the brightness of the light itself.  But on that night, it wasn’t necessary.  Since the branches were all covered in ice and the lamp was not too bright, the interplay of the two put on a slowly evolving and amazing display as I walked past.

At first, it looked like the tree was opening up to engulf the source of the light — like a big maw, full of long, slender, silvery teeth, widening and reaching out to bite it.  It then closed its fearsome jaws, holding the light gently and loosely inside a skeletal, globular mouth.  Finally, as the lamp and tree slowly left true alignment, the tree appeared to open up on its other side, as if thinking better of swallowing it, and let the light loose safely into the darkness once again.

I’m not sure why I find that so fascinating, but I do.  Maybe the element of finding the unexpected in the midst of the ordinary plays a role.  I’m quite sure Waldo was oblivious to what I witnessed, but, then, I have little to no idea of the vast world he smells, especially in all its variety and wonder, as he walks along.  We’re both entertained by our walks, no matter how short.

And that’s what counts.

Different tree, different light, same affect.