Snow Trees

The snow has silenced the landscape. Nothing moves today in this white forest. The birds are mysteriously absent.
Even the cove itself – though certainly the tide still sweeps its waters in and out – seems motionless. Its shoreline is roughly piled with snow, and the inner half of the cove is frozen, a solid stretch of churned-up snow and cakes of ice. Out beyond this, the water is dark and gray with drifting, translucent ice, granular and amorphous.
There’s no movement here, in the woods, or in the underbrush. The long-legged snowshoe hare that was hopping through the woods last week, looking foolish because he’d turned white too soon, is now invisible. He may be curled up somewhere, inside a hollow log, or he may be moving subtly through this pale wintry landscape, impossible to see.
The trees going down to the cove are all evergreens, mostly firs, and right now they’re loaded with 14 inches of snow. Their boughs slant steeply down under this burden, but they don’t break. On the few times when a heavy snow falls early in the season, while the deciduous trees are still in leaf, a natural disaster occurs. Those leaves, wide and flat, hold the snow in accumulating piles, and those branches, horizontal and rigid, are unprepared for this cumbersome burden. They break off with excruciating cracks, and fall heavily and heartbreakingly onto the lawn.
Many times, in one of these snows, I’ve climbed out onto the roof with a broom and whacked off all the snow I could reach, but I couldn’t reach every limb, and all around me I’d hear the big old sugar maples creaking and groaning, and their limbs would finally crack right off with the unbearable heaviness of snow. We’ve lost big branches that way, from the sugar maples and the ash trees. But not from the conifers.
A fir tree is an engineer’s dream, perfectly designed for shedding snow. Every aspect works to this end: the tapering, pyramidal shape, the pointed tip, the drooping branches, the fine, downward-slanting needles. Snow, no matter how wet or heavy, slides easily off. It’s shed at once from the highest, most flexible twigs, then it slides father, until it rests in bulky drifts along a lower branch.
The branch already droops downward, and it’s limber, ready to give. The more snow, the more its weight bears the branch down, until the angle is so steep that gravity intervenes. The snow slides down farther, out onto the narrowest, supplest, slenderest needles fingers. These yield gracefully, under its weight, and the snow drops off. The branch, released, rises springily upward; a silent plume of snowy mist blooms in the air.
That’s all that’s happening here this afternoon, in the woods around the silent cove. There’s no wind. The surface of the snow is untouched, as though there were no hares, foxes, squirrels, crows or chickadees here. The snow, weighty and commanding, seems to muffle activity, as though the creatures are attending to its presence, lying low beneath this heavy, unfamiliar white blanket.
There are no footprints yet. The only marks are the erratic, soft-edged craters made by the suddenly plummeting snow. The only movement is the white spume, spilling silently from a dark, laden bough.