Bare Mountain, Amherst MA
In this essay, Julia struggles with the facts of changing winter.
It’s the first snowfall of the year. The regional schools in the Pioneer Valley are cancelled, and the community embraces winter’s kingdom by scraping ice from windshields and contributing life to the sound of passing tires and greying snow. In the following days, the surrounding towns play make believe. The parking lots of Amethyst Brook and the Holyoke Range State Park brim with townsmen eager to add their footprints to the packed-down trails. Driving down Northeast street, passerby encounter a snowman of eight foot stature, whose maple branch arms wave to them between Amherst Glass and Cumberland Farms. Mainstreet hums with early Christmas carols, and boughs of douglas fir and white pine hang wrapped in red ribbon and coated in white shimmer.
By the end of the week, an influx of freezing rain has melted wonderland. The world returns to grey, and winter boots track mud and road salt into every building; there is nothing for show but puddles on the floor. Cross country skis rest in backseats for weeks, frozen water bottles lay dormant in passenger seat cup holders. What remains of enchantment is bitter cold and downcasted heads at bus stops. The few inches of snow that fall in January and February are gone before anyone remembers them.
By the first week of March, the weather pushes upwards of seventy degrees. It is a lovely early spring, with open windows and abridged seasonal depression. On the front lawns of Pelham Road, students play guitar in thin sweatshirts, sitting on chairs that sink into a ground that hasn’t been frozen for weeks. The dogs are happy. Jean shorts are pulled from the back of the closet. The Saturday before spring break, several hundred college students wear short-sleeve green shirts for a made-up, pre-Saint Patrick’s Day celebration, basking in the warm sun as they down a bottle and a half of six dollar Chardonnay before noon. Yet as they soak in the sun’s vitamin D, they realize that what they seek respite from never came. It has been a two-storm winter, the latter melting even more quickly than the first.
The community nonetheless celebrates the unseasonable coming of spring. After all, there is perhaps nothing that distinguishes a New Englander quite like his desperate yearning for the winter to pass. We refuse to be soured by the weather’s implications because the sunshine on our skin feels far too good; we revel in our Northeastern climate denial because we want to hear the birds sing, even if their song is one of warning.
Even so, as coats are cautiously stored away and books are opened on the lawn, it is difficult not to wonder: will my home ever see winter again? A version of this question is surely being asked in every corner of the world. Is heat death in August what now constitutes normal? Will the trees here burn indefinitely? In comparison, pondering whether the future of winter in Western Massachusetts will come packaged in grey or white seems of little importance. The bean state, with its relative prosperity and temperate latitude, will not sink like the Maldives or disappear under the smog of Shouguang. The changes here will be less devastating, but then, the uniting element of the twenty-first century is that environmental changes, mostly negative, will occur everywhere. There are things we are about to lose forever, and the disappearing Massachusetts winter strikes within us something new: the realization that we are living through an end.
Massachusetts, like the Northeast in its entirety, will react to climate warming with an increase in precipitation, though less of it will fall as snow as the winters become increasingly warm. We will quickly adjust to wearing shorts in March, but the trees and bees and black bears will have to try their hand at it as well. Deciduous oak and ash trees will begin the slow migration northwards, and frogs will have nowhere to lay their eggs as seasonal vernal pools dry before spring. Without the insulation of snow, plants will freeze to death with increased abundance, and the snow that used to melt slowly will inundate the rivers in the spring, leaving them dry by the end of summer. The heat in our warmest months will rise above 90? on more days than we care to imagine, and, ironically, in addition to more precipitation, we will also have more drought. By the end of the century, Massachusetts is predicted to finally obtain the weather of our sunny west coast enemy, California.
As we slip into leather sandals and celebrate the mild winter, perhaps enacting the nonchalance of our western counterparts, we can’t forget the ways in which the cold is essential to New England’s character. Staying in to read by the fire, waking to spirals of frost on the windows, the irony of drinking iced coffee as we walk to the car in sub-zero temperatures?like coats in the spring the North East’s personality threatens to come unbuttoned as the winter loses its precious chill.
Those who grew up in New England are likely familiar with one of the region’s treasured picture books, Nancy Dinman Watson’s Sugar on Snow. I imagine there’s a whole cohort of young people who can recall their mother sitting on the edge of their twin bed, reading aloud the 1966 edition, worn at the seams from her own childhood. The story tells of tapping maple trees and impatiently waiting for the sap to boil and thicken. It illustrates the classic and idyllic image of childhood in rural New England; the anticipation of snowfall, the care and craft of using a metal spigot to draw sugar from trees, the salt and sweet and cold of “pickles and doughnuts and sugar on snow”.
Even in our ever urbanizing world, the spirit of this story lives on. The feeling of New England reverberates when children walk to school after a fresh snowfall, engaging in impromptu snowball fights that result in red cheeks and wet ankles. It’s present in the snow forts whose basic infrastructure begins in December, but whose architecture is not complete until February, after the driveway has been coated and plowed a half dozen times. Winter allows a certain connection to the past, the memory of generations trapped in the idiosyncrasies of New England snow.
And yet, there are details that disappear every day, memories that nine year olds in Massachusetts may never make. Chickadees singing in the quiet of a new snowfall, the sky clear and blue overhead. The relentless danger of black ice and falling icicles, laughing about stupid purple bruises and sore wrists. Things lost in autumn that only appear waterlogged in April. The justified arrogance that stems from confidently driving through the snow, the special feel of skidding on the slippery, tractionless roads. All of this is as essential to New England as the red leaves that flutter in the fall.
Yet as we sit outside in the soft breeze in March, we cherish the absence of cold and envision warmer futures. We will ourselves to forget that perhaps our nostalgia for childhood is indebted not only to the impossibility of returning to youth, but to the season that may never again return. And all we can think to do is wear thin cotton, and try to forget what we’ve already lost.