Silvering Light

We’re past the season of the lowering, as I’ve come to call it, when the sun sits slightly deeper with each passing day in Maine, even at noon. By mid-December, rather than arcing across the sky, it merely rolls around the edges, never climbing more than a fist’s width above the horizon. The trees cast thin, stretched-out shadows that stand out starkly when there’s a cover of snow. The sun rises about 7:00 and sets just after 4:00. I try to make as much of those nine hours as I can.   

In late 2018 during our first full winter in Maine, I dreaded the shortening of the days. Not quite a year had passed since we’d left the North Carolina Outer Banks as some of America’s earliest climate migrants. We’d pulled up stakes and launched ourselves into a new life up north, hoping we wouldn’t find the cold and the long winter nights oppressive. To my great surprise, the fading light made me feel settled in and safe. We’d managed to make a major life shift much sooner than we’d planned. The reverberations from that explosive act were still with me. Nothing seemed certain. But the winter dark somehow comforted me. (The appealing novelty of the long nights would wear off as the years rolled round—six of them now.)

That first full winter I was surprised to see the strange optical effect created by the lowering sun. In the weeks around the winter solstice, its light slants and flattens. In our fields, the browns and grays of milkweed and meadowsweet fade as their stems freeze and dry to rattles. Shadows deepen, even within the grooved bark of oaks and pines. Every line seems more well-defined, as if my vision has suddenly grown sharper.

When I first noticed this, out walking one day, I thought something had gone slightly screwy with my eyes. I crossed the fields and hills near our house with a slightly off-kilter feel. Back inside, I searched the cabinets and closets for colorful fabrics to make sure my vision was still working. (It was.) The sideways sliding sun was simply casting a different light. It was more stark. With a covering of snow, the bleaching of the landscape became even more severe. The flattened, silvery tones bathed the land only from mid-December until sometime in early January, when one day I noticed the brightened browns and pale yellows of timothy grass again washing the fields.

It’s been that way each year since—until now.

Early this past summer it began to rain, and rain. At first this was most welcome. Maine had been in a serious drought for three years. There was talk that the dryer weather was a product of climate change and might be permanent. Area farmers began to wonder if they would be able to adjust to a warmer, drought-plagued New England.

Every few days it rained, all summer long—often five days out of seven. Rivers rose. Campgrounds in the north woods closed because of the high water. Black flies swarmed later and more ferociously than usual. Float trips were cancelled, the beach season mostly ruined. Lawns grew with astounding speed but couldn’t often be cut; conditions were too wet. The rains continued into autumn, which was much warmer than normal. A single inch-and-a-half of snow fell in early December, hung on the trees for a few days, received a mild freshening of new snow—and then washed away in rain. And the showers that came were much heavier than normal, with storms often dumping an inch or two of moisture.

In mid-December a major storm swirled up the East Coast, dropping up to six inches of rain here. Its winds howled and ebbed, howled and ebbed, very much like those in a hurricane. I knew the feel of that weather. Where was I living? In Maine, or still on the Outer Banks?

Christmastime arrived, and with it the lowering of light. But this year the silvering rays fell not on freeze-desiccated stems and stubble, but on green grass. On a Maine landscape that had yet to experience a solid cold snap. (I thought back to our first autumn here, when a neighbor warned me that it wouldn’t be unusual to have our first frost when green leaves still clung to trees.) Mosses grew lushly on the north sides of trees and on the rocks lining streams. And so I walked through the Christmas holidays and into the New Year not through a landscape of silver and platinum, but in one that even as a newcomer I found shockingly unfamiliar.

Shortly before Christmas, my mother’s best friend called from Pennsylvania. As we chatted, she exclaimed, “The grass is still green here! I can’t believe it.” As with our grass, hers did not grow. But neither did it die.

In ways small and large, climate change makes itself known.

            The deepest nights of the year have gone, and our part of the world arcs toward spring. It will still be a long journey for us—through what many of us hope will be (but fear will not be) the snowy months. If the cold never comes, I worry that we will have continuous weeks of mud season, when Maine is at its absolute worst. At last we’ll reach mid-May and the yearly greening. With each revolution around the sun, this Earth moves further into a new era. I do not know what to expect of it. No one really does.

            Do you have a particular spot in the natural world that’s dear to you, and that you fear will be radically altered, perhaps even destroyed, by a warming climate? If so, please get in touch. I would like to compile an atlas of natural places that are deeply important to us and that are under serious threat because of climate. This should be a specific site, one that speaks to you personally. My hope is to make this a widely collaborative project.

            I envision this as a way to honor the special places that may soon become unrecognizable to us (or that we’ve already lost). My hope is to collect these stories and post them online. Please send me a brief (less than 500 or so words) description of your beloved place and a photo if at all possible. You can find me at jdeblieu@gmail.com. Many thanks, Jan