Potentials

Minds tend to extrapolate the present into the future. It’s hard to remember the forest clothed in summer, and easy to imagine winter will stretch on like the snow cover stretches into the forest as far as the eyes can see. It laps up against tree trunks and rolls over fallen branches. The surface of snow unites the forest with the pond, making the world seem like one big shallow sea.

Why shouldn’t it, since snow is water in another guise? Yet the difference between liquid and solid water is not merely academic, and oxygen-breathing mice can build tunnel systems in the crystalline structure of snow that shelters them from both the freezing air and predatory eyes. This is a feat they can’t replicate in liquid water or ice. But the solid state is impermanent.

As if to prove the world is never as it seems, this week a storm system brought heavy rains down on the snow that had survived a recent warm snap. The rain swept the land clean of snow so that what had been a virtual sea idly covering the land became active water with places to go. Rivers swelled. Water roared down gorges and flew into the air as great veils of mist.



In the forests and bogs by my job, low areas teemed with muddy water. Creamy sheets of ice lay at or below the surface. The snow melt exposed green moss and rusty dried ferns. The world was saturated by rain and saturated in rich colors. Over it all hung the salty exhalations of decay from disturbed wetland soils.

Just as the snow had the dormant potential to be liquid, undeveloped land can have the potential to hold lots of water. Water can move pretty easily on roads and flat lawns, but bogs have depressions to fill and vegetation, both alive and deceased, to get in the way. It’s hard for the mind to see flooding that’s not happening. Unlike the bloom of summer, the water retention potential of natural areas is best noticed when it’s already gone.