Weather Report, Wind Warning

The weather forecast warns of a flash-freeze. We've already received a bounty of nature's winter-fierce offerings. Overnight freezing rain as the temperature rose from yesterday's high of -7-degrees C. Followed by rain, then ice pellets, and finally snow. Reports are coming in from all over the province, of hazardous driving conditions, fog and white-outs; treacherously icy highways. City buses late, or taken off their routes.

Local police forces and the Ontario Provincial Police plead with motorists to stay off the roads, if they can. School bus routes cancelled in rural areas. Municipal snow ploughs taken off the roads; too dangerous even for them. A series of fierce winter storms, wreaking havoc from the West coast to Canada's East. Giving Vancouver an unaccustomed snowbath, and Prince Edward Island a true winter headache with 95% residential power outage.

Wind whooshes through the tree tops, whirling them about, the trunks bowing in courtly response. Fir boughs turn themselves upward in response to the wind's obstreperous prompting, as though pleading for gentler treatment. The flat needles' undersides bright blue-green, against the darker green of their flip sides.

The huge old double-spired pine at the fork of the ravine trails, situated at the very bottom of the first long descent has a decided lean away from the creek behind it, toward the trail in front of it. Where we are wont to descend and ascend. The pine is a grand old tree, in fairly good shape, but its lower trunk at ground level, rising to roughly 6 feet on one side is bereft of bark, and appears hollow.

There have been countless emergency road closures on provincial highways, adversely affecting access for hydro crews attempting to restore lost power to various rural areas. Power outages in these temperatures and weather conditions hamper life in the most miserable way for tens of thousands of people whose energy source has been impaired. No heat, no light, no water. The hydro authority warns that some residents may have to wait several days for resumption of power.

Ferociously gusting winds shriek above us as stubborn fall leaves still clinging to a stand of immature ironwood are loosed and whip across the trail. Earlier, standing beside our sliding doors looking onto the deck, I watched as an almost-transparent leaf appeared suddenly, thrust through the lattice. And, as though it was a desperate, sentient thing, found a place of refuge for itself, nestling between the deck floor boards and a bank of icy snow.

Wind chugs energetically about us in fierce gasps of frenzied gusts. I'm unable to stop my eyes from weeping, and dab at them continuously as we proceed along the snow-mounded, frozen and well-trodden trail, just lightly covered with the remnants of the last flurries. Earlier, the rain had already loosed and melted the snow accumulated on boughs and branches.

We peruse our close landscape, identifying the corpses of trees ready to keel over at the wind's insistence. The presence of these decade-old snags of various heights and volume - mostly birch which had suffered most egregiously from the '98 Ice Storm - makes for a wary ramble. They've been well punctured by woodpeckers, colonized by various types of lichen and fungi; sad remnants of once-beautiful tree specimens.

Tree trunks, like those of some ironwood, pin cherry, hawthorn and spruce are host to rich colonies of dark green moss. Alongside circular, brighter-green disks of lichen. A huge old poplar looks quite odd, its trunk glazed a grey-blue colour. A trick of the ambient light darkened by heavy overhead clouds - or, perhaps, remnants of the freezing rain that had slathered it overnight....?

The sky bustles, busy with dark grey-to-pewter clouds. Yet, on occasion the wind-harried clouds part company sufficiently to allow a glimpse of brightness above and beyond. Escaping sun rays even manage, fleetingly, to cast their brightness on the snowy terrain, bringing all the bumps and hollows into eerie relief.