Woodswoman by Anne LaBastille

Author:Anne LaBastille [LaBastille, Anne]
Format: epub
Tags: Americana, 1960ties, Wilderness
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Breakup

Once the barrel has slipped through, the breakup is imminent.

The eroded ice is rotten, spongy, and pocked with holes where melt water swirls through in miniature whirlpools to the great mass of dark lake below. My last few trips down Black Bear Lake are tentative and damp. Cracks are showing open water along the shoreline. The ice seems to warp and bend beneath my weight.

The snowshoe webbing gets soggy, gelatinous, and heavy. I use an ice pole again, tapping carefully. Then, one day, intuition tells me to take to the woodland route until breakup is over. A few more days pass with treacherous “black ice” still spanning the lake. And then, miraculously, one morning there is blue water sparkling in the sun! It’s April 25!

I shovel out my boat from under a foot of snow, haul up the outboard motor, screw in two new sparkplugs, and yank on the rope. Twenty-three pulls later, it coughs into life, disgruntled to be working again after a five-month vacation. The first trip down Black Bear Lake in April is like the last one up in November.

The water is thick and turgid. The weather is raw and bleak.

But now everything is reversed, especially my feelings. Instead of resignation to impending gloom, ice, isolation, snow, cold, short days, and hardship, there is anticipation of sunshine, green trees, visitors, movement, color, long days, and singing birds.

It must be the same for wild animals, I think. Beavers, otters, and muskrats are suddenly free to cruise on the lakes’ surfaces rather than dive precariously from air hole to air hole under a heavy roof of ice. How do they find those lifesaving exits swimming through the murk of a cold Adirondack lake with 30 inches of ice and a foot of snow overhead? And what of the fish? Do they sense relief at the lightening, brightening, warming of water?

Loons, grebes, mergansers, geese, and ducks are migrating.

Any day, familiar pairs will be dropping down to Black Bear Lake and Beaver Pond for the summer. I long for the shrill laugh of a loon at dawn. The Canada Geese have seen the open water and are heading northward, sure of a resting place come night.

^^^^

Freak May snowstorm buffets Pitzi and me as we speed down the lake with the mailbag.

Their jubilant honking drifts down over the quickening streams, rivers, and marshlands.

All through the mountains, from steepest peak to lowest swamp, water is moving. Trillions of cubic feet of water have been freed. The immense watersheds of the Adirondacks are unfettered.

The vast vegetative sponge is yielding up its moisture.

Water is purging, flooding, surging toward the lowlands. Crystal drops are falling from ice-coated boulders way up on Algonquin and Marcy. Tiny trickles are gurgling out from under snow banks on southfacing slopes. From every height of land, water is pouring toward’its appointed tributary or main river—be it the Independence, Grass, Cold, Opalescent, Cedar, Ausable, Oswegatchie, Boquet, Raquette, Moose, Beaver, Otter, Sacandaga, West Canada, St. Regis, Schroon, or Boreas—hence via the St. Lawrence or Hudson Rivers to the sea.

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