blessings of a blizzard: hernandos gifts
The woodlands surrounding my home are defined by hardy evergreen vegetation and a majestic forest of tall pine and sturdy oak, but in the face of the recent Blizzard Hernando, they cowered in palpable fear. Bravely, two plump turkeys clung perilously to a high oak branch as trees swayed in the wind like spineless blades of beach grass bending to limits oft unrecoverable, snapping limbs like twigs and pummeling everything it touched. I’m not sure if they were brave, or petrified, but the pair of birds were the only signs of life.
From a second-floor window in my darkened home, my family watched as heavy snow whipped through the air like a swarm of angry white hornets. An old growth pine that had likely stood in its place more than 50 years succumbed to the wind and weight of the snow that coated her bark and branches. She snapped like a matchstick, wretched apart tearing a 20-foot gaping wound that exposed the grains of life that had nurtured her for a generation. It sounded like lightening had struck in the very next room followed by a thunder like boom with a force so violent to shake the house as she hit the ground littering the baby pinecones that clung to her upper reaches. The turkeys took flight.
How awesome the power of nature so great to topple such a tree. It was at once terrifying, marvelous, and alive.
This particular power of nature delt a huge blow to Cape Cod with winds gusting to more than 80 miles per hour and white out conditions that lasted nearly 24 hours, dumping more than two feet of snow and knocking out power to more than 150,000 homes and businesses. We are accustomed to snow here, but this was a storm unlike any we had seen in nearly 50 years. It also came at a time when climate change is measurable in terms of snow fall that had been nearly unmeasurable in the region for the last five years. We always had snow here, until we didn’t.
So, as the lights went out and internet crashed residents were left to fend for themselves many employing the wit and wisdom of old timers smart enough to stock up on food, stack dry wood and break out flashlights and candles. For some, generators hummed turning on lights but the absence of connectivity to computers, smart phones and television forced them to come to very real terms with what we can live without and what we have been missing.
When the winds subsided and the sun shone on the glittering whiteness that frosted everything the blizzard touched, people donned winter gear, boots and snowshoes and got out to experience it with a sense of wonder and amazement. We shoveled driveways and pathways for our children and dogs and piled snow became fortresses for snowball wars.
While it was hard for some to imagine two feet of snow as something to be grateful for, especially if you were those turkeys, on Cape Cod we have experienced severe drought for the last three years. If we are to trust the Farmer’s Almanac, we can expect a dry summer. Blizzard Hernando was in fact a gift, an eventual wash of water to recharge our soil and find its way to our groundwater come springtime.
In its blanketing form the snow was insulation protecting and even nurturing evergreen ground cover and culturally important medicinal plants like the creeping jenny, the trailing arbutus with its delicate roots and tiny “Mayflowers”, the boxberry with its wee red fruit waiting to be picked even under the snow, and those petite princess pine. Small mammals, field mice, moles and boles, made lairs underneath, while coyote and fox found ready habitat in the lee side of deadfall debris.
Hernando will mean a rising water table to support the return of herring and trout that have struggled in recent years, in ever more shallow riverbeds to find their way back to the lakes and ponds.
And the long periods of sustained freezing along with the significant snow and ice we have experienced this winter may mean fewer ticks reducing the risk of dreadful tick-borne illnesses this season.
At Native Land Conservancy our office remained closed for a week as schools throughout the region were closed, driving was banned except for essential travel, and our staff was snowed in. Our director and associate director who had been traveling in the days before the storm were stranded out of state.
Nothing was as it was. But the moment the lights came back on was bittersweet.
Hernando was brutal but none the less a gift. A gift that recharged our ecosystem and ourselves. The gift of time. Time to reflect on what was important. Telling stories by the hearth. Reading aloud, playing card games, doing jigsaw puzzles by candlelight. Time to make memories.
