Spring is definitely underway now, even as Old Man Winter is still shuffling slowly toward the exit. I heard tundra swans almost as soon as I went out on the porch this morning, and when the swans stopped flying over around mid-morning, it was time for the “V”s of migrant Canada geese. I even saw a lone seagull.

I walked around the field, checking out the networks of vole burrows emerging from the melting snowpack. Down by the barn, the bluebirds were inspecting a battered old nesting box, and a few hours later, the first song sparrow returned. This was actually the first year in a couple of decades that song sparrows didn’t over-winter, and the mornings have seemed unnaturally silent as a result.

When the temperature hit 60 degrees this afternoon, I felt a sudden compulsion to cut my hair. It had been a year and a half since my last self-administered haircut. It’s nice to be able to do it outside, without a shirt on, leaning over the porch rail.

I documented the results mainly with Facebook in mind, but since I don’t feel up to a real blog post tonight, I thought I might as well inflict it on y’all, too. (Yes, I wear deeply unfashionable glasses and clothes from Wal-Mart.) I was somewhat repulsed by the emergence of my bare scalp from underneath all that graying hair. There were some blood spots and other unsightly blotches of the sort that I tend to identify with — you know — old people. It looked raw, like a patch of ground just liberated from the snow.

The smoothness of their bark makes beech trees, both American and European, among the sexiest and also the most grotesque of trees. Branch scars and other markings that would virtually disappear on trees with more bark-like bark are hard to miss on a beech.

Some beech trees look downright neurotic. But who can blame them? The great beech forests of North America are gone, clearcut two centuries ago to make way for farms, to such an extant that most people who spend anytime outdoors assume that beeches actually prefer the mountainsides and ravines in which they’ve made their last stand. The passenger pigeon, which once visited beech forests the way hurricanes visit Florida, has been extinct for a hundred years. And now a non-native scale insect is helping beech bark disease decimate the remnant stands, though thankfully it hasn’t appeared in Plummer’s Hollow just yet.

It was the trees’ abundant mast that accounted for their popularity with passenger pigeons, of course, and beechnuts still feed many species today. But the grotesqueness of beech trees has wildlife value, too: the frequent hollows in older trees can provide den sites for a wide variety of birds and mammals. Many trees rot out as they age, but beeches seem to get started on it early.

Nor does the grotesquerie end with weird, vaguely human scars and orifices. The self-grafting ability of beech limbs can produce some bizarre effects, as in the above specimen, which grows right next to the Plummer’s Hollow Road.

I am kind of at a loss to explain how this happened… or why it took me so many years to notice it. I don’t know how many more years we’ll have canopy-height beeches in the hollow — not too far north of here, all the big beeches are dead — so I figure I’d better start paying more attention to them now.

Beech bark disease won’t wipe them out completely, but it will probably kill almost all the mature beeches and keep new root sprouts from getting very big, just as the chestnut blight has done for American chestnuts. The grotesquerie will be all but lost, and the tree from which the word “book” is derived may become little more than an asterisk and a footnote.

Watch the full slideshow (13 photos in all) or browse the set (easier for people with slow connections).

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Don’t forget to submit tree-related blog posts to the Festival of the Trees. The deadline for the next edition, at The Voltage Gate, is Friday, February 26. See the call for submissions for details on how to participate.

Walking on water, I forgot about the fish
in their white gardens of coral.

Walking on the snow, I forgot about spring,
though others knew to dig for it.

My snowshoes kept me from sinking
& I glided over the drifts
almost as lightly as the shadows of the trees.

And watching those shadows,
I even managed to forget about the trees themselves.

This is what’s wrong with that dreamy kind of faith
that depends on miracles. We don’t need
one more way to keep our distance.

The bottom of the hollow is a strange place: so steep that the trees grow tall and spindly, with few branches, and are spaced far apart. Two hundred years ago it would’ve been a much darker place, dense with hemlocks, but now it’s mostly deciduous and, in winter, as light-filled as a northeast-facing hollow can be. Plummer’s Hollow Run is of course as wide as it gets down here, and we have to be vigilant to keep it from undercutting our access road when it floods. Most of the winter, though, it’s dark and quiet.

The steep slopes provide some protection for vegetation that the deer would browse down to the ground anywhere else, such as wild hydrangea (above) and red elderberry. In May, they harbor our largest patches of purple trillium.

The wind is fierce along the railroad tracks at the bottom, and reaches up into this bottom portion of the hollow to make its mark on the snow, erasing and rearranging daily like a never-satisfied artist. Cold and wind have defined this landscape for the last two centuries. I think of the people who used to live in a small cluster of houses at the entrance to the hollow, on the shady side of the gap — a desolate and dirt-poor hamlet whose hey-day only lasted for a couple of decades before the railroad came through in 1850 and took out the heart of the settlement and its raison d’etre, an iron forge. (It was the forge that precipitated the original clearcutting of the hollow, since it ran on charcoal.)

People who grew up in the last of those houses are elderly now, and come to visit every now and then (though probably not in the winter). They walk up around the first bend, sign the guest register next to the Plummer’s Hollow welcome board, and return to gaze at the empty spaces where their homes once stood and listen to the thunder of the trains.

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Be sure to check out the latest Festival of the Trees at treeblog.

I set out this morning before the snow stopped, eager to take full advantage of the silence that settles over the land when a major winter storm falls on the weekend. This was the first I’d worn snowshoes in a couple of years, and I began with enthusiasm, despite the fact that I sank in nearly a foot with every step. Progress was slow. My own breath moved more quickly than I did, and I was soon almost out of it.

I’d almost forgotten what a deep, dry snow was like. From time to time my footsteps set off shockwaves, quiet little booms accompanied by a sudden settling of all the snow within a few yards’ radius. Sometimes this was enough to shake the snow loose from a nearby laurel bush, the waxy green leaves springing up and throwing off their white straitjackets. Before long my calves were aching, and my glasses kept steaming up and then freezing. I finally took them off and put them in my pocket, and did most of the rest of the hike half-blind: up to the top of the watershed, through the spruce grove and out to the Far Field, alone with the sound of my exertion.

Or nearly alone. The downy woodpeckers were out and about, and a pair of cardinals foraged in one thicket. On the ridgetop not far from its den tree I crossed a porcupine trail — an almost-tunnel through the snow — and wondered whether it had been going out or returning home. Twenty minutes later, on the lower trail back from the Far Field, I had my answer.

This was shot hurriedly in dim light through a zoom lens, and then magnified further through digital zooming. But I really only took the picture to make sure of what I was looking at, especially with my glasses so fogged up. Had it not been for the location on a thin branch, I might’ve dismissed it as an unusually messy squirrel’s nest. It sat motionless with its head tucked against its belly as the snow sifted in through its forest of quills.

In honor of Imbolc and its buck-toothed seer, I uploaded a sharper copy of some footage I shot two years ago. Groundhogs are among the most solitary of marmots, and I think what we’re seeing here is a territorial dispute over some valuable real estate — the crawlspace under my house.

And as long as we’re watching videos, here’s another one I just uploaded, from the three-banjo jam session. There were other songs they performed more flawlessly, but this is the only one where the video is also half-decent (emphasis on “half”). And yes, it is entirely possible that they interrupted the sleep of the groundhog(s) below the floor.

Steady rain turned into a downpour early Sunday evening and didn’t let up for another fifteen hours. And just like that, we had a flood. In the same way that you get flash floods after hard rains in the dry West, here in the winter when the ground is frozen hard and the trees are leafless and dormant, there’s little to keep the water from running into the nearest ravine. We lost hundreds of dollars worth of quarry stone from the Plummer’s Hollow Road in just a few hours.

It would take a solid week of hard rain to get this kind of flood on a forested landscape in the summer. If these rare winter floods serve any purpose, it may be to remind us what would happen — what has happened here in the past — in the absence of forests: every hard rain turns into a flood.

At the bottom of the hollow, the Little Juniata River wasn’t so little anymore. It roared just a couple feet below the deck of our access bridge, which shook as floating logs and tires thudded against the pier. The riverbanks became instant swamps.

Nor was the flooding restricted to low places; the ephemeral ponds at the very top of the Plummer’s Hollow watershed grew and merged briefly into one big pond. Then the temperature dropped and everything froze.

By the time I got up there to take pictures yesterday afternoon, the water level had fallen by half a foot, leaving a sagging ice ceiling with little underneath it and nothing but scattered tree trunks to hold it up — an ephemeral architecture, like some boom town gone bust.

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Don’t forget to submit tree-related blog posts to the Festival of the Trees blog carnival. The deadline for the next edition, at the UK-based treeblog, is January 30 — see the call for submissions for details on how to submit.

Also, be sure not to miss the interview with Pablo, Jade and me at the Nature Blog Network. We talk all about the Festival of the Trees: how it got started, why we do it, how it’s not really some kind of freaky tree cult, and why you should join us.

I’m sitting with my back to the grove when the sound of heavy wingbeats in the tops of the spruces makes me look around, and seeing nothing, get up and edge my way in between the trees. The intricate skeletons of recently dead boughs snap loudly whenever I try to diverge from the rudimentary path. I crane my neck peering into the shadowy tops of the 40-foot trees which I helped my parents plant when I was a boy. How could they already have grown so full of secrets?

The greatest natural disaster-related humanitarian crisis in a generation, and I have written exactly nothing about it. But this is a place for personal essays and poems, and what do I know of Haiti? Everything is second-hand at best: the Haitian woman in Japan back in 1985 with whom I shared a mailbox and some confessions of homesickness; the Anglo-American friend who joined a Vodun congregation in New Jersey and was ridden by Ghede, orisha of the crossroads. A smattering of histories and ethnographies. The vague sense that if Toussaint had never been exiled, Haiti might have kept its topsoil and some of its forests. An immense sense of guilt, as an American, for my country’s share of blame in its immiseration.

A few days ago, I read Newsweek’s latest cover story, “Why Haiti Matters,” and felt my stomach turn. It did little but recycle platitudes about America as a force for good: Haiti matters, we are led to believe, because it gives us a chance to show “the character of our country.” The author is Barack Obama.

He does at least quote Qoheleth — wisest voice in the Old Testament — toward the end of the essay:

In the aftermath of disaster, we are reminded that life can be unimaginably cruel. That pain and loss is so often meted out without any justice or mercy. That “time and chance” happen to us all. But it is also in these moments, when we are brought face to face with our own fragility, that we rediscover our common humanity. We look into the eyes of another and see ourselves.

O.K., Mr. President, I’ll give you that. I’ve kept my silence in part because I know all too well the moralizing impulse of my Protestant heritage. Try as I might to anathematize Pat Robertson for his ignorant, victim-blaming remarks, I recognize the temptation, even as an agnostic, to make the world make sense, to pretend that life is or could be fair — or at least redeemable. To accept that it isn’t makes us into monsters, does it not? But the view of God or gods as unpredictable and sometimes violent — that Old Testament and animist view that progressives love to decry — comports more easily with observable reality than any pablum about God as infinite goodness. Even for me to put on my secular humanist hat and declare, as I did on Identica and Twitter last week, that tectonic activity is the price we pay for life on earth seems unduly glib, offensive to the memory of the earthquake’s victims. Their deaths were were not some kind of sacrifice. Stop it! Stop trying to explain. Live with the questions. Make your peace with the unknowable as best you can.

It’s a little past 4:00 o’clock, but the January sun is low and just minutes from dropping behind the ridge. The feathery shadows seem full of possibility now, and I see a picture in every direction where before there was nothing but branches blocking my way. This is the way. I steady the camera in the dim light by holding it out in front of me so the strap is stretched taut from the back of my neck: there’s far less tremor in my trunk than in my limbs. Some kind of large owl — barred, great-horned, long-eared — is hiding in these pictures, I’m sure of it. It’s waiting for darkness so it can begin to see.

My sledding video from last winter was such a success, I thought I’d try it again this year. The conditions were pretty icy and scary last winter, so I stopped at the half-way point, not wanting to risk the video camera any farther. (I hold it in my right hand as I ride — this isn’t a helmet cam.) But this winter, given all the wonderful cold weather and regular snow, sledding conditions have been exceptional, and with the January thaw imminent, yesterday afternoon I went ahead and shot this video of a sled ride clear to the bottom, a mile-and-a-half-long run. It isn’t quite non-stop, as you’ll see: there are two places, slight uphills on the way down, where I had to get out and walk for a few yards. (The first is the half-way spot where I stopped in last winter’s video.)

Since I was on hard-packed snow rather than ice this time, the ride was relatively quiet. It’s the quiet that I love about sledding, as much as the speed, so I decided to dispense with rousing music on the soundtrack and go for straight realism. (Actually, a little less realism might’ve been nice, but unfortunately my camera doesn’t have image stabilization. I also apologize for all the sniffing — but that too is the sound of winter, isn’t it?)

I’ve been sledding for a long time — since at least the age of four, I think. My mother remembers watching me sled the hill below our farmhouse in Maine, trudging up and flying down over and over at zero degrees Fahrenheit. We moved to Plummer’s Hollow in 1971, when I was five. We did a lot of sledding as a family in the early 70s; my mother’s back still permitted her to go down a gentle slope sitting up. I remember sledding by moonlight, the five of us, taking turns on a shifting assortment of runner sleds and wooden toboggans, our whoops strangely not out of place in the silvered landscape. We never had anything plastic, nor even an aluminum saucer. We were arch traditionalists.

Winters were serious business back then, boys and girls. I remember our first brown Christmas, sometime in the late 70s, because it was such an exception. This winter so far has been like a trip into a time-machine (and given the option of going anywhere back in time, how many of us from happy families wouldn’t choose our own childhoods over the most stirring periods of human history?). January was always the best month for sledding because it was the coldest.

February, by contrast, was always the serious snow month, which brought its own excitement — snow forts, long walks on snowshoes — but it also meant we had to do a lot of tromping in order to keep the sled runs open. Dad showed us how to shuffle slowly along in a straight line, making several passes. But I don’t think anyone else had the patience for it but him and me, and after a few years it was all me. I was an inveterate day-dreamer, so it didn’t much matter what I was doing — I was always somewhere else, deep in a story. And you know, maybe that explains the attraction of sledding to someone like me, who never got into sports otherwise: going down a hill on a sled is one time I am fully alive to the present and nothing else.

After Mom’s back got too bad to permit any more sledding, Dad stopped too, and from the mid-70s on, his main contribution was to mow a sledding trail through the field with his tractor and brushhog each fall. Oddly enough, we didn’t otherwise keep walking trails through the fields mowed back them. We were still raising chickens and ducks and cutting hay, so I guess we viewed them more as hayfields than meadows for wildlife watching. We didn’t, for example, have the trail down through what we call the amphitheatre, where I start my sled ride in the video. The sledding trail Dad mowed every year went straight down from the upper edge of the field opposite the barn. We’d sometimes shovel snow into a bump at the bottom to make group toboggan rides more exciting: airborne!

It’s funny the way people look at me now, as an almost 44-year-old man, when I mention I like to go sledding. As I noted in last year’s post, even though lots of adults enjoy skiing and snowboarding, somehow sledding is for children. But is it? About a week before Christmas, I was joined by a couple of kids — my four-year-old niece Elanor and an older boy of around nine, I think, and the boy’s father, who’s my age, joined in as well. We had a blast sledding and tobogganing down through the field. But I couldn’t help noticing that both children seemed to regard the walk back up the hill as something onerous. Well, to be fair, their legs were a lot shorter than mine, but on the other hand, they were in way better shape than me. The walk up the hill is how you build up the warmth that makes the ride down tolerable, I told them, but they weren’t buying it. So maybe you have to be a grown-up to truly appreciate sledding.

One of the other things besides sledding that signals my permanent adolescence to most people, of course, is the fact that I don’t own a car and barely know how to drive. I am not a big fan of the internal combustion engine. But I’m not sure I’d enjoy sledding nearly as much if I weren’t so accustomed, as we all are, to the contrasting experience of riding in a car. It makes sledding feel like a magic carpet ride.

It helps that these days I invariably sled in a sitting position, which is a bit slower than lying down because of the way the weight’s distributed — the runners tend to bite in toward the back and it can slow forward momentum considerably, depending on the conditions. But it feels faster and more dangerous, especially the sharp turns when you risk tipping over. About ten years ago I started to notice dangerous twinges in my lower back whenever I went over a bump while sledding prone, so much as loved sledding that way I was forced to switch. Our neighbor Paula threw her back out a couple weeks ago while sledding with her grandchildren in front of their house (the third residence in Plummer’s Hollow). And she’s just a year older than me.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s the real reason most adults prefer to leave sledding to the kids. But I hear there are an increasing number of publicly designated sledding hills, for example in Pennsylvania state parks, and given the tendencies of people in my generation to try and prolong childhood indefinitely if possible, I suspect I might even be part of a trend. But even if all the downhill skiers decide to switch tomorrow, forgo their lazy-ass ski lifts, and take up something truly physically demanding, I think I’ll still stick to the quiet and solitude of a Plummer’s Hollow sled ride.