20. Season 2: Episode 10 - JANUARY FROST

The morning is cold. A light sparkly dusting of frost covers the ground and the clear blue sky reveals the stars and waning slice of moon above. It is 8:30 and it is already getting lighter out, a rosy orange glow graces the horizon- evidence of the days getting longer.

I find the matchbox and notice there is only one match left, so I decide to use it to light a candle and bring some feeling of warmth to my indoor surroundings.

The last match in the box reminds me of my time of teacher training in an outdoor education programme in Northern Michigan many years ago. One of the courses involved teaching ways of surviving in the snow, and what to do if we were stuck out in the wilderness with only one match left. We taught the pupils to gather and light small branches and leaves to start it off, and gradually as the flame grew, larger branches were added until we (hopefully) had a roaring fire in the middle of the woods. It was an interesting and sometimes painstaking challenge, theoretically a matter of life and death!

For another lesson we built a lean-to with our 12-year-old students and afterwards took turns going in and experiencing what it might be like to sit in such a frozen cocoon. As it happened, inhabiting the insulated space meant that it soon became cozy and warm, not to mention very quiet! A few of my colleagues took their sleeping bags inside and slept in it one night to test it out further,. They woke up fully rested the next morning!

That particular winter in January involved a lot of constantly falling snow which accumulated to a height way over my head. So the snowshoes and skis came out often.

When groups of children visited the centre for a day, we would take them out for walks in the woods, each with their own pair of snowshoes, and hunt for animal prints, or anything else nature had to offer.

We’d often see rabbit or deer tracks. Though I remember once coming across a kind of brush mark in the snow. Our professor at the time suggested that it was most likely a ruffed grouse or ptarmigan that had left the mark when it got up from its snowy nest and flew away. I remember thinking how perceptive he was to spot that.

Another time, on my Saturday off, it was -25 degrees Celsius. I decided to layer up and stepped out of my wooden cabin accommodation to do a bit of cross country skiing through the woods. I was very content, gliding through the snow, until an hour later I did not know where I was. I was starting to make circles with my ski tracks, unsure of what direction I was moving in, and stupidly had forgotten my compass. It was another 2 hours before I came across another human being who pointed me in the right direction, and I made it back by early evening light, so relieved, and cold, and happy to see my friends.

…

A flock of geese flying overhead interrupts my thoughts….

…

Yesterday, here in the north of Scotland, I went out onto the frozen beach for a break from the day’s tasks and to get some fresh air, crunching through the frosty sand and seaweed. Eventually I came upon some tracks that could only have belonged to a sea otter. I had seen him from a distance in the late summer, a rare sight indeed. I followed the five-toed footprints for a while, until they vanished and I found myself in a patch of low tidal rocks and egg wrack swishing this way and that in the rising tide. I looked up to see how far I had gone, and decided to turn around and walk back, retracing my steps that ran parallel to the otter’s.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted birds of black and white in the sky, flying in a flock and turning this way and that...

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