Snake on ice

Though the ground is still snow-covered a foot deep or more in shady places, it's warm enough to bring some critters out of hibernation. Yesterday i came across a garter snake crawling over a little snowbank – very slowly, as you might imagine, and my arrival didn't speed him up. I lifted him with a stick and set him down in a dry, sunny spot and went on my way as he slowly unkinked his coils. I hope he found something to eat – not many bugs out yet! – or else found a good place to go back to sleep for awhile.

Walking with Henry David

from Thoreau's Journal, 10 January 1851:

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of taking walks daily,—not [to] exercise the legs or body merely, nor barely to recruit the spirits, but positively to exercise both body and spirit, and to succeed to the highest and worthiest ends by the abandonment of all specific ends,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering. And this word “saunter,” by the way, is happily derived “from idle people who roved about the country [in the Middle Ages] and asked charity under pretence of going à la Sainte-Terrer,” to the Holy Land, till, perchance, the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds.

At this point four pages are missing from the original Journal; but later in his essay ‘Walking’ – first published a month after he died – Thoreau continued the thought as follows:

… but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

Snowshoe musings

A day and a night of rain this past weekend made the blanket of snow here quite a bit thinner – the ditches are still running like rivers even though the temperature has dropped again to around –10. But today the snow cover has been refreshed, and since there was hardly any wind, the trees are once again wearing white. There's still a surprising amount left on the ground despite the rain, and the deer tracks i found today in the snowshoe trail i made yesterday seemed to show that they appreciated my efforts. It's only fair, since i like following their trails too. Though it would be hard not to – the bush here is riddled with them.

A flock of goldfinches also brightened up the day today. A real service, now that we're less than a week from the winter solstice and the sun hardly shows his face. And a free service too! (unless you count the bit of birdseed i provide for them).

Snow job

So much snow has fallen on Manitoulin Island in recent days that i've spent a lot of time shovelling when i could have been blogging. Well, no great loss for blog readers, i'm sure … and moving this much snow does get the blood pumping, even better than walking. Besides, there's nothing more beautiful (especially in the sunlight, if you're lucky enough to get any) than a field of totally undisturbed snow.

A day like this erases all tracks, here in the woods, and the preoccupations of civilization seem even more distant and strange. Of course i wouldn't need to clear the driveway at all if we were really cut off from busy world – but still, once Pam's taken the car off to work, it feels almost like i'm hibernating while awake.

I do intend to make some tracks, though, next time i get a break from shovelling. Last winter the snowfall was so thin that i hardly had to use my snowshoes at all. This one, so far, looks like a new kind of winter, with a new kind of walking ahead.

Sniffing snow and Morning Earth

Walking is different with snow on the ground because it's so much easier to see who else has been walking there (snowshoe hare, white-tailed deer, red fox, ...). Of course if i kept my nose to the ground like the dog does, and my nose were as finely discriminating as his, i'd be tracking all the time too. But we gave all that up for the privilege of bipedality, so now we rely on the snow to supply us with easily read signs.

When it comes to reading outdoor signs, though, this blog is no match for John Caddy's Morning Earth site. I recommend subscribing to his daily poem if you like what you see there.

The birds of winter

In a climate like we have here on Manitoulin Island, the movements of migratory birds are among the pleasures of the changing seasons. But i must confess a special affection for the birds who don't migrate at all, but stay here through the winter — the blue jays, woodpeckers, nuthatches, and above all, the chickadees. Unlike the raucous and greedy jays, they rarely fight at the feeder; they wait their turn, zoom in and grab a seed, and zip off to a nearby perch to eat or stash it. I like the way they fly, too — in aphoristic bursts of wingflapping, allowing themselves to fall a bit between bursts. Bloggers and journal keepers write the way chickadees fly.

The way they move, call and occasionally sing, it's hard not to see them as cheerful, friendly little tykes. And fearless, too. They'll eat out of your hand if you can manage to hold still for a minute or two. If the feeder's empty, they let me know by calling when they see me, or landing on a branch inches away from my head and staring at me pointedly. A few days ago, one of them flew right up to me and hovered fluttering about a foot in front of my face for a second or two. I got the message, and refreshed the supply of sunflower seeds. But i also tried to say a few cheerful words of my own, and i trust that they understand my clumsy language as well as i understand theirs.

Just walking

Awoke this morning to a white surprise: not only the ground but the trees, now stripped of their leaves, are covered with snow, the first of this coming winter. Since it's barely below the freezing point, the snow sticks to the branches despite the fairly strong breeze. This burst of brightness in the normally dismal November weather must be beautiful even to those who don't like winter.

I've been out this morning only long enough to bring in the day's supply of firewood. Some kind of cold or flu has kept me mostly indoors for over a week now, which is even more of a nuisance than the sluggishness of bodymind it brings. I can't claim as much outdoor time as Thoreau did, but enough to bear witness to the truth of this journal entry (4 Nov. 1852):

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life. This life in the present. Let a man have thought what he will of Nature in the house, she will still be novel outdoors. I keep out of doors for the sake of the mineral, vegetable, and animal in me.

It's important to escape from an artificial environment for at least part of each day — something difficult for city dwellers to do, since the surroundings of the buildings are hardly less artificial than the interiors. We are blessed to live here in the backwoods of Manitoulin! But that's not the only factor in Thoreau's practice which kept him grounded in reality: the aimlessness of his walking was equally important. Just walking, or ‘sauntering’ as he called it, corresponds to what Dogen called ‘just sitting’ — not trying to get somewhere, not aiming to become a Buddha. Even an indoor-oriented thinker such as Peirce could see the value of aimless thinking, or the ‘play of musement’ as he called it. It seems to short-circuit our self-deceptive tendencies. Thoreau was as much a reader as a walker, but his reading too was often aimless, ‘just reading’ as i might call it — aimless and yet urgent in its immediacy, its being-time.

My own reading practice is similar. And even that i often interrupt by immersing myself in music, usually the wordless kind. But as Thoreau says, it's not enough to dwell in the world of words and feelings, and you need to get outdoors to shed that cultural cocoon. So i'm looking forward to getting out there again, when my lungs will let me.