That respite of snow happened. How nice. My pal Brendan was kind enough to find out that there is actually a term for the winter version of an Indian Summer. Favored by our friends below the Mason Dixon line, a Blackberry Winter is a late strike of cold. Though considering it's still February, I suppose we have a few of those ahead.
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We're getting into that ugliest season, the gap between winter melt and sprouting spring. Yuk. The lovely mounds of snow are now filthy crust piles. In the parks a season's worth of dog shits have sprouted as horrible mushrooms. Give me a, ah, what is the opposite of Indian Summer? There should be a term for a respite of cold and snow from the clammy fetid air and wan sad purgatory warmth of this time of year.
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The young Saint Croix, from the flat Northwoods, from a swamp by a town whose name most people have never heard, a place of shuttered summer cabins, snowmobile trails, pine plantations and a grocery store with high priced shabby produce. Trains rumble by en route to the docks in Duluth, where their goods will be loaded into massive ships and sent away, oh so far away, from little Gordon and little Solon Springs and the little Saint Croix.
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The mounds in the photo come from buried reeds at the very beginning of the Saint Croix. Both St Croix and the Bois Brule rivers flow from the same swamp, one to the south and Mississippi, the other north to Lake Superior.
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These days, when I go on my walks along the trails in the parks people flock to in the summer, it's usually just me. The snow serves as indicator of what ground has seen feet since December and what ground has sat untouched, little pockets of seasonal wilderness, since the big freeze, since the wild fence fell.
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