Weeds Above the Snow
THERE is a foot of snow on the ground, lying almost level, for it fell quietly, and during a warm day and night, so that it was lightly crusted before the wind came up. Only on the most exposed slopes has the northwest wind, which draws strongly down our valley beneath the shaggy mountain wall, been able to ruffle the surface into tiny drifts, like the waves of a choppy sea, or like the sand of the Sahara. Skiing rapidly over such a surface is beset with much the same perils as sailing a canoe through a chop.
My brook is now a beautiful thing, not in the least resembling any of its spring or summer aspects. If you should load a flexible brush heavily with black oil paint, and then draw it in a wavy line across a sheet of thick, soft, clear white paper, you might approximate the appearance of my brook from a slight distance, as it comes down through the pasture. But you could not quite capture, even with the utmost technical dexterity, the delicate undulations of its course. Ordinarily I am aware of it as a coolly gurgling little brown stream, splashing into white over rocks, lined with grasses, weeds, and monkey flowers, but in no sense an exponent of pure line. What line it has is half lost in the grasses. But now it is pure line, a ribbon of velvety black sunk in the deeper white velvet of the snow, a line that tells of every hidden contour of the ground, and, above all, has that sheer beauty of curve which only something that flows can ever completely attain. Coming nearer to it, I find its transformed banks no less strange and lovely. Every rock around which the dark water curves, every grass hassock, is capped with snow like a tiny dome, and all the banks are overhung with snow in a delicate yet abrupt down-sweeping curve, steeper than that of a thatched roof, and almost infinitely varied as the wind above or water below has moulded them. It is not until I stand directly over the brook that I see through the black water, swaying gently in the current, the familiar green of living vegetation. My brook in the snow is the skeleton of contour, the soul of pure line. It is a single, fluid masterstroke by the Master Etcher.
But, as I move about over the wide white paper of the fields and pastures to-day, I realize my entire world as an etching. My pasture climbs steeply to the forest, and the forest, with ever-increasing abruptness, climbs to the fifteen-hundred-foot ridge of the mountain shoulder which juts boldly into the plain and hides a sight, from this close angle, of the domed summit yet a thousand feet higher. So steep, indeed, are the upper ledges of this shaggy shoulder, that they are, in places, practically precipitous, and the trees, seen from below, are outlined against a white backing, either of snow-and ice-covered cliffs, or of the up-ended forest floor itself.
The bulk of the forest is deciduous, a mixed stand of chestnut and hard woods; and now the straight, forestgrown trunks are suddenly stabbed in a new distinctness against the white backing, with a myriad down-strokes of the etcher’s needle. Their sprayed tops, an intricate maze of hairlike lines, are colored in subdued tints of lavender, red, and brown, as if the colored ink had been delicately brushed on with a bit of feather. The scattered evergreens — pines and hemlocks — are, however, firmly etched in outline, each one distinct though half a mile away, and colored a rich dark green with a loaded brush. There is an old saying that you cannot, when too close, see the forest lor the trees. Here on the great white, upstanding paper of the mountainside, I suddenly behold both the forest and the trees. The mountain looks even higher and steeper than when wearing its customary aspect; the forest is no less impressive in bulk; but the myriad arboreal units which compose it are suddenly revealed, each one delineated with infinite patience, in its naked skeleton of trunk and branches, patterned in ink-strokes on the snow.
Letting my eyes come back from the mountain ledges to the pasture at my feet, I am aware of the loveliest part of the whole great etching which is the visible world to-day. The weed-tops above the snow! To the farmer, at least, they are weeds. Some of them are the ghosts of our fairest flowers. Dried now to a russet or straw-brown, in some lights almost an old gold, or, in the case of hardhack and shrubby cinquefoil, to a deep chocolate, these dead stalks stand up rigid above the snow, and each one reveals all that it possesses of linear charm and intricacy. And how much that almost invariably is! Here, in a space of a few feet near the fence, where, for some reason, the cows did not crop the pasture close last summer, the etcher’s needle has fixed in beauty no less than a score of different designs, some of them as lovely as a snow crystal. Take, for example, that spray of wood asters. The stem rises above the crust, and then curves gracefully down wind, throwing out wiry branchlets, each branchlet hung with tiny stars, each star the shell that once held a pale blue flower.
They are no less lovely, surely, than the flowers — these stiff little strawbrown stars etched on the gleaming snow. Beside them are the brown plumes of goldenrod, the dried flowercups like rayed pin-heads; with what tool did the etcher make so many perfect, star-edged dots? The Queen Anne’s lace has half closed its cups — cups of open ribs and diaphanous rim, which hold each its little dab of snow. Amid them all are many grasses, fairy plumes of such delicacy that the artist’s needle must merely have breathed against the blackened plate. A mullein stalk by the fence is a gaudy thing, a big, grandiloquent straight line, borne down heavily upon for the sake of contrast. But, beside it, and quite as tall, a milkweed is bursting open its pods like gray and ochre orchids, and a tall wild lettuce, ugliest of weeds (always excepting the burdock) in summer, is now a slender spire, flowering at its peak into a hundred feathery little rosettes. To one who loves pure line and pattern, this small garden of weedtops above the snow by the pasture fence — even the fence-posts go marching along, stroke, stroke, stroke of black, across the snow, in a quaint procession — could be a source of almost endless study and delight.
But again I lift my eyes. Just across the road is a row of fine old sugar maples which have not yet succumbed to the brutally unintelligent pruning of the State Highway Commission. Now, more than ever, I am aware how, fifteen feet from the ground, they begin to burst into a great fountain-spray of branches, each branch bursting and rebursting on its upward spring, till the whole gracefully domed crown dissolves in a riot of twigs, and against the hard winter sky it is almost impossible to tell exactly the point at which the last buds end. Between the shaggy gray boles of these trees I look across a meadow, toward the swamp. This meadow was neglected last summer by the mowers, and the prevailing autumn winds bent the dried grasses southeastward, so that now they form an army with straw-gold plumes, sweeping across the snow, forever in motion, yet frozen fast. Beyond them is a patch of rich chocolate, where the etcher has rubbed the ink on with a liberal thumb, and then the feathery rust of the tamaracks. You never realize what a beautiful color rust is till you see a tamarack swamp across the white fields, perhaps with the amethyst lights of sunset beginning to tinge the eastern hills. One of our ultra-modern American poets has written a poem ‘To a Discarded Steel Rail,’ in which he speaks of
The rust of the tamaracks is not a smile at the vanity of man’s restlessness, however, but at the pleasant, sunny world and the dreaming thoughts of resurgent sap.
I went far afield to-day, through old orchards where the deer had been pawing up the snow for buried, frozen apples; through a snow-laden stand of young pines, where the aspect was of blobs of white spattered on dark green, and where, no matter how low I stooped, the brushed branches pelted me with cold powder; past fox-tracks and rabbit-tracks and the bed of a partridge in the uncovered leaves — I heard him go whirring off through the snowy silences before I reached the spot; into clearings where the weed-top etchings were renewed, and invisible water tinkled somewhere under ice; then into deep woods again, and up the mountain ravines.
It was late when, at last, I pushed back out of the forest fringe, and set my ski-points valley ward, but leaning first on my poles to look down on the ghostly-radiant, frozen world. A young moon swam over the mountain shoulder, holding in its crescent the vague wraith of the full sphere, like a bubble in a golden saucer. The light of this moon bathed all the world in its pale, clear glow. The world was not an etching any more. All but the nearest weedtops had disappeared. But each tree and shrub sent out a pale, firm shadow over the faintly sparkling snow; the world was a silver-point engraving of supreme delicacy, upon a frosted paper; and not the trees, but their shadows, were most alive. The air was a frozen crystal which no sound snapped, except, far off in the valley, a dull boom from expanding ice in the pond, and the disembodied hoot of an owl up the ravine behind me. Yet there was another sound. Listening intently, I could hear it behind, below, on both sides — the sound of running water, like a wind just waking, or like the world’s soft breathing as it lay wrapped in frozen dream.
Far below gleamed a single reddishgold window-square, oddly unrelated to the lonely scene. Yet thither I must go. My skis squeaked on the snow as I slid them forward and caught the first rush of icy air in my lungs.
The young moon has dropped now behind the mountain shoulder, and Orion, who nightly springs from his couch beyond the eastern hills, is up amid the game flocks of the stars. My window-square glows out into darkness lit with a dim white radiance from the snow. The weed-top etchings are only in my memory.
I know moods — as who does not? — when it would be most natural for me to allow them to remain there, neither reasoned about nor written about, merely a deepening of the background of one’s sensuous enjoyment of ‘this goodly frame, the earth.’ Yet to-night I am curiously tempted to pin them up before me for further contemplation, endeavoring vaguely, blindly, to work from them to human analogies.
If, aided by the soft, obliterating mantle of the snow, we walk abroad and find common things — a brook, a dead weed-top — suddenly revealed in a new and simpler aspect, so that some unguessed trait of enduring loveliness it all along possessed is set alone, in a high light, for contemplation, and from its littleness one’s soul moves on to grasp such large conceptions as the beauty of the curve or the profound strength required for accurate delicacy, why can there not be some snow-mantle in our relations with our fellows, to work a magical transformation and reveal similar unexpected significances? Henry Adams is but the last large mind to affirm that a man can compass at most but two or three friends. Is that because it is only upon friendship — and love — that the snow-mantle of silence falls, and under the spell of this silence is born a more perfect understanding than can ever come of words; under it, as we think each our own secret and dynamic thoughts, we seem mystically aware of what it is in his, or her, soul which is lovely and eternal? All of us know this snow-mantle of silence that drops upon the converse of friends, the communion of lovers, the wife and husband sitting by their evening fire. And all of us know that we can look for its soft revealing in our relations with but a pitiful few of our fellows. For the rest, we guess at the verities in their souls, as we might guess at the exquisite curve of the brook when it is half lost in sedgy verdure, or at the delicate, spired loveliness of the lettucestalk when it is a rank, ungainly green shoot by the roadside, with ugly, insignificant flowers.
It is not alone in my own small circle that I yearn for some gentle obliteration alike of outer ugliness and rank summer richness, and a revelation of those still, cold winter lines of the human spirit that tell so surely whether its essential form is fair. After all, in our immediate circle, we arrive in time at approximate, if unsatisfactory estimates. But how is it in the wider relations of men? As the snow buries, so we talked of the war burning away, the unessentials, and we did indeed seem to see the stark skeletons of men’s ideals, fine and rigid and at a white heat. But in the crackling haze of a conflagration the vision is often deluded. It is over the cool calmness of snow, that outlines are best estimated — snow which is white like Peace.
The white benediction of Peace! When that descends on the world, is not then the time to look for those spiritual perfections, those inner, essential beauties of soul in our fellows, which can give us so deep a moment of contemplation, in the belief that in essence the world and the world’s people are drawn clean and fine and delicate, the delicacy of infinite strength under perfect control? Ah, if we could but find it so! If we could but admit to our deeper beliefs the belief that War is a purge, or Peace a soft-fallen obliteration of rank excesses and things dead and ugly, a revelation of Man’s structural spirituality, like the weed-tops above the snow! But we see War intoxicate as well as purge, and we see Peace reveal gross selfishnesses, ugly, rank green burdocks of greed and covetousness. Nowhere does the world of Man lie cool beneath a white snow-blanket, each lifted soul a bitten, lacy line of beauty. We seem to see plumed souls that wave and beckon, strong, solid, spired souls, souls delicate as tops of grass; but ever such a mass and maze of other souls, lineless, formless, or of evil twist, souls like dead leaves that rot, or weeds that crowd the flowers out, hidden by no kindly snow, stripped by no winter frosts — the welter of the world of men! How strip them all down to their naked stalks? How show them all against some background white as snow, that what is beautiful may be so clearly seen that no man can forget, and what is ugly, that all men shall turn away and choose the plumes and aster stars?
My etched world has led me far afield, and brought me, groping, back again, unanswered and unsatisfied. Upon their bright Ægean hills, ages long ago, the shepherds watched Orion climb, and gave to him, no doubt, his name. War came and peace came, religions rose and perished, philosophers were crowned, — and poisoned, — man groped for light within himself and freedom in his universe, poets sang, and saints perished. Still I look out and see Orion hunting the game flocks of the stars. Now he has forded the Milky Way. The Dog-star is in golden cry beneath his heels. How still and cold and beautiful is the night! How remote those star-glints from our troubled earth! How keener far than Man’s must be the eye that sees the end and meaning of it all; how greater far the hand that etches on some spirit snow the weed-tops of our human souls, and makes them all fair at last!