Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? Job 38:22
Student: Teacher, what is snow?
Teacher: Snow is part of the hydrologic water cycle that is essentially ice mixed with air. Supercooled droplets of water freeze into microscopic crystals, then these crystals conglomerate into a flake, forming one of six unique shapes of snowflake in accordance with atmospheric conditions. These shapes are columns, dendrites, sector plates, plates, and needles.
Eventually, this flake become too heavy to be suspended in air and begins to fall. If it stays in air that is below freezing, it will remain frozen and continue toward earth. Most snowflakes are polluted slightly, often built around a dust particle that has formed the nucleus of the flake, but the tighter water freezes, the more impurities it freezes out.
Student: Oh.
What is snow? That’s what I want to know. Last year, I had the privilege of watching the transformation of the first snow twice, once in November in Alaska, and again in Kentucky in December when winter storm Elliot shouldered in and powdered the woods. Both times, the result was the same. The brittle morning air softens, and all sounds seem as if they were coming from underwater.
Sketch: Sunday morning, 4:50 a.m., -7 Fahrenheit, Alaska, waning moon at 98 percent. The moonlight is coming in the window and it’s so bright inside the house it feels as though someone has left a lamp on. Shall I have a cup of coffee, or break the morning routine with a walk in the night? Coffee is here anytime. I suppose anyone who comes to Alaska suffers the Zeal of Convert phase, and after a year or two one would choose the coffee. But I’m still a tourist.
Does snow have a phosphorescence that gathers light and slowly releases it again come nightfall? Or is it just this moon that makes the snow glow like this? Around the winter solstice, the sun barely clears the trees at high noon, but a full moon will kick off from the horizon at dusk and stay in the sky until noon the following day. This gives you nights of crystal and sparkle, with enough candlepower to make a flashlight more of a hinderance than a help. The snow and frost on the birch, willow, and spruce trees catch the moon and hold it in crystals for the person who has time to look. Down on the river, with its jammed and tilted pieces of ice, the surface glints like the surface of a multifaceted diamond rotating in light. The river ice is unstable, and creaking and popping the relentless current underneath.The snow is squeaking, like a walking on Styrofoam, snow so dry that that it’s doing exactly what Styrofoam does when you rub it together: two tightly compacted, dry surfaces rubbing together.
Daylight, but another day, and before freeze-up: All the summer homes lining the river are buried in snow, their tenants gone south with the sandhill cranes and mallards. Despite the water hovering around freezing, the air temperature is low enough to set the river to fogging.
If you’re a literate individual, you can read the snow like a constantly expanding scroll. Here’s a shrew striking out across what must be a wilderness of white for him. His tracks stitch together spruce tree to tussock. What’s he looking for? Over here, a snowshoe hare has cut across the expanses, then stopped, crisscrossing his own tracks in an agony of indecision. So many willows, and they must taste exactly the same. But this Snowshoe hare feels the need to sample randomly.
Wing tip scratches converge with the tracks of a running Snowshoe hare, and the snow shows signs of a kerfuffle. For a moment I think I have stumbled upon an avian kill site. But the wing tips match a raven more closely than a hawk or eagle, and anyway I can see where the bird hopped twice in the snow to get a purchase on the air. There was nothing in his talons, if it was a bird with talons. Also, the rabbit tracks appear to be older than the fresh wing strokes into the snow. What happened? Maybe nothing. Maybe just a raven landing to bellyache a bit, and his landing spot coincided with some rabbit tracks.
A track leaps from the bank and strikes across the field of unbroken white and makes for the river. But the lengths are random, and I stoop to find them not to be a track but rather tunnels in the snow, appearing here and there, surfacing randomly. If you look into the depths of a these tunnels, the shadow is more blue than black. How does white snow cast blue shadow? That’s what I want to know.
Light has different wavelengths we see as color, and blue light is the light that goes through ice most readily. Snow is white because of the surface of the crystal freezes and is essentially water particles broken into many small bits, but if the droplets of water were much larger, snowflakes would be nearly clear. So when light penetrates a white snowbank, it pierces through the white and tinges it blue. When snow appears blue, it means it is very pure. It’s the same thing that makes sea and sky blue. Did you get that? Me neither.
And what animal might burrow from the cut bank in a straight line to the river? I ask around, and a friend suggests mink. The tunnels are about two to three inches in diameter. The water, obviously, is above thirty-two degrees, but I’m glad I’m not a mink. There is no return tunnel.
There’s a merganser in the river. You can’t trust a merganser. They will dodge ice chunks before they feel the need to find something warmer. And some common Goldeneyes, a diver duck I had never seen before.
On my way back, I find an insect atop the snow. It’s not dead, either. Everything I know about insects tells me that this shouldn’t be, but it turns out I that what I know about insects is incomplete. It’s probably a Snow Sedge from the family of Caddisflies. Most Caddisflies grow to maturity and die in summer, but a few overwinter in stream and river beds. Some of these insects can survive temperatures as low as 27 degrees, Fahrenheit, without freezing, because of an antifreeze in the blood. Has this one tunneled up through twenty inches of snow and to look for a mate? He’s going to have a lonely time.
Sketch: Kentucky, Friday, 7:30 a.m., 0 degrees. We only get this type of cold once or twice a year. Day breaks on the skiff of snow, and I take a walk into the hollow. Coming home after a time away, you’re a convert again to these places where you’ve grown up. In this case, you have coffee first, then a walk.
We have whitetails, and cottontails, and gray squirrels, but nothing seems to be moving except the songbirds. Over in the tall grass and burdock going to seed are the usual songbirds: Cardinal, Black-capped chickadee (or is that a Carolina? likely not), titmouse, and the nondescript birds I heard a birder call once “LGBs” (Little Gray Birds, he is of scientific bent).
I find a whitetail track at the verge of the hollow and follow it out of curiosity. It cuts the side of the ridge, maintaining a consistent distance from the horizon, which is the top of the ridge, as it circles a cirque-like head of the hollow, and then drops down to the top of an abutting ridge. Here the fingerling beeches, maples, and cedars are closing in an old logging road.
At the head of the ridge, in a copse of second-growth cedars that empty into a perpendicular hollow are depressions in the snow where the deer were bedded. I lean close and can smell the deer, that’s how fresh the beds are. But maybe I’m imagining things. Have I spooked them? Isn’t this beautiful? Do I know what snow is now? How many times have I used that squiggly punctuation mark today?