David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Heave Ho!

Drivers beware!  In New England this is the frost heave season when the contrast of daytime warmth and evening cold cause a rash of bumps, bruises and pimples on even the smoothest, best constructed roadways.  The bane of highway crews and a boon for alignment shops, heaves alter the expectations of a journey.  The familiar road you could sleep-drive through and may often travel in a fugue is suddenly different.  If you stray into your normal mode of driving, a hump or a dip is sure to awaken you to a changed world.

“The main thing that causes soil to heave, or swell,” Mariana Gosnell writes in Ice: The Nature, the History, and Uses of an Astonishing Substance, “is water being sucked through fine soil channels to scattered sites and being converted into discrete bodies of ice, which push soil particles apart to make room for themselves.”  Regardless of their origin, frost heaves give us less chance at this time of year to fall into a somnolent routine while on the road.  There’s no getting entirely used to the changes because the weather has the wherewithal to surprise us with variations over night.  It can be a rockin’ and rollin’, horse-bucking, rollercoaster, corduroy-rattling ride and the unwary might require some car repair or worse.

Frost heaves may be a nuisance and in some cases an outright danger, but I like the way they upset expectations and force us to look at the dull daily drive a little differently.  They’re part and parcel of a season that demands we get used to the unexpected.

Breathing River

Winter is not the monolithic freeze that haunts many imaginations.  Deep cold is a kind of capricious tide that arrives and departs at irregular intervals.  There’s no better gauge of this than the seesaw spread and retreat of river ice throughout the season.  One week the water is sealed as hard as macadam and the next it is fluid, waxy and dark.  I like watching the slow creep of the glassy surface, solidifying first in shelves along the shore.  It spreads in thin gossamer sheets that grow in fits and starts with the vagaries of sunlight and temperature until a cold snap leaves only the strongest currents flowing.  Eventually even the fast water coagulates leaving the river motionless and quiet until the next inevitable thaw.  The flux and reflux of ice seems akin to respirations, and I imagine the river as the lungs of winter with breaths expressing the season’s rhythm.

Ice Collecting

Blame the time of year, but my mind is frozen on the subject of ice.  Praising ice may be impolitic, loutish even in the midst of a New England February when most sane individuals anticipate spring, but everywhere I look these days I find myself fascinated with ice in innumerable shapes, textures, colors, and origins.  Like many people with a passion, I’ve decided to start a collection.

Ephemeral by nature, it’d be impossible to collect the real thing, so I instead I’ll amass a list of all the graphic and striking names the English language has absorbed to describe frozen water.  Like any miser of old coins, buttons or spoons, I’ll store my finds away to gaze upon at special moments—most likely during the sweltering grip of August.

“Needle ice,” the fine frozen spikes that crunch underfoot on newly frozen soil, is one of my favorites because it sounds like walking on broken glass and the tiny needles seem to grin from cracks in the frozen ground.  I’m also fond of “frazil,” tiny ice platelets that form in rivers and look like floating clusters of cellophane filaments.  But nothing can beat the lacy, windswept delicacy of rime which forms when water droplets condense on cold objects.

Species of ice are rich in suggestive metaphor with names like pancake, pack, candle, bullet, ribbon, honeycomb, grease and plate.   There are icebergs, icicles, ice dams, ice walls and ice volcanoes (a frozen cone formed when waves push water up through a hole in shoreline ice).  Newfoundland sealers and fishermen used terms like glin, sish, selvage, stritch, glitter, conkerbills, ballycatters, and clumper to describe various ice types.

Names define and domesticate an object, make it more familiar and provide us with a sort of possession.  No wonder the true name of God remains a secret.  Maybe if we had a better lexicon for ice we’d enjoy its presence more.

Ice is the essence of change, transformation, and evanescence.  It’s a protean material emblematic of our time.  Let’s proclaim a new ice age.  Send me ice names with all the spectacular variety worthy of the substance itself.  I’ll publish a way-cool list in mid summer.

Flowers of Winter

While many people are fond of snow, ice has but few advocates save skaters and climbers.  No doubt ice is a menace beneath tires or underfoot and the term “black ice” justly inspires fear.  But in New England, ice is also one of the most beautiful facts of winter life, at least when not adhering to pavement.

Although ice is most commonly associated with lakes, ponds and quiet river reaches where it first forms, it attains its greatest artistry in the thick of winter when deep temperatures freeze water in motion.  River rapids, waterfalls, seeping highway rock cuts and even the roof edges of our own houses form ice in the most delicate and fantastical shapes.

At home, icicles as delicate as soda straws or thick as walrus tusks often cling to the shingled drip-line of a roof and sparkle in sunlight like a row of teeth.  Rocks in fast moving water turn into lumpy, glistening cauliflowers often edged in a lace of spray and shaped to the whims of currents.  Waterfalls appear like whipped cream confections frequently imitating delicate foam though they’re granite hard.  Fossilized by cold, they look as if still in motion.

Rock cuts along highways where water seeps from soil and bedrock fractures offer the most glorious displays of ice, though we pass them so often we hardly notice.  Leaning over steep ledges and cascading from precipitous heights, ice forms in odd shaped pillows, massive columns and stalactites, fanciful ribbons and curtains.  It appears differently in sun or shadow and may come in soft, transparent tourmaline shades of green and blue, occasionally rust or peach.

Ice formations clinging to rock cuts are the flowers of winter, as delicate and ephemeral as any rosebud or petal.  Like flowers, we watch them grow, reach maturity and fade away.  Better than summer’s blossoms, they are just as beautiful in decline, slowly rotting into ever more bizarre shapes until disappearing.  Depending on the weather, roadside ice can bloom multiple times.

Though winter is a rugged season, it produces among the most fragile and evanescent phenomena.  But you don’t have to get icy cold to experience some of the season’s best.  It’s right out the windshield.

Getting Real About Groundhog Day

Flipping through my calendar, I’m hard pressed to find a more bizarre holiday than Groundhog Day.  Given all the magnificent wildlife from eagles to elk and grizzly bears that might stir a nation’s passion, it seems a bit odd to have a day commemorating a sluggish rodent that is the bane of gardeners and lawn aficionados.  In a month where Presidents Washington and Lincoln have had their birthdays expunged from most calendars and collapsed into the insipid Presidents’ Day, celebration over the unlikely issuance of this burrowing creature from deep hibernation seems remarkable.

Like a biblical prophet emerging from a cave with a divine message, legend has it that the groundhog will appear at its burrow opening on February 2nd.  On a sunny day it will see its shadow presaging six more weeks of winter, but should the day be overcast spring will come early. Yet inasmuch as spring’s arrival at the vernal equinox is a function of astronomy when night and day are equalized, there are always six more weeks of winter regardless of what the groundhog sees.

Despite my skepticism, I honored tradition and recently paid a visit to my local groundhog at the Lutz Children’s Museum in Manchester, Connecticut where I caught up with Chuckles VII, known to friends as Molly.  A handsome fur ball with a lustrous brown coat, she busily munched on a banana during an interview.  Unassuming and quiet, she refused to reveal whether she consulted weather charts, radar, or even the Old Farmer’s Almanac.  Though too polite to comment on her colleagues in the business, it was clear that she didn’t cotton to the Hollywood-like hoopla surrounding Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil.

Balanced equally on the fulcrum of days between the advent of winter and the start of spring, this midpoint of our harshest season is noteworthy regardless of the groundhog’s participation, and the moment has been observed for millennia in some cultures.  Furthermore, given that most holidays commemorate heroes, historical events and other weighty matters, a day leavened with frivolous ritual is no doubt a welcome relief.

But maybe we’re not making the best use of the holiday.  In these times when weather and climate have given rise to earnest controversy with serious political and practical consequences, perhaps we ought to seize this transitional time in the year to promote climatological knowledge and open discussion of issues faced by a planet confronting significant changes.  We can still have fun with groundhogs to keep things from getting overly contentious.