I won’t lie. When I went this month to the to the trails near my apartments, I was a bit disappointed.
What stuck out to me the most in Leopald’s book was a beautiful illustration of the changing of seasons. Things were tentative but cyclical. Animals and plants would make themselves known and then sink to the background as other forces took over. It was a beautiful and poetic illustration of the environment’s synergistic competition and elegant balance that could only have developed after centuries of unchecked experimentation.
This was none of that.
The woods still looked the same as they did last month. The trails had been shrouded in gray for two months now. The granite paths squelched with every step and the air was wet and sticky under the protection of the trees. Early January had held a brief reprieve, perhaps a week, of warm weather. Since then the pall of a stubborn winter had clung on tenaciously to central Texas. I stalked through the woods, looking for something to mark the seasons, a sign of change.
The one difference (observable to my eyes) that I was able to find were the flowers of a tree that stood in an isolated bloom amidst the thin pale arms of the other trees. I had walked past it many times before noticing. The white petals were hardly much to catch the eyes against the pale gray sky. On closer look however they were rather beautiful, their pink insides shielded by the curved white petals.
Last February had been of a different nature entirely. By late February, winter had already begun to melt from our memories. The weather had begun to be mild and discussing the fear of Texas summer was already the prefered weapon for killing a prolonged silence. However, now spring break approaches this year and the idea camping seems painful and unpleasant.
This was the thing worth noting, the lack of change. Well, it wasn’t really that there was no change. There were subtle changes from January that I’m sure a much more trained eye could detect. The change that was obvious to me however was one that was much further away in time. The change from last year. This winter was lasting longer than normal and would undoubtedly have effects come spring. Some species would proliferate while others lay dormant. Natures diversity was not gone, only in hiding.
The Earth is wild. It is in human nature to divide it cutely into months and seasons, like the chapters of a book, but this can only hinder my understanding of it. The only metric of nature is its own processes. The animals and plants do not come out merely because of the date of the calendar, but due to their environment. When the environment does not change, neither do the visible species. Rather than watching the dates change I need to be watching the temperature and the humidity. These will be the catalysts that bring in the animals and plants that will serve as my sign of spring.
“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring” – Aldo Leopold p.18