No big changes

No big changes:  that's my New Year's resolution.  No weddings, no moves, no job changes.  Just settling down, like an old house -- although maybe too much like an old house these days, full of creaks and cracks, with cold extremities and scarcely a level surface.

Despite expectations, we enjoyed a white Christmas.  The snow started to fall on the 23rd or 24th and has continued, on and off, ever since.  Not large amounts.  But the trails have opened in Gatineau Park, and I look forward to a ski through the woods.  I know that somewhere along the trail, I will stop and listen to nothing but snowflakes sifting through the trees.  That moment will carry me a long way into the New Year.

In between snowdays, we've had some spectacularly clear and beautiful days.  Sue and I went to babysit our granddaughters, Ella and Lyla, on Wednesday.  On the way home, along the Micksburg Road, we drove beside snowy fields silver and blue in twilight.  A crescent moon hung bright in conjunction with some planet.  A persimmon sunset silhoutted the distant line of forest and the nearer, solitary individual trees.

And still, each season carries the promise of the next.  Yes, we now enter the coldest part of the year, just as the hours before dawn are the coldest time of night.  But the sun has begun its return.  Within a few weeks, a restlessness will begin to stir in the shorebirds along the coasts of Central and South America.  In the southwest, seasonal rains will cause deserts to bloom.  Around Ottawa, I know that the trees already feel the change in light.  In just a few weeks -- well, okay, eight to ten weeks -- the sap will begin to flow, and the buds will begin to swell.  Almost before we've grown accustomed to winter again, snowdrops and crocusses will begin to unfurl wherever a sunny wall reflects warmth onto bare earth.  Then I'll pull my fly rod from the basement and look to the opening of trout season in Algonquin Park.

Bring on another New Year.

Let it snow

Now that I've resigned myself to winter's arrival, I want it to snow.  Lots and lots of snow.  I want it lining each tree branch, piled high beside the front walk, and clinging to my eyelashes as I walk to work.  Most especially, I want it deep, and light, and ready to receive the tracks of my skis.  I want my breathe puffing out in a fog, as I kick through the trees in Gatineau Park.  I want a headband to protect my ears from the chill, as I glide downhill.  I want to eat my lunch in a muggy, wooden lodge, with the smell of wood smoke, wet wool and ski wax.  Enough of these dustings; I want a good, old-fashioned dump of snow.

Stream crossings

A couple of weeks ago, I took advantage of unseasonably mild weather to explore the lower reaches of Sawmill Creek, looking particularly for a beaver dam reported by the City's water environment group.  The lower creek meanders through a deeply incised, wooded ravine -- a green slash through quiet neighborhoods.  At places, where it cuts close to the south transitway, the City has stabilized the banks and slope through a variety of techniques:  armourstone, gabion baskets, plantings, even realignment of the channel.  Not bad work.  Once the vegetation matures, the engineered portions should appear reasonably natural.  The hardened portions preserve the floodplain and the natural form of the creek.

The ravine, itself, has suffered a lot from the surrounding development.  In the open, leafless woods, I could see fill, yard waste and garbage spilling down the slopes.  Plastic flotsam lay scattered and tangled in the underbrush, carried there by spring floods and summer rainstorms.  In places, I pushed through dense thickets of Japanese knotweed.  Periodically, I stopped to untangle myself from downed crack willow branches, or to pull burrs from my jacket and pants.

The summer storms had brought down or split many trees.  Some lay in or across the creek, where they had caught other wood and debris to create impressive log jams.  I crossed several of them to avoid steeper slopes, balancing or crawling across the slipperly, canted trunks.  It reminded me of my teenage excursions around Goldstream Park and the Malahat Drive in Victoria, where I would scramble alone up the mountainsides along the tumbling creeks.  Probably not the wisest thing to do.  I would often find myself paused on a precarious foothold on a slick ledge, above a creek jammed with massive deadfalls, out of sight and sound of any help.

At the time -- and even now, I guess -- I believed that the rewards justified the risks.  Balanced on a boulder in the creek bed, with walls of stone and trees climbing high on either side, and a waterfall splashing down a mossy rock face into a secret pool, I felt transported to a different world.  With the forest closed in around me, I felt connected to the earth in primal way, as if I could have grown roots myself.