It takes dust to make a snowflake. For the freeze of air and moisture to find shape, bloom into crystalline structures, petals of ice. And become snow.
Scientists sought and eventually found ways to re-create the weather’s alchemy in non-weathered labs, creating currents of electricity to shock the air into giving up its secrets. But it takes a filament—something for the cooled air and echo of rain to catch hold of, merge into something altogether different.
When Ukichiro Nakaya began to work on recreating snow crystals in his lab in Hokkaido, he tried many linear, flexible surfaces—not unlike early alchemists of light, searching for the perfect conductor to catch the current between two poles. Cotton. Wire. Silk. Cobweb. Threads that only froze, becoming shocks of rime and ice.
By some happenstance, Nakaya tried rabbit fur, its softness matching, in a way, the feather-light weight of snow, the oils conducting and promoting separation, crystallization of the cold, moist air. Rabbit fur snowflakes, micro cylinders, rods, hexagons taking shape before his eyes. A filament alighting in snow like the dusty wings of a moth at a candle.
The word rune in Old English means a whisper—secret speech not to be overheard.
The run l, (īs), also means ice—a runic filament, the ice needed to allow the secret of a snowflake to bloom. The rune lagu (which I can’t recreate here but looks like l with half of a \ at the top of it)—the beginning of a crystalline snow forming—means both water and sea. Filaments of dust whispering, creating snow. Makes me think that earlier runic speakers knew the secret of snow, centuries before they were photographed or made artificially—magicked secrets of ice and water.
I can’t stop thinking about snow because we had over a foot of it fall last week, only by Sunday to gain another foot. The most to fall at once in over twenty years.
All of this snow is now lighting up the house with reflected snowlight, drifts encroaching on windows where the roof is nearby. The dogs porpoise around the yard, carving out labyrinths in the snowbanks. Neighbors rose early to all help shovel one another’s driveways, snowblowers active, the scrape of snow shovels heard throughout the day. Laughter of young kids in the neighborhood.
When I first lived here the winter darkness felt like it would seep into one’s pores, induce a kind of torpor. I could feel it affecting how I moved through the day hours, pulling like a different source of gravity. Energy slowing, mood influenced by the long quiet dark, but having to live as if the dark or cold didn’t exist.
I think nearly every year, when the dark begins to solidify in late November through January, my thoughts turn to hibernation. What would happen if we gave into the dark and cold and what it was whispering to us? That it’s time to rest, conserve energy, gather together, keep warm?
How intent—and beholden—we are to stubbornly conquer season, weather, relationships, place—to keep everything moving. Always power over, never with.
Seeking validation for wintery malaise, I went searching for histories of hibernation and found several accounts.
In 19th-century pre-industrial North America there were patterns of sleep, and rest, poverty and scarcity in winter until spring. By the mid-century the persistence of this agriculturally focused way of life drove new industrialists crazy, leading to church leaders and others to publicly extoll the virtues of productivity—more to be done, more to consume, more to work for, more to buy. Economies boomed so long as no one takes a break—or decides they can do with less.
Much longer ago, and perhaps closer to hibernation as bears think of it, a recent study concluded that Neandertals most likely hibernated in caves in cold and lean times, reducing their metabolism, keeping warm together.
Much much later, accounts of a type of winter hibernation in Europe were also recorded. This account from the British Medical Journal of 1900 uses a language that would never make it in a journal today, but interesting to see how already it was contrasted with the pace of life in 1900:
A Practice closely akin to hibernation is said to be general among Russian peasants in the Pskov Government, where food is scanty to a degree almost equivalent to chronic famine. Not having provisions enough to carry them through the whole year, they adopt the economical expedient of spending one half of it in sleep. This custom has existed among them from time immemorial. At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread, of which an amount sufficient to last six months has providently been baked in the previous autumn. When the bread has been washed down with a draught of water, everyone goes to sleep again. The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself, goes out to see if the grass is growing, and by-and-by sets to work at summer tasks. The country remains comparatively lively till the following winter, when again all signs of life disappear and all is silent, except we presume for the snores of the sleepers. This winter sleep is called lotska. …In addition to the economic advantages of hibernation, the mere thought of a sleep which knits up the ravelled sleeve of care for half a year on end is calculated to fill our harassed souls with envy. We, doomed to dwell here where men sit and hear each other groan, can scarce imagine what it must be for six whole months out of the twelve to be in the state of Nirvana longed for by Eastern sages, free from the stress of life, from the need to labour, from the multitudinous burdens, anxieties, and vexations of existence.
A similar account of lotska was published in the New York Times in 1906.
In post-revolution France, government officials were distraught with how to compete with British Industrialization, anxious over the slow progress of the French economy. Economists and bureaucrats carrying out surveys in the aftermath of the revolution found to their wild horror that the workforce went quiet in the winter. Drawing from accounts given in Graham Robb’s Discovery of France, an NYT opinion piece contrasted the rhythms of life with modern expectations, relaying similarly that once the weather turned cold, people withdrew indoors:
In the mountains, the tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. ‘Seven months of winter, five months of hell,’ they said in the Alps. When the ‘hell’ of unremitting toil was over, the human beings settled in with their cows and pigs. They lowered their metabolic rate to prevent hunger from exhausting supplies….In Burgundy, after the wine harvest, the workers burned the vine stocks, repaired their tools and left the land to the wolves.
Benjamin Reiss also notes such practices in his book on sleep1, writing:
...many people in cold climates stayed in bed longer in the winter out of necessity. With reduced food supplies and limited sources for heat other than animal skins or other coverings, they simply had to conserve energy....As late as 1880, one observer said that residents of the Eastern Pyrenees were ‘as idle as marmots’ during the cold months.
The pulse of the world slows in winter, and people used to slow along with it.
While hibernating for the whole of winter would mean missing some of the beauty and quiet of a snowfall—the change of the land into tree branches of dark lace, the marvels of water turning to ice—there is a part of me that most certainly notices each November through January how my warm bed seems to beckon earlier each evening, the joy of a hot water bottle at my feet, the comfort of that still-warmth in a morning that looks exactly like the dark night I just said goodnight to. The delight children have on snow days when the world has to stop (or does for them while it insists on still moving for their parents) freed from the demands of rule-following and clocks and being told what to do when.
I don’t wish for everything to stop, but I do long for collapses of time and quiet, where the routines of life aren’t in dissonance and conflict with the land and latitude—to have a type of grace and humility to recognize we’re never an objective “I” observing an idea of ‘nature’ at a distance. Insistent on never being affected by land, latitude, sun, moon.
I read recently somewhere that as impactful as the railroad was to our experience of access and distance, it was how it regulated time that was even more dramatic. Rail created a need for synchronized, precise measurements of time. Clocks had been around for centuries, but now there was a need for a national and later global reckoning of time—synchronized time and clocks meant synchronized schedules, arrivals, departures, work hours, meetings—and the local reckoning of time vanished. The access of cheap, precision clocks, worn on our bodies, hung in every home, town square, rail station, etc., led to a dependence on the reality of the clock rather than on our own experience of time. It’s morning at 7 am because the clock says so, despite it being as dark as midnight. 4 pm means hours of work left in the day for many, instead of here when it’s dark and would otherwise be a time to gather close, stay warm, tend a fire, share stories. All the ways of reckoning time that were followed for generations before the last century have been relegated to history as quaint ideas of a less sophisticated, scarcity-driven time.
The railroad may have first collapsed space and distance, but keeping time kept us distanced from latitude, sun, moon, starlight. Snowlight. The tyranny of one time created this world where rest and slowing with the cold and dark, like the rest of the winter landscape, became something to conquer and deny, keep separate from our own reality.
Seasonal affective disorder is being affected by the season, land, and latitude, and having to practice denial.
The quiet that accompanies snow is a part of its crystalline nature—porous angles and icy fronds build surface after surface, creating more room where sound can vanish and rest. Quieting the already quiet landscape down to whispers, secrets if listened close. Something spoken but not to be overheard—drifts upon drifts of runes blanketing the land, saying hush.
If only we’d turn our attention toward it.
Benjamin Reiss. 2017. Wild Nights: How How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. Basic Books.
This is lovely, if surprising, medical writing:
"...the mere thought of a sleep which knits up the ravelled sleeve of care for half a year on end is calculated to fill our harassed souls with envy."
as idle as marmots: #GOALZ