The Wonder of Water in Winter

My foot crunches through the snow and into unseen mud below. Thank Wilbert and Robert Gore for these waterproof boots. Mud in winter is weird but is not surprising when stomping around the woods amidst spring-fed fens and creeks. A tiny trickle bubbles behind me where I just stepped across it and started up this grassy slope. The ground looks solid but is in fact full of muddy seeps where the water leaks from the soil and starts its trip down the surface to the St. Croix.

I’m also headed for the river, but I don’t know how to get there. Someone had mentioned a path I would find across the creek. It’s maybe half a mile, I figure I can find it. Navigating around the mossy wetlands, I am a little turned around, and there is no sign of a trail. The woods are thick with brush and buckthorn, and I push through it on deer trails when I’m not stepping carefully across watery meadows.

Giving up on finding the trail, I see a notch in the land where the creek goes, and think that surely it must be the most direct route to the river. I step across it because the other bank looks less brushy, and do it again another 25 yards downstream. The creek is legitimate here, the trickle where I started has gathered the countless springs and seeps and rushes along, six feet wide and six inches deep.

One hillside is covered in rocks a foot or two across, surely a big glacial deposit. Where these rocks meet the stream, the water bends around a pile of stones, and at the apex of that bend is a fallen tree. The rocks had pushed the water into the opposite bank long enough that it undercut the tree’s roots, the area’s geology interacting with the botany.

The stream drops a couple feet down a final rocky fall into a big, wide, slow channel which must be backed up from the river around the next bend. A beaver has been at work here, and I can’t help but marvel at the trees it has felled just to get the succulent upper branches.

Then I come to the point where the creek ends, the ice starts, and the river is before me. It’s a backwater here, a term which belies its character. “Backwater” makes it sounds muddy and stagnant, but this is probably some of the cleanest in the system, thanks to the inflow of creeks like this and all the springs that flow into this channel before joining the main current.

Silence and stillness rule here. Just a crow cawing on the island across the channel. My feet crunching through the shallow snow are deafening. The ice is perfectly flat and pure white, and the trees gray against a gray sky. It may lack the exuberance of springtime birdsong, the joy of summer swimming, the brilliance of autumn color, but winter boasts great calm, quiet and solitude. I stand still a few moments, letting my mind rest and my spirit wander out into the big empty world.