January: Snow

January 2, our backyard
Venus is low in the sky as the sun comes up. The waning quarter moon is high in the south. No snow.

January 4, East Woods
Leaves are annealed to the ground by frost at 8:15. They are as brittle as old newspapers in an herbarium, the ones wrapped around collections from the 70s or earlier that have yet to be mounted. There’s no flipping them over without breaking them or potentially tearing what’s beneath. A woodpecker calls, possibly a downy. A cluster of 20 white oak acorns are embedded in the wood chips spilled over from the trail onto the forest floor. They have landed in a good spot: fifteen appear to be firmly rooted. In a non-mast year, I don’t expect we’d see this many in such a prime spot, plump and happy and optimally placed for squirrel-pilfering, unbothered nonetheless.

There is very little green in the woods today. I walk through the spruces slowly, considering the plants senesced and brittle along the trail’s edge, trying to remember what was growing there three or four months earlier. There was a colony of woolly aphids on one of these plants, but I cannot remember which species it was. It wasn’t the wood nettles. Possibly the white snakeroot? Leftover fungus stalks are arrested in their decomposing. A bluejay calls. A brilliant green mat of Thuidium moss spreads out in a hollow near the north end of the trail before the road. I spend a little time looking at it, not studying it so much as recalling. I saw the same species or something very like it in the mountains of Tamaulipas a year and a half ago, beneath Acer skutchii and the podocarps, and the species has taken me back to that trip every time I’ve encountered it in the past year.

I cross the road and then the bridge where the water is still, pass the tagged bur oaks by the Big Rock Visitor Station. The forest floor is charred and smells like only a oak-maple forest smells, the particular mix of wood and mostly dry oak leaves with the smoldering of damp, flattened maple leaves that darken and are charred or simply dried to the texture of old bible paper at their margins. There must be connoisseurs of these smells, who can distinguish the East Woods after a burn from all other woods after their respective burns, and the burns of different years from each other. A dog could probably do so, and perhaps does. But we are unlikely to ever know, because the smells they discern in the burning woods are less interesting to them than the distinctions they make between a raccoon and two raccoons, or between the smell of a fox that ran past this point five hours ago and one that sauntered. Singed acorn caps of bur and white oak are buried in the leaf mold.

The morning light is brilliant against the white oaks climbing the south slope of the moraine that runs west from the Big Rock Visitor Station. Indiangrass along the trail falls somewhere in color between a sugar maple leaf, a scarlet oak, and the pale yellow of a shagbark hickory leaflet, all in optimal color in mid-October, and then all dampened by winter. It has translocated a little nitrogen belowground, storing it for next year,^[1] leaving the stems to ripen all through the winter as meadow voles hide in their bases.

January 6, Maple Grove

Brooklyn and I take the walk through our neighborhood to Maple Grove. We pass homes of a few people we know, a few whom we recognize and wave to when they are out on other warmer days, more often on afternoons, many more whom we don’t know at all. I am embarrassed to admit how few I know personally along this walk; I know the trees in many of their yards individually, but I have never met most of the people. We pass the fountain by the train station, cut through the library parking lot, get into Denburn Woods. We run into another dog-walker, a resident with whom I’ve spoken before. She’s lived here since 1997. The region used to freeze all winter long, she tells me. She says the maples are all dying, growing thick knots in their trunks and breaking off, rotted on the inside, weakened by fungi. She says it’s happening in the yards and neighborhoods as well as in the Forest Preserve. She asks what we know, and I tell her I don’t know a thing about it. I’ve noted the same thing on a few trees but assumed it was natural. Perhaps I have been unduly unalarmed; I often am. Is this cohort of sugar maples just reaching a critical age all at the same time, going through challenges of old age? Is each individual becoming susceptible to the fungi and insects evolving within it? Give scale insects a long enough time, and they’ll learn to love one individual ponderosa pine.^[2] They adapt, generation after generation, to a single pine tree. An insect population can undergo hundreds of generations during the lifetime of a single tree, so the insect population evolves while the individual tree—being an individual, not a population on its own—does not, and may become more vulnerable in old age for that reason alone. The population of trees may do just fine while the old inviduals succumb. Perhaps the fungi evolve this way, individuals overlapping year after year, generation taking over generation. Or perhaps they evolve as individuals, mutations arising at random among the billions of hyphal growing points competing with one another, natural selection winnowing the hyphae, the fungus becoming better-adapted to this particular tree over time while this tree stands in place, gritting its teeth. These are only guesses; it would take studying to know.

A light dusting of snow outlines the honeysuckles that line the trail into Maple Grove. The pond that was green with duckweed in December is pale gray. Snow is stirred into the upper inches of water, and the duckweed is either tucked into the slush or sunken to the shallow bottom. I stick a heel into the edge of the water and a plume of hydrogen sulfide rises, bearing the smell of rotten eggs. A few duckweed fronds stick to my boot. A buck has rubbed one side of a maple sapling smooth with its antlers.

January 13, Maple Grove and Lyman Woods

The wet snow that we expected to start in the middle of the night Thursday got going wholeheartedly by 4:00 or 5:00 Friday morning. It was cutting diagonally across the yard by the time the sky was lighting up, the living room window spawning snow and our cats against it all eyes.^[3] Joni, the smaller one, stood on her hind legs to watch a rabbit bound across the yard. Brooklyn slept. Aggregates of snow fell as large as corn flakes and coated the trees and cars and sidewalks within minutes.

Rachel and Brooklyn and I walked to Maple Grove watching the neighborhoods fill with snow. It was wet enough to coat the branches of the honeysuckles and rim the leaves still hanging onto the sugar maples and the ironwoods. By the time we got home, the snow had turned into rain. We all stayed home that day, made slushballs and worked and ate as the rain froze to the driveway and the roofs.

The temperature dropped. We got an inch or two more snow Saturday morning and enough wind to blow it around. In the morning it was a little below freezing as I walked toward Lyman woods. Friday’s snow had iced up before the light snow fell over the top of it. On Sterling Road north of Ogden, a sprawling Japanese yew heavy with snow overhung the sidewalk. A clan of rabbits had been traveling the sidewalk connecting the sectors of their compound beneath the branches. Beside their paw prints were the scratches of tree sparrows, some now flitting into the shrub, one perched momentarily on the chainlink fence behind it. Beyond the fence, an older dog walked up the wooden steps with some difficulty, or at least slowly, to a back door and waited, then barked. Blue jays called.

An exposed oriole’s nest was becoming dilapidated in an elm tree arched over the street. Voles had tunneled through the new snow in an unshoveled section of sidewalk, making a short, perilous dash between the ditch lining the road and an adjacent vacant lot dominated by buckthorn and rimmed with Russian mulberry. Snowmelt bubbled audibly through the sewers beneath the sidewalk and the yards, a warren carved beneath the rabbit and mouse tunnels in the vacant lot. The sewers will be a treasure for archaeaologists of the future, a story of our unceasing resistance to the appalling strength of water.^[4] What will they make of these futile battles we carved into the land?

Deer prints ran across the trails in Lyman Woods. Divots in the snow stood out in the sunlight diffusing from the east, hinting at topographies built up over seasons and decades and centuries. Snow can reveal the shadows of overlapping histories camouflaged behind the green of midsummer. The creek that drains out to the neighborhoods on the east side of the preserve bubbled and moistened the air above it, glueing the snow on the branches into sugary blobs. I like to watch the whole of the forest to the south at this point, as I walk downslope to the creek and up the steeper bank on the far side. The woods resolve into a chiaroscuro of snow glazing the west faces of the boles, the trunks and stems emerging from the snow a warm black in relief. Nan Shepard wrote of the view as she descended a familiar trail in the Cairngorms, “one watches the high panorama opposite settle into itself as one descends. It enchants me like a juggler’s trick. Every time I come down I want promptly to go back and see it all over again.” It is similar, the recurring present, on this section of trail through Lyman Woods.

Canada geese call to each other as sandhill cranes croak low overhead, revolving around an axis centered approximately on the lake and marshes that feed through Downers Grove, make their last appearance as a pond west of Highland Avenue before they submerge into the drains and culverts beneath the neighborhoods, only to reemerge on the west side of the interstate as a DuPage River tributary too small for a name. Chickadees fee-bee in the morning light and dee-dee-dee the boundaries of their territories. Vole trails are scrawled in the snow, about as haphazard as leaf miner trails in snakeroot leaves, but to different ends: foraging in relative safety, not eating their way to maturity as a larva does. Snow at the bases of some of the oaks is yellow to light brown with tannic drizzle, clotted with ice.

A dead ash tipped across the trail sags against a white oak about twenty feet away. The bark has mostly fallen off, exposing trails of emerald ash borer excavations and Armillaria rhizomorphs, unequal collaborators in the tree’s demise: what the ash-borer started, the Armillaria likely helped along. Further along the trail, a standing white oak is sloughing bark, dislodging an enormous poison ivy in the process. I think in summer this poison ivy was alive, but I do not remember for sure, and I fail to look closely enough at the buds to say. I’ll check on my next visit. A chickadee perches in the branches.

Peromyscus trails enter the woods as I walk out at 9:30, and it is already colder than when I left the house about an hour earlier. The temperature drops through the day, and by sundown it is near 15 degrees Farenheit. Brooklyn and I take a quick walk through Maple Grove. She barks at a trio of deer moving around off trail, and we walk up the hill and back down the hill as the light goes down. We don’t spend much time. By the time we get home, the temperature has dropped to about 10°F.

Sunday morning it is ten below when we awaken. I step outside to throw a cupful of boiling water in the air, and Rachel and I watch it freeze to a cloud of steam and ice shards.

January 27, Maple Grove

Two weeks have passed, and with them the cold. Yesterday a woolly bear caterpillar inched across the road in Denburn Woods as I walked to Maple Grove. Its hairs were dotted with rain, and it moved so slowly, barely above freezing. The woods and neighborhood are draped with fog this morning. A fallen log near the parking lot by the ball field pools with moss colonies, bright green growing tips toward the center of each and branches faded toward the edges. A log that was a thick with fresh stump puffballs this fall is a cemetery of extinguished puffballs now. Cardinals, red-bellied woodpeckers, and white-breasted nuthatches are singing.

The forest floor bristles with knee-high sugar maple whips on the slope that leads down to the ephemeral pond. The pond is filled with water now; it will stand dry through most of the summer and fall. A large, dead American elm has sloughed bark, and the smaller American elm below it has caught the fallen bark in its branches, seems about to try to press it back into place. Snow is thin on the south-facing slope that climbs around the pond. The slope on the walk down the north-facing slope is about 80% snow.

The snow by the culvert at the base of the trail leading up past Avery Coonley is littered with half-eaten white oak cotyledons. A collection of shells is scattered into a pile. I don’t remember this sort of behavior from past years. Between the mast and the warm winter, the squirrels appear to be gorging themselves. No care for the future, eating what they want and tossing the rest to the side. Where are our prudent little friends? They have their own verb: they are supposed to squirrel away their acorns one by one and, months later, swim through the snow or evade the watchful owls and hawks to retrieve them. They are supposed to remember where they pounded the fruits into the ground and come back for them, one by one, parsimonious. They are not supposed to be acting like humans, and yet here they are. In a year of plenty, even a squirrel may become wanton. Or perhaps they are eating what they can quickly because in this warm year the acorns started growing early, which they did.

On the topmost slope of the forest, marcescent ironwood leaves stand out tawny and tannic against the snowy background. The snow is strewn with their papery fruits. The trunks are colonized with open fungal caps of Aleurodiscus oakesii. Each cap is about as big around as the fleshy pad on my index finger, soft in the fog. A chickadee is calling “feebee” as I hike out.

January 31, my neighborhood

My neighbor’s mulched garden bed has sprouted a colony of bird’s nest fungi, each cap filled with lentil-shaped peridioles, each wanting only a splash of rain to dislodge it and glue it to a nearby wood chip, where it may break open and release millions of spores, each a potential new fungus. They will take the rain when they can get it, January or April. They are ready either way.

Plants referenced

• Lonicera maackii — honeysuckle, though there also may be L. x bella in the forest.
• Rhamnus cathartica — buckthorn
• Quercus alba — white oak
• Quercus macrocarpa — bur oak
• Carya ovata — shagbark hickory
• Ostrya virginiana — ironwood
• Laportea canadensis — wood nettle
• Ageratina altissima — white snakeroot
• Thuidium — fern moss; both T. delicatulum and T. recognitum have been collected at the Arboretum
• Quercus coccinea — scarlet oak
• Acer saccharum — sugar maple
• Sorghastrum nutans — Indian grass
• Morus alba — Russian mulberry, white mulberry
• Fraxinus — ash

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1. Adams DE, Wallace LL. 1985. Nutrient and Biomass Allocation in Five Grass Species in an Oklahoma Tallgrass Prairie. The American Midland Naturalist 113: 170–181. ↩︎

2. Edmunds GF, Alstad DN. 1978. Coevolution in Insect Herbivores and Conifers. Science 199: 941–945. ↩︎

3. Lifted from the first stanza of Louis Macneice’s “Snow,” quoted here with no one’s permission: “The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was / Spawning snow and pink roses against it / Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: / World is suddener than we fancy it.” ↩︎

4. “The most appalling quality of water is its strength… We make it all so easy, any child in school can understand it–water rises in the hills, it flows and finds its own level, and man can’t live without it. But I don’t understand it. I can’t fathom its power.” – Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, chapter 4. ↩︎