PEPIN

“For them who think death’s honesty won’t fall upon ’em naturally, life sometimes must get lonely,” – Bob Dylan

In the frosty mornings on these November days, with the orange-red sun burning through the crystalline ice and frost like a laser, I find an honest peace and headspace wide enough for my mind to roam.

Over the span of only a few hours overnight, this thick frost has coated every branch of every tree and shrub. Shocks of once green grass growing in the meadow along the old logging road, now are covered in their gray-white and sparkling covering.

The weight of the frost pulls some plants and branches down toward the ground.

As the sun burns on, frost smoke rises over the marsh and then disappears into the sunlight the higher it floats.

There’s something about seeing the trees and everything else flocked with frost that makes the silence over the landscape a little more pronounced. It also seems as though the air is cleaner and more intoxicating when I breathe it in deep.

If I touch a frosted branch, leaf or pine bough, the warmth from my hand breaks the spell as the frost melts. The illusion is gone.

So, I don’t touch the branches or anything else. I want to keep that sense of profound peace, silence and magical wonder existing all around me for as long as I can.

Usually on days when I find myself within the confines of a snow globe scene such as this, I discover that I have forgotten my camera.

Today is no exception.

That’s OK. I would love to have images from today to reflect upon in the days ahead, but a camera is a distraction from my absolute presence in these moments.

From where I am standing, I can’t hear any birds calling, tapping or otherwise making noise. I don’t blame them for staying tucked away in their warm little places.

They might be like me sometimes when I’m camping and I know it’s freezing outside the tent. I don’t get out of my warm sleeping bag unless I need to.

The need to get out usually involves having to pee.

I know some dudes keep a pee jug or jar in their tent for just such an occasion, but that’s just not something I’m going to do.

I think my first experience with this was when I lived in California and was riding north from L.A. to the Monterey area for an Audubon conference. My buddy’s truck had a camper on it, and we were just going to park to sleep.

In the middle of the night, of course, I had to brave the cold outdoors to answer nature’s call.

When I got back in and finally got resituated and enveloped once again within the warmth of my sleeping bag, I heard a liquid making a pinging sound off the inside of an empty glass bottle.

It was immediately recognizable.

“What are you doing?”

“Gotta be prepared.”

I don’t know what he did with the bottle, and I don’t want to know.

I had mental pictures of it tipping over and rolling around on the floorboard while he was driving. Yuck!

As though he had heard me thinking about the lack of birdlife around me, a chickadee popped out of one of the trees and landed not far away from me, offering me a chick-dee-dee-dee.

“Well, hello Mr. Chick-diddle-diddle.”

As he went about his way, the silence returned to wrap itself around me like a jacket three times larger than what fits me.

I have been searching this week for as much silence as I can find. The good news is that these warm days, cold nights conditions make the icy-blue silence easier to discover.

Outside my house, in the wee hours, there is an almost pounding silence most nights. On others, I can hear the highway buzzing with traffic, even though it’s a couple miles away, emergency sirens or dogs barking.

This week, I have experienced a couple nights of pure pleasurable silence, another couple filled with the wondrous sounds of northern saw-whet, great horned and barred owls and one night with far-off sirens, which led to the yipping of coyotes.

I was hoping to catch a glimpse of a peaking meteor shower, but even though the skies were clear, the production of meteor sightings was low — at least for me.

I start walking down an old trail that is covered with patches of frost that mask the dirt and gravel in some places. This little path can take me down along the river.

I am certain the water is warmer than the air this morning, even with the sun shining. I move slowly under some big white pine trees, their sap certainly not flowing anywhere.

The sky is cerulean up above the five-needled green pine branches at the highest tops of these trees. I can smell that Christmasy aroma of these big giants, the ground littered with fallen rust-red needles coated in a salting of frost.

Nearby, I see some balsam firs and pop one of the sap bubbles on one of the tree trunks. The clear goo covers my fingers like aloe vera, and the evergreen aroma is so strong as I take a big sniff of it.

This is one of those smells that can define the season for me. If I was deaf, dumb and blind, if I smelled balsam sap it would mean Christmas to me.

I feel the same about pumpkin spice smell defining the harvest season, which would include Halloween and Thanksgiving for me.

I keep walking along toward the river with the sap sticking to my fingers. I continue to raise my hand to my nose to keep smelling the balsam. Taking in that smell with a deep cold breath is exhilarating.

As the sun moves higher into the sky, warming bigger and wider areas, I retreat farther down the trail into the shadows where I can remain amid the still frosty forest.

I find a log to sit on for a few minutes to watch the black water of the river drift past in a smooth, thick flow reminding me of oil.

There are swirls in the water as it moves and other places where the surface is disturbed by the current, but the river is completely quiet.

Along the riverbank, there are dried brown grasses from the summertime past, those wonderful days of the greenest greens and the teeming life and living of seemingly everything all at once.

Some of the dried and dead blooms remind me of pinwheels. Their stems are bent and frosted, like the half-eaten and frosty seed tops of gone-but-not-forgotten black-eyed Susans.

I feel the wind drift up in a lonely swirl that moves across my face and touches me. I start to feel a hollow, dead sensation moving in a whirl throughout my body.

Maybe the frost is turning my blooms, stems and branches into a dried brown pinwheel. If that’s what is happening, I am willing to accept my fate, if I can stay out here by the wide, black river, under the blue skies and the green pine trees.

I can stand here frozen in place like the Tin Man.

Or lashed to a post like the Scarecrow.

The important thing after all, is to be out here where everything real and true and right and pure is going on — all the time, every day and every night.

Before I freeze in place, I start walking down an old railroad bed. If I close my eyes, I can hear the whistle of the engine and the slow rolling sound of those big wheels on the heavy loaded cars passing over the silvery rails.

The trains are gone from here and they aren’t coming back.

It’s hard for a kid like me to understand how that’s even possible.

A lot of the familiar sights we knew is those ancient times, including viaducts, railroad bridges, miles and miles of tracks, buckets full of rusty railroad spikes, old switches and steel spike plates, like the two-man hand cars, are gone.

I look at old pictures to remind myself of these things. It is incomprehensible to me that all these things — made from steel, concrete, boulders and wood — have disappeared.

As I start to walk back to my waiting Jeep, with the frost still clinging tight against everything I see, I think about that.

The bridges and the railroad tracks may be gone from here, but the river is still here.

With the grace of the creator, the river will always be here.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.