You don't need a weatherman to tell you what the weather is, and you don't need a calendar to tell you when winter starts.
You may not have known how many wooly caterpillars shouted out warnings earlier this year about a tough winter, or geese flew higher, or about bigger numbers of evergreen cones, or whatever signs you read. You didn't need to know, because now it has arrived. You have a window, and that's all you need. This has all the signs of a dandy.
The 9 inches or whatever that blew in on the first week of November's coattails may have been more than an aberration. Seems it caught the road commission with their plows over there, and more than a few of us with our lawnmowers blocking the snowblower. We may have known this early blast would melt, but we didn't know how quickly it might be replaced. As I said, this could be a dandy.
For deer scouts the early high snow came on angelic coattails. The week before opener had most of the hunters in the woods scouting their favorite spots anyway, and the snow let them know what was moving, when, and where. It tends to get anyone excited, following tracks and thinking like a buck. A big buck.
Usually intemperate weather is followed by more polite stuff. The feared second storm is never as nasty as promised.
Then came November 12, 2003, in Brimley. Late night news not only had an ominous tip about the weather, but outside, the background music literally bounced off the siding. By midnight that night air arrived at 50 miles an hour, branches broke, and roots turned desperate. Electricity took the night off.
Dawn November 13 on Lake Superior was an angry affair. Mishipishu (Bay Mills News November, 2002), the cranky beast who sleeps at the bottom of Lake Superior was awake, and working the “Big Unfriendly” into a white lather. Waves desperate to hit the beach crashed into one another, and slammed their way home.
Along the shore we lost dozens of ancient trees. Hemlock trees, thick with majesty and wavy green fir turned on their sides, their shallow roots exposing them for the weaklings they sometimes are. Long lasting new openings replaced long lasting thick old growth, at 50 miles an hour.
The beauty of storm damage, if there is such a thing, is that it is both ending and beginning at the same time. The new, ugly open spaces give light to new trees that will now have the strength to thicken and turn ancient. Just like a forest burn opens a cone with its heat and spills seeds on nitrogen rich black soil, decaying branches and trunks will nurture new growth along the shore.
The season has hardly started, but already it scars the memory. The winter of 2003 has an energetic start.
Pat Egan is the former publisher of the Sault Evening News. He is a recipient of the William Allen White award for editorial writing. He and his wife Debra live at Salt Point.
