Its been a roller coaster ride.
A month ago it warmed. Earlier than expected! Huzzah!
I started my dirt bike, gingerly squished through the icy mud, and rode to town for the ceremonial “first tank of gas for the season”. A few days later it got very cold. Then it snowed. It was nice while it lasted.
Things started thawing again but I had other tasks. I ignored the bikes and went on a 3,000 mile road trip. I expected to get home well after spring breakup. When I got back the planet was still dithering. It hadn’t made up its mind. Even so, all the snow was gone and the driveway was dry. Light at the end of the tunnel? I rejoiced. But then it snowed again. Hard!
It wasn’t just a flurry. It snowed until my tractor could scarcely handle the weight. It was a short wet sloppy whole ‘nother winter! I was exhausted.
It melted again… in fits and starts. Because of all that drama, the ground has had its fill. It’s as much liquid as solid. Yesterday my tractor’s front tire sunk a full 10” into a wet spot. I was hauling wood. It would be easy to get truly stuck and shred my already “questionable” lawn. Luckily, I was watching carefully. At the first sign of “quicksand” I backed out. Disaster averted.
Today the world dawned anew. It is April after all. It was nearly t-shirt weather! The driveway is battered but more or less passible. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I charged out to the garage, fired up my cruiser (Honda Shadow 1100), and made my way from our muddy homestead to blissfully clear pavement. It was going to be another “first tank of gas” day!
I planned to drop some mail at the post office; which I did. Then, as sometimes happens, the motorcycle refused to go home.
I though I’d ride a while and then find a coffee shop to do some blogging; another test of my pipsqueak Linux toy. Alas, every coffee shop was closed. It’s still winter season and it was late afternoon. God fearin’ folk were up at 6 am drinking coffee, not ambling around at 3 pm like a degenerate.
Not that I cared about the coffee. I wandered back country roads with no particular aim. The pavement is treacherous with winter’s accumulated grit so I rolled slow; which suited me just fine.
The landscape is still frozen. Lakes are ice (though the ice shacks have been pulled). But it’s achingly close to ice out. Nobody is dumb enough to be out there with a truck on the weak ice. (There’s usually some ass nugget who’ll drive a leased SUV onto a quarter inch of slush and sink it. But not today. The ice is so weak even the idiots received the memo.)
The grass is dead. It’ll burst forth very suddenly when conditions are right. They’re not right yet… but will be soon.
At my house nature is stirring. The wild turkeys are strutting about in twitterpation. There’s a huge Tom out there and he’s looking to score. He looks like a Thanksgiving piñata. The only cranes so far are a couple holed up in my swamp; and those two are incredibly pissed. They bet on the earlier warm pattern and lost. They’ll survive but they’re grumpy about their lot. Ruffed grouse have started drumming. Skunks are stinking things up. We had a trio of chipmunks invade our house!
As I rode, I was hoping to see more cranes. I have not yet mastered their migration pattern. I stopped at a wildlife refuge but saw none. I did see a bunch of snow geese. There are hints that the migration is started and some swans have shown up. But nothing migratory is here in full force. It’ll happen. Soon. Big birds will head north in a great armada. They’ll eat every invertebrate they can hoover up, reproduce, then flee south. Dinosaurs still rule the world, in avian form.
I ride through all this; contented at a level some may never know. Possibly because I’m paying attention to God’s creation instead of a cell phone screen. I witness the last bits of the season of death; not in regret over the cold but in joy at the rebirth. Winter is neither bad nor evil, it merely is.
Optimistic and bundled against the chill I grin at it all. I’m on my motorcycle. Even this simple fact is a thing I thought I might never attain. The odds weren’t good for it. It took me a long time to get one. I wasn’t fortunate to have such things in my youth. But I didn’t fuck up my life too much. In fact I did OK. I acquired one as soon as I had the funds and my wife was happy to see it. It felt late in life at the time but it’s long ago now. I freaked over financing “a luxury” but I needed it and could handle it.
Everyone (except my wife) thought I was nuts. What do they know? If you want to do something and are physically and financially able… do it. Don’t chain yourself to the level of other people’s fears. You are not them; exercise freewill.
Motorcycles are as fabulous as I dreamed they would be. Better even! I wish I could go back in time to a child watching Fonzie and reassure him. “Take heart young Curmudgeon. Your first bike will have twice the displacement of the Fonz’s Triumph. And Henry Winkler is just an actor with a nice jacket. He’s a pipsqueak that can’t even ride. You will ride!”
The bike and I wander post-apocalyptic terrain. Is that not what winter is? If you didn’t know about “winter” in advance you’d think the world was ending. In a way it does. Every year almost everything dies or goes dormant. Up north, it’s the way of the world. Our planet has an axial tilt. It is what it is.
Does every apocalypse seed the rejuvenation that follows? It feels like it might. I smell spring in the air and see it in the plants and animals. A frog hops across the lane and I carefully miss him. I’d never see such details were I hermetically sealed in an SUV.
Farm fields are thawing and smell of cowshit. The buildup accumulated during months of icy stasis is thawing all at once. It’s spread on the fields, returning to the soil from whence the cow’s feed came. Biology hasn’t had time to break down the material, but it will. In a few weeks, those same farms will smell sweetly of grass and flowers. Canadian geese will be prowling amid the corn stubble. My buddy the frog had better watch out. Thawing cowshit is the smell of commerce, of wealth, of another year when winter didn’t kill me. It means I’m where the food is made instead of where its consumed.
Eventually I turn back toward home. I stopped at a grocery store with a coffee shop in the corner. It’ll do. That’s where I’m typing this.
Enjoy your spring.
AC