Panorama ~ Jasper, Alberta. Click for wide view.
Panorama ~ Jasper, Alberta. Click for wide view.
January Escape to Jasper
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Taking the train across the northern prairies into mountain country is a delight: columnar conifers slipping by, lake surfaces luminescent in the moonlight…
We splurged on a winter deal at Jasper Park Lodge – admittedly a cushy way to experience the wilds of the mountains. From the Great Hall, crackle of fireplace nearby, comforting beverage in hand, bum firmly planted in cushioned armchair, this is the view that greets you:
And then there’s the view from the trail. Worth getting up for!
How amazing that there is a culturally approved opportunity to bring a real live whole tree into my home to sit in the front window of the living room for all the passers-by to see! It’s such an odd tradition, seen with fresh eyes. Why do we do it? There’s never a holiday where we bring a boulder into our homes.
Whatever the original reason, I’m delighted we do. I love trees. They’ve grown to have a significant place in my pantheon of spiritual practice. It began on a walk I used to take regularly on a path that led beside a row of evergreen trees. They called to me to brush their branch tips with my bare fingers. In winter I’d take off a mitt to let the direct contact happen. I was surprised to notice that I felt a subtle… something. Their energy, is one way of putting it. The trees of a park a little further down the path would call me to place my palm directly on their trunks, standing quietly with the tree. This palm-to-trunk contact inexplicably produces a calming, grounded effect in me.
The weekend has arrived when we must say farewell to the tree that has shared our home for weeks. I sit in the armchair beside it, artificial lights turned off in the dim morning light, so that the tree’s own spirit can shine through. I have treated it as a presence unto itself this year – welcoming it to my home and greeting it with a “hello, tree” occasionally.
I feel somewhat at odds with the tradition, though – much as I love having the tree in my home, it is a selfish human act. Of course it is dying – has been ever since it was cut – and soon it will be a mound under the snow in the alley.
But even well after cutting, I’ve found that wood retains its spirit. Furniture, walls, stairways, or flooring of wood can have the same effect. A certain cut across the grain to produce a thick sloping table edge fits the human hand well for that buzz of palm-contact. There’s something mysteriously special about trees – when we scurrying bipeds slow our pace enough to soak up their presence.
Dark of Winter
The wheel of the year turns, bringing us round to the dark time. It is the season of long, deep nights, with restful darkness drawn about us like a soft quilt: that comfort at the heart of winter.
The ethereal blessing of prairie winter nighttime is the abundance of bright, reflective snow. Every light picked up a million-fold in the water crystals along the surface of their banks and fields. It mysteriously hangs twinkling in the air as if snow fairies had just danced by. It is a beautiful, magical season.
And now, on solstice morning, we’re “half-way through the dark,” as they so aptly put it in a Christmas Dr. Who episode not so long ago. The dark and light ebb and flow, like the ocean tides in celestial slow motion. The darkness now begins receding – and as I sit by my window on this sacred morning, I feel a friendly loneliness for it at the prospect.
Coyote
I saw a coyote in the park nearby, leaping through the deep snow, earlier this week. I saw the same one in our back alley the same night, minutes later. I don’t see them often here, myself. And sadly, I have never heard them sing since moving to the city. More often I see the tracks in the snow in the morning – that lone set of ‘dog’ tracks with no companion human tracks alongside, meandering around the neighbourhood. Once recently I saw a pair of these independent canine tracks – one large and one small, going down our front sidewalk and, boldly, right up our neighbour’s front walk.
This one’s size surprised me when I saw it again in the alley, out of the park’s deep snow. I always think of coyotes as small – I guess my basis of comparison has always been wolves (in the abstract). I was surprised to see that, with all that silky, fluffy hair, it looked about the size of my own 50lb dog. City living must be kind to him!
This drove me to my trusty, all purpose Alberta Nature Guide (Lone Pine), that I picked up at that source of all things country – Peavey Mart! Lo and behold, a coyote’s weight is listed as 10 – 22 kg. Which means nothing to me. So I Googled it to good old pounds and found that it’s nearly 50 lbs! And stands 2 feet high.
All this led me back to Google, which taught me that this Western Canadian coyote is even smaller than his Eastern cousins! And that nice soft-looking coat he has is softer than the coats of his relatives out east, too. (source)
The university at the end of the rainbow
Winter Rainbow!
Very unusual for this northern prairie spot to have rainbows in the winter – this one from last Saturday (Nov 30) is the latest occurring one we’ve noticed here.
A cold snap hit this week, with flesh searing temperatures reaching sub -30 degrees Celsius with the wind chill. Bundling up for commuter walks becomes an art – or an obsession. Dog walks become brief back yard visits, bare canine foot pads carefully protected by small felt dog boots. Nature manifests as the Adversary. Beware the traveller who wanders from the known path!
Accompanying a dog on a nocturnal backyard visit, I am distracted from the seeping cold by the stars’ silent vigil overhead. The calmness of the winter scene settles around me. A muffled crack! fills the air, and another. The sentinel row of spruce standing by a neighbour’s house is popping in the cold, instantly transporting me to the novel I am reading, featuring vivid descriptions of a storm of mythic proportions – a storm for a mythical land.
Stephen King’s recent gunslinger book, The Wind Through the Keyhole, includes storytelling of fantastical weather more extreme than what I am experiencing – a comforting perspective:
The starkblast comes suddenly, you ken. One moment you’re warm as toast—because the weather always warms up before—and then it falls on you, like wolves on a ruttle of lambs. The only warning is the sound the trees make as the cold of the starkblast rolls over them. A kind of thudding sound, like grenados covered with dirt. The sound living wood makes when it contracts all at once, I suppose. …”
“The temperature can fall to as much as forty limbits below freezing in less than an hour,” Roland said grimly. “Ponds freeze in an instant, with a sound like bullets breaking windowpanes. Birds turn to ice-statues in the sky and fall like rocks. Grass turns to glass.” …
[T]he extreme peril of his situation announced itself in a series of low, thudding explosions. “What’s that?”
“Trees on the far side of the Great Canyon,” Daria said. “Extreme rapid temperature change is causing them to implode. Seek shelter, Tim.”
The starkblast—what else?
A Tale in the Snow
This timeless reflection has such a mesmerizing dreamlike quality…
To one who lives in the snow and watches it day by day, it is a book to read. The pages turn as the wind blows; the characters shift and the images formed by their combinations change in meaning, but the language remains the same. It is a shadow language, spoken by things that have gone by and will come again. The same text has been written there for thousands of years, though I was not here, and will not be here in winters to come, to read it. These seemingly random ways, these paths, these beds, these footprints, these hard, round pellets in the snow: they all have meaning. Dark things may be written there, news of other lives, their sorties and excursions, their terrors and deaths.
From the irresistibly titled book: The Stars, The Snow, The Fire
By John Haines. Published by the also irresistibly named Graywolf Press
Don’t these words leap to mind!? ……… “Winter is coming”…
A book I was delighted to discover lying about the house after my partner returned from foraging in the library, hunting down a quote from our old favourite nature fix – The Road Home.
Colours of Winter
One of my most loved pieces of naturalist literature is Diane Ackerman’s book, Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and other ways to Start the Day. Here is an excerpt from the chapter Where it’s Winter – a revelry in colour.
Monet understood the subjective lens through which snow, though rumoured to be white, often appears confetti-colored as it reflects the winter sun. Dig a hole in the snow and a blue shadow appears at the bottom, because on our planet all shadows are blue, sky-tinted, the scheme of winter dawn.
An opalescent sky becomes the stinging blue of mosque tiles or stage scenery. It’s an azure blue, from the ancient word for lapis lazuli, the intense blue mineral flecked with gold that has emblazoned church and palace walls since antiquity. Polished lapis gives soul to a mosaic, including dawn’s chimeras of jumbled outlines, blurred edges, and phantom forms. We bundle up but the trees go naked in winter. I’ve always loved the way sky is captured in their bare limbs. Held by the delicate tracery of twigs, sky resembles light pouring through leaded stained-glass windows. …
Porch lights shine along the street — white, yellow, gold — like distant stars each tinted differently by the gas at its core. As a result shadows streak behind the trees. The magnolia branches are all elbows.
Winter is a blue season, gray-blue at dawn, blue-white in landscapes, and for many people blue in mood. For them it’s not enough that the sun rises each day, if it just trickles copper across the lake instead of trumpeting reds and oranges. The short days don’t fill their reservoirs of light, and anyway most of the animals are scarce and the plants dead. Personally, I love winter, and regard snow as a great big toy that falls from the sky, just as I did as a child. I love how snow becomes a prism in the sun, crinkling with colors, and how ice coating a winter fence creates visual firecrackers. I love that snow is a mineral, falling as billions of temporary stars.
Snow falling in the lamp light
A fluffy grey blanket hangs overhead; the air fills with glittering crystals; and a deep soft carpet sparkles below. The snow swirling around the park lampposts in the dim early morning light conjure childhood tales of Narnia adventure, or cozy Christmas movies.
“And then she saw that there was a light ahead of her; not a few inches away where the back of the wardrobe ought to have been, but a long way off. Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air….
She began to walk forward, crunch-crunch, over the snow and through the wood towards the light.
In about ten minutes she reached it and found that it was a lamp-post. As she stood looking at it, wondering why there was a lamp-post in the middle of a wood and wondering what to do next, she heard a pitter patter of feet coming toward her.”
~C. S. Lewis
Field to Forest 