Nature Journal

"The ice on the lakes has secured the shores and islands, has adjusted itself to the form it must keep until spring.  The woods are ready, and the zero hour approaches, an even greater silence settles down over the north."
–Sigurd Olson, from Listening Point, "Coming of the Snow"












28 November


Without knowing it, or trying much, the lake changes its art in one night; along its beaches only two months previous, people lounging on its soft sands dipping toes into water and seeing the great pool as a playground, wide, brown, warm, inviting, a gift of recreation and habitat, depending on who or what is using. The coming of the first snows and the canvas tightens, issues a set of differing colors – in the sun not only do the deep browns turn glass blue, but diamonds are everywhere possible, sharp spectrums, churning and catching refractions, leaving the eye to behold new recreations.  In all, the lake is the mystery.

A painting is but a manufactured thing, dry, brittle, representing only other things.  Under the art of the ice, the water still lives.  When the child kicks down the heel onto the thin crust at the shore, it is fun to crack, pick and throw, but it is the visible soft brown folds of the sand below and the deepening a few feet out that is hidden that attracts as well.  How could such an art, so massive, be so quick to form?  Under the weather of a warming day, how could it as easily melt?  Where do the diamonds go?  Part of the the power of the seasons is to see in comparison how small our own brush.