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Tuesday
Nov232010

The Fog and the Hoars Frost.

It looks like fog, and we call it fog, but it is actually more like living in the clouds. When we drive to town we drop five hundred feet down into the South Platte River valley, into Sterling, and we descend down and out of this white mist. Yet we get this type of weather often here at home in the winter months. The air is saturated and the temperature is below freezing. The wind blows cold and soft, and leaves behind icy accretions on the downwind side of everything. Barbed wire as thick as fingers and white as bones; tall grasses slowly fold over as if kneeling in prayer. Power lines sag low under the weight of the ice, and they will eventually break and we will lose power. It is quiet except for the sound of a muffled wind, and the breaking-glass crack of overburdened tree branches shattering and piling on each other. Between the fog, and the hoars frost, the small amount of pale color we have left in our winter landscape is obscured. Even the horizon, the single most defining feature of this place is masked from view, and we are left floating, unanchored, in icy white nothing.

Ella comes with me to check the electric fence. We need to check inside the old dairy milk box and see if the battery that fires the fence is still holding a charge, and if the fence charger is still firing it's rhythmic warning. We need to drive the length of the fence and check to see if the wire is still up. My Ford f250 is old and falling apart; it constantly rattles and squawks, it's doors are nearly impossible to open. But the heater is fierce. I roll my window down so we can see the wire, and we drive slowly around the perimeter of 320 acres . We follow the electric fence like it's a towline pulling us along. As we watch the wire we talk of all kinds of things: electricity, ground wires, why birds can land on electric fences and not get shocked, Christmas carols to be learned on the piano. We watch Horned Larks scratch through the corn stalks, and wonder how they can live here all winter and not freeze to death. I tell Ella of the time I found a dead Great Horned Owl at the base of a telephone pole. And how big it was, and how it didn't weigh anything. We stop and take some photos, and the whole time I am supremely happy.

The next morning, the clouds have lifted and gone. The skies are clear and blue. Everything is icy and as white as a bleached skeleton. The sun warms up and the frost begins to melt; the ice releases and falls. Each tree covers the ground under its branches with a noisy hail storm of ice.

You can see more photos here. 

 

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Reader Comments (2)

Damn poetic

November 30, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterJohn Cross

Ned,
Was reading my daily devotional and there it was. Psalm 147 v16 hoarfrost. " He gives snow like wool;He scatters the hoarfrost like ashes." He casts forth His ice as fragments." And you are not spiritual? I think you are!
Having your recent photos certainly added a vivid dimension to the verse.
Your sister,

December 8, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterSue

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