FROM THE ARCHIVES: When ice relaxes into water, the world quickens and flows. That shape-shifting sprite, H2O, is busy at this time of year appearing everywhere in every guise — solid, liquid, and vapor — awakening the world with all its sudden activity.
We associate these water-induced awakenings with spring, but there was a time 10,000 years ago when there was one great awakening after an era of ice when spring failed to show up for thousands of years. When the Laurentide Ice Sheet finally loosened its cold grip on Connecticut a hundred centuries ago and melted into runoff, the transformed landscape was revealed. The hills and vales had been sculpted by the solid scrape of ice into the terrain that now defines our home state.
Great quantities of ice had been ground into the soil, and when the ice melted the soil collapsed into depressions. Some of the larger depressions filled with water and became lakes and ponds along the emerging networks of coursing water. The smaller depressions, discrete and removed from the flow, survive only as ephemeral water bodies, capturing the snowmelt and spring showers in the months of March and April, then drying up in the summer heat, and sometimes reappearing in a rainy fall.
It’s a warm wind, the west wind,
full of birds’ cries;
I never hear the west wind
but tears are in my eyes.
For it comes from the west lands,
the old brown hills,
And April’s in the West wind, and daffodils.
—John Masefield
Much is made of the March wind as it spins weathervanes from lion to lamb. The month straddles the frontier of two seasons, a haven for smugglers crossing at will from winter to spring and back again, carrying snowdrifts, snowdrops, black ice, and crocuses under the unseen cloak of the wind.
The March wind blows hot and cold, speaking in warm whispers of hope and cold coughs of despair to the credulous. To those of us wise to the feints and deceptions of March, it speaks ultimately of resignation to the West wind, which arrives as surely as the world turns, bearing April and daffodils.
The caprice of March always tests my best efforts to approach the world with equanimity, to take things as they come. I try my best not to be thrown off course by unexpected bumps in the road, which at this time of year alternately splash slush and mud in every direction. Steady-as-she-goes goes a lot steadier in the monotony of January, February, June, or July, or in the even flow of spring and fall. But March can be a rough, messy ride for even-tempered souls. The only solution is to adopt a March modus operandi devoid of expectation about what comes next.
My March mode I liken to lichens’.
Lichens are famous for not requiring much of anything to make them happy. They exist quite contentedly in some of the planet’s most extreme places, from parched deserts to frozen tundra. So the fickle forecasts of March are a cakewalk for lichen. The organism doesn’t care what comes next.
