The Rural Life Read Online Free Page B

to little purpose. What made this winter unusual was ice. In a truly hard winter, ice is something of a scarcity. It appears in all the predictable spots—on rivers, lakes, and ponds—but it’s often abraded by wind or covered by drifts. The snowpack in a frigid winter feels almost arid, and moisture is locked up tight. Not so this winter. Days were warm, nights cold, rain almost as likely as snow. Every afternoon the world liquefied a little, and every morning the world was freshly plated in ice.
    The roads weren’t the problem. Dead level roads are rare in New England. But during January and February, every parking lot or driveway seemed to be a catch basin for the surrounding hillsides, which meant that every parking lot or driveway was a sheet of ice. When the surface of the ice melted in the afternoon, it engulfed the sand that was spread on it the night before. Spreading salt, like tempering steel, only seemed to create a superior grade of ice. All across New England, drivers walked to their vehicles in a gingerly manner, clutching every handhold in sight, only to find themselves stuck on slick, level pavement, often in their own driveways. Some drivers tried to ease off the ice. Some tried to burn rubber right through to the asphalt. In a frictionless universe, nearly everyone would be irascible nearly all of the time.
    The ice was beautiful, though it’s a beauty most people had had enough of by mid-January. Out in the fields, where the hollows filled with water and froze over, strange vacancies seemed to interrupt the continuity of the landscape. In the rivers, the frazil ice came and went a dozen times. On Dublin Lake, New Hampshire, one arctic morning, I watched a stiff west wind stalemate the closing ice, the whitecaps freezing even as they blew onto a stiffening shelf of frost. And when a light snow fell, just dusting the driveway, it was almost impossible not to admire how slick and unyielding ice can really be. But now the moles are throwing up fresh mounds of dirt. Traction has returned.

    I t’s been as ugly here as open, undisturbed country ever gets. One day early last week the temperature reached forty-seven in the afternoon, with steady rain. The ground was frozen and still partly covered by snow, which had turned porous and grainy. A dense vapor clung to the tops of the snowbanks. Water ran in thin, scalloped rivulets across tarred roads. It streamed across the earth and pooled in every depression, where it stayed because it had nowhere to go. In every ditch, every hollow, a cold, sepia brew of last year’s leaves was steeping in a basin of discolored ice. I found myself staring into the tangled woods, wondering why humans had never learned to hibernate and whether it was too late to think again.
    There’s a limit to how ugly Manhattan gets in that kind of weather. The light can only fail so far in the rain before buildings begin to glisten. The city never feels quite so immense or so familiar as when the fog closes in. But on a cold, wet night here on the edge of the woods, the opacity is shocking. This isn’t the deep sky darkness of December or January, when the emptiness of space seems to reach right down to the horizon. This feels like some suffocating, damp antithesis.
    And still, a few days ago the ground was frozen solid. On late October mornings, when the grass suffers a brittle frost, the earth remains soft, though you can feel it tightening underfoot. Now conditions were reversed. In the fields the long grass looked like Ophelia’s hair, caught by the current in which she drowned. Yet there was nothing pliant about the earth to which it was rooted. No give at all.
    On Thursday, all at once, the soil would take the print of a foot. Not a deep print. As I walked I could feel a thin layer of soil sliding over the frostbound dirt beneath it, like the flesh of the forehead over the skull. By the weekend walking was treacherous, mud over shoes in the wet spots. On drier ground there was