Winter and all that

I just got back from my home near Brockville. It's a great place on the St. Lawrence River. It's also buried in snow. 

You don't get a lot for your taxes in the rural township where my house is. One thing you do get, however, is decent snow clearance. The plows and sanders seem to hit the road while a storm is underway and once it's done the heavy gear comes out to finish the job. 

I've never seen this much snow there this late in the season. The 7:30 p.m. sunsets make it all the more disorienting. This is light I would see in late-September. The sun is so high and warm now that all it takes is exposing the concrete or wood or granite and the natural heat does the rest, the snow just melts away. For all the perceived permanence of the white blanket, shovel away a bit and your realize pretty quickly, the snow is the interloper here. The sun is the truth-teller.  

Still, the conditions are confusing. Take the waterbirds. The Canada geese are arriving back after the winter down south. In these parts they are accustomed to open water and nice shallows to feed in. But there is still a lot of ice in the river, the northern ducks: old squaw, mergansers and the like, are still here. So is the bald eagle. I saw one confused flock do circles around its usual landing spot and head for open water. This morning a group of about 20 geese were working the shore by my place, navigating through chunks of ice. We'll see if they suffer for lack of food.

The other thing I noticed was my neighbour. George has a dock that is cantilevered out over the fast moving water. It looks like a helipad. It's a vulnerable place. This time of year, ice starts heading down the river and water levels begin to rise. I remember high-water years as a kid, seeing docks torn from their moorings gliding toward Montreal. George has been lucky over the years. Spring water levels have been low, ice has mostly melted before it gets to us. He's lost the odd plank, never anything more serious. This year might be a sterner test for the dock's construction. Yesterday he was down on the dock, looking over the edge, looking west toward the wider part of the river where it's frozen from shore to shore. The Seaway opens in a couple of week and the ice breakers will have to open things up first. The ice will arrive soon, and the high water won't be far behind.

When I pulled out this morning it was snowing lightly. About two inches of new powder was on the ground. It felt like February and looked like it too. The snow let up shortly after Kingston and soon the sky was mostly clear. The sun was on my left shoulder and I was warming up quite nicely. The sun was telling the truth.