Mysteries
Forty degrees is a lot different from four degrees. After a few very cold days, forty feels almost balmy. Break out the suntan lotion, Jay says. I set out for my walk bundled up in zippered coat, gloves and hat, but before I reached the top of Gulf road I had shed most of it. Gulf is quiet all the time, but more so on a wintry Sunday afternoon. A car passed me in my 45 minutes of walking, and I met Mark and his dog from the corner of Gulf and Schoolhouse Hill out for a walk.
The snow is beautiful with its frozen crust, broken by a variety of tracks. The most recognizable are the big deer tracks, and in the photo you can see the marks their bodies have left where they slept in the snow. Their paths crisscross and go in loops. It’s impossible to know if they were made at once or over several days, since there’s been very little wind and the frozen snow has stayed put. Up Gulf three sets of deer tracks cross the road. Three deer walking together? Three deer crossing the road alone, hours or days apart?
There are crow tracks, and what I’m pretty sure is the track of a mouse or possibly a chipmunk skittering across the snow and then diving into a shallow tunnel. There are the beautiful, smooth, even tracks of a cross country skier. They mystified us last year until we spotted a skier and realized who had been crossing our property silently in the snow. Today I saw that the skier’s tracks started at the house on the far side of Gulf at the top of the hill. It’s a very nice looking house with a big deck and a spectacular view, a weekend place. The owners aren’t there often during the winter, but it looks like they’re here this weekend – maybe for the Christmas break. I can see where the skier came down the big hill from their place, crossed Gulf, headed across our neighbor’s field, around their pond and then looped back towards Gulf across our hill.
The tracks speak to how busy life is, even in the winter cold. Animals are moving about, mostly unseen, looking for food, looking for a good place to sleep, or maybe, like me, just going for a walk, to stretch their legs and enjoy the relative warmth of forty degrees. The snow records their passing, but it tells me nothing about why they made a loop here or seemed to separate there. And then there is the mystery of why we are here, why we gave up the easy California climate for these frozen winters. Every choice has its trade offs. This morning I sat for a long time mesmerized by an orange and pink sunrise spread out across the huge eastern horizon, watching the colors shift as the angle of the sun changed minute by minute. It was perfectly quiet. And it was perfectly quiet last night when I watched Orion cross a velvet dark sky. Maybe the deer too say to themselves, well, it’s cold, but it sure is beautiful here, and it sure is peaceful.
