Principitation

Repeated snowstorms this winter, while burying us in their beauty, have laid bare the English language's paltry vocabulary for describing winter's crystalline creativity. "Wintry mix" only goes so far. Nor will importing Eskimo terms like aqilokoq and piegnartoq rescue us from this deficit. We need words that grow out of our own cultural soil, locally coined--words we can use to heap praise or hurl insult, as we gaze in wonder at the opulent beauty of it all, or curse the foot of snow covering the sidewalk.

To fill the linguistic void, I offer the following illustrated glossary, primarily developed during the winter of 2011, when the atmosphere's wizardry was on full display. Study these terms carefully, and you will be better prepared for the next time the heavens let loose with some snowlike substance. An accompanying post, entitled Snowbound Language, uses these terms to tell a precautionary tale of what can happen when snow begins to blanket not only the physical world but our language as well.

GLOSSARY OF USEFUL TERMS

Principitation: All the different forms of precipitation that fall on Princeton, NJ. Largely indistinguishable from precipitation that falls anywhere else, but made special nonetheless simply by falling in the 08540 area code.

Snirt: blackened snow lining streets

Snapples: tree limbs broken off by the weight of the snow

Snapples and snirt lingering after a thaw.

Snight: light reflecting off of snow. Also, a snow-covered night

We-cicles: A family of i-cicles

Snoodle: A weak-trunked tree that bends over under the weight of snow and/or ice.

Snouse: A snow-covered house.

As in: "The trees had long since become snees, and snain had turned many a weak-trunked snee into a snoodle. “Once a snoodle, always a snoodle,” worried Snaddy, looking at a birch snee arched completely over in front of a snouse."

Snuff: Fluffy snow.

Kerfluffle: The falling of fluffy snow onto your head when you bump into a snow-covered branch.

Snubbins: snow that falls in the form of tiny beads

Snidewalk: A narrow channel carved through deep snow to allow passage. Also called a sneezeway, because one has to squeeze through it, often while sneezing.

Snazeycake: Snow glazed with a topping of freezing rain.

Other useful terms:

Snain: very wet snow

Snice: icey snow

Snizzle: freezing drizzle

Snool: snowmelt dripping from trees

Snibble: A diplomatic term for any snow of ill-defined category whose name would otherwise be quibbled over.

This vocabulary can easily be expanded by replacing the consonent at the beginning of a word with "sn", to describe that object or action when it is covered with snow. A snow-covered dog, daughter, day or chortle become, respectively, or disrespectfully, a snog, snaughter, snay and snortle. For practice, try applying this rule to "tiny tot". Additional examples can be found in the accompanying short story, Snowbound Language. 

Where Vines Tackle Trees

Perhaps we'd suffer cold more gladly if occasionally reminded of how a warmer climate can power unwanted invasions. Our cold NJ winter may, for instance, be knocking back the pine bark beetles that have been moving north into the Pinelands as the climate warms. And we can be thankful that Asian wisteria is not as aggressive here as it is further south. There's a place I used to live, in Durham, North Carolina, where the wisteria grows so densely you needn't touch the ground when you walk. The lateral shoots make a web on the ground,

while the vines reach up and rob the trees of sunlight.

Whole trees collapse, weakened by the weight and lack of sun. The wisteria, which probably started as one small plant brought home from the nursery long ago by a neighbor, has over the intervening decades invaded several acres of woodland that the homes back onto.

Now a 17 acre nature preserve, the woodland displays an exaggerated version of the classic eastern woodland profile--native trees with a mostly exotic understory. Most of the non-native invasives can also be found in NJ, but behave less aggressively because of the cooler climate. Here's a very robust climbing Euonymus, whose hairy stem rivals that of poison ivy.

This tree's branches are actually the lateral shoots of the Euonymus vine.

Elsewhere in the preserve are extensive swaths of Vinca major, English ivy, bamboo and privet, growing so densely that native understory species have little chance of surviving. The preserve was free of Japanese stiltgrass until its seeds hitchhiked in on the tire treads of vehicles brought in to do emergency repair on a sewer.

My friend Perry has been leading workdays to remove the thick stands of privet in this floodplain woods. On the left is before, on the right is after. Invasives removal creates pleasing vistas, safer trails, and sometimes leads to the discovery of a few solitary native shrubs that have been hanging on despite all the competition, such as hazelnut and blackhaw Viburnum.

Herrontown Wood in Deep Snow

The parking lot at Herrontown Wood was filled to the brim Tuesday, with snow. The combination of thick, wet snow and no wind made for beauteous effects.

Evergreens like Norway spruce were particularly good at catching and holding,

though the few remaining white pines paid a price.

Some deciduous trees that hold their leaves through winter, like American beech, got into the act,

looking well tressed,

along with the white oaks.

A giant tulip poplar went two-tone

while another looked to be the victim of a cream pie prank.

Some of the shrubs took on a jazzy mobile look.

Even the lateral branches of poison ivy (note the hairy main stem climbing up the side of the tree)

and the old fence demarcating the Veblen House property took on an ornamental look.

The moss-covered cliff was nicely framed from below,

and from above. What a great birdwatching spot it looks to be.

Today's catch, a robin.

Upcoming Events: Films and Lecture

Despite Princeton's ongoing "Winter in Residence" outdoor programming, which has thus far provided four straight days of skating on Carnegie Lake, followed by extended explorations of different consistencies of snow and sleet, it looks like the Princeton Environmental Film Festival will continue today, Wednesday, with a free showing of "Slow Food Story" at the Garden Theater at 6pm. Urban farming is explored in Thursday's showing of "Growing Cities", Thursday Feb. 6 at the library at 4pm.

Thursday evening presents a quandary, with a 7pm showing of Musicwood at the library, and a 6:30 talk by the author of Roadside Geology of New Jersey, at DR Greenway's Johnson Education Center.

This Friday, Feb. 7, the film festival continues with a couple intriguing films during the day. At noon, there's "Bringing it Home", about the many uses of industrial hemp and the prospects for it becoming legal once again in the U.S. At 4pm, "Tiny: A Story About Living Small" could provide insights into how Princeton could diversify its housing.

When Carnegie Ice Melted Memories

Two days ago, I stepped out onto the ice on Carnegie Lake just in time to catch the sunset over the Washington Road bridge. Jets, like metal blades on ice, had left their etchings in the sky, to catch the sun's last rays. I skated towards the sunset, unaware of the inner journey about to be taken.

The white flag at Harrison Street had been signaling for three days that it's time to surrender to your long dormant desire to ice skate. 

Princeton's response to winter's call was etched in the light dusting of snow. This is sustainable skating, the sort that doesn't require digging up ancient fuel to run the machines to make the ice or to erect and maintain a building around a rink.

A Carnegie Lake frozen thick, shore to shore, is the work of nature's refrigerator, for which we have so much to be grateful, despite the discomfort of the cold. There are the glaciers that act like slow faucets in summer, feeding rivers that quench the thirst of millions of people and all other life. There are the giant ice sheets perched on the bedrock of Greenland and Antarctica, parking water that would otherwise flood out our coastal towns and cities. And there's the floating ice so important to polar bears and penguins at their respective ends of the earth.

In low light, my camera painted a father and son clearing a new rectangle of ice for a hockey game. Skating makes even the shoveling of snow a graceful activity.

Slowly the frozen scene worked on my mind, thawing out memories of a youth spent in Wisconsin next to an extraordinary legacy of the glaciers called Lake Geneva. I had googled my home town the day before, and was reminded that the lake was once called "The Ice Capital of the World" for the ice sailing regattas held there. Einstein, too, gets mention for his visit to Yerkes Observatory, which like Princeton is perched above a lake.

You cannot grow up near a large lake and think nature to be static. On the first freezing nights of late fall, the lake would steam, exhaling summer's remembered warmth into the air. If the night was calm when the surface froze over, we'd find the ice smooth as glass when it became thick enough to skate on. Each year's ice was different. On a few special years, the snow held off while the ice thickened, long enough to make the whole lake ours to skate on. The ice sheet was a dynamic system, composed of shifting plates that would push against each other as the ice expanded, forming seams. The lake would emit thunderous booms as build-ups of pressure caused these plates to shift. On Lake Carnegie, the seams are an inch wide, but on Lake Geneva they could be ten or fifteen feet wide--jumbles of ice that looked like frozen rivers running through the ice sheet. One year, the forces of expansion were so strong that the ice sheet acted like a bulldozer, creating a berm of broken chunks of ice all along the shore, eight feet high and twenty feet wide.

The best ice was dark and deep, yet clear enough to let the eye trace bubbles trapped far down in its structure. We'd play pickup hockey with all ages mixed together, no referees, and the only spectators were those who couldn't be coaxed to join in. When I was old enough to skate but too young to keep up, a Canadian doing graduate work at the observatory offered wise counsel. Hover near the goal, ready to catch a rebound and shoot it through. Errant passes would require a pause in the game, as one of us scrambled after the puck skidding far off across the lake on the slick ice. I didn't encounter a manmade rink ringed with boards and glass until years later when we moved to a city one state to the east.

Years after that, teaching outdoor education during a deep New Hampshire winter at Camp Union, we were skating at night on similarly smooth, limitless ice when I saw my first and only UFO. Amidst the dazzling array of stars overhead, I happened to look towards one horizon, some distance above the ridge of trees, and saw what seemed like a bright planet where one hadn't been before. It remained steady in glow for a minute, then, maintaining its position in the sky, it curiously faded into nothing, as if rocketing directly away from our planet at unfathomable speed. That, along with other mysteries, hovers along the perimeter of consciousness like stars populating the night sky.

As Carnegie Lake's ice thawed out these memories, my body too was slowly recalling how to skate. There was an initial awkwardness, short strides and cautious turns, but perhaps a half hour in, as the sunset faded to gray, muscle memory kicked in. Knees bent more, strides lengthened, weight began to automatically shift forward or back to fit the motion. Fluid movement returned above frozen water.

At some point, the beauty of that world I once inhabited, glistening expanses of ice beneath radiant skies, began to overwhelm. The skating stopped, and I was overcome by the remembered joy.  After an inward journey back in time, the likes of which had never happened before, my eyes opened to the sight of the Washington Road bridge and a flagged rope stretched across the lake, bearing a sign, "No skating beyond this point". Yes, the sign and I agreed. Best to stop for those upwellings that break through the otherwise solid plane of our day to day existence.

It's hard to say how many people fifty years from now, perched on ice wherever it may be, will have such experiences of recollection. It made me realize how much of our lives is stored in our bodies, and can only be recovered by physically replicating movement. There were more skaters five years ago when Carnegie Lake last froze deep enough to skate on. Maybe the ice was smoother that time, but my guess is that the number of skates in closets has thinned out as the chances to use them become more rare. As the ice grows thin, so will memories.

Several great blue herons flew overhead. Usually, they fly in a straight path, with destination firm in mind, but over the ice they were turning left and right, as if disoriented by frozen circumstance, too young to remember the last time the lake froze over. My daughters resisted going skating yesterday morning--the last chance before warm weather returned--but I insisted, so that they might carry with them some small memory of what it's like to skate on ice stretching so far towards the horizon. It's possible such chances won't come again, but maybe they will. Maybe the jet stream, made slow and saggy by the arctic's melting ice cap, will let more arctic air make extended visits in the future. Global warming brings with it a strong dose of global weirding. What is known is that our skates will stay ready in the basement, and that these last few wintry days have warmed the heart, adding another layer to a rich deposit of memories.

Some links to Carnegie ice from past years: in 2007, 2009, and 2010.

Outdoor Skating Time in Princeton

Today, at last, the magic thickness of 5 inches was reached, and town rec officials gave the go-ahead for skating on Carnegie Lake. Perhaps owing to the five year lull since Princeton's last skating day, many were caught skateless, but it didn't matter. Just to be out on the ice was exhilarating. The wind must have blown all the snow away, because the whole lake is clear. There's a bit of roughness, suggesting the wind was kicking up when the surface water froze, but not enough to take away the pleasure.

Each time the lake freezes, it offers up a new variety of enigmatic patterns. This time, it's distinctly two-tone, yet the colors appear to have nothing to do with the thickness of the ice.

Hard to say why the ice froze so squizzly,

or in streamers of white.

These markings are easier to explain. The geese have been busy, and the dark line going left-right is a seam that allows some give between two giant plates of ice.

Reaching out of the bleak obscurity of the woods on this grey afternoon is the tree where the cormorants traditionally roost, looking a little worse for wear.

A curious ice pattern imitates the trunk of a tree, or the meander of a stream.

Mentioned in a previous post, here are links to some of Lake Carnegie's more inspired craftings of ice from previous years, in 2007, 2009, and 2010.

With temperatures staying low, there's the promise of a skateful day tomorrow. Community Park North's pond was also declared safe today. Check the flag next to the lake daily for updates, or call 609-688-2054. Some more info and links assembled here.

A Mysterious Hitchhiker From Argentina

Back in early September, walking down a hallway in our house, I happened to look up and saw a strange insect on the wall near the ceiling. My impulse is not to squash such things but to take a closer look. It had very long antennae and white spots on a black body. Preoccupied, I took a photo and thought nothing more of it.

A month or so later, I happened to move a wooden bowl on the wooden table that holds the TV. Beneath the bowl were miniature piles of sawdust, and two small holes where something had started to bore into the table. I guess we should dust more often, but who expects a miniature drilling operation to begin underneath a pretty souvenir?

We had bought the bowl in August at a tourist spot called Aripuca, in northern Argentina near Iguazu Falls. The site has a grassy open space surrounded by remarkable buildings built of wood.

This description of the main building is from Lonely Planet:

"Designed to 'capture the conscience of man' (an aripuca is a trap used by the Guaraní to catch small animals) this interesting structure is made entirely from the timber of 29 different endangered native tree species. While this might sound contradictory, the timber is all salvaged..."

A guide at the site showed us how the trap, whose shape the building imitates, is set by Guarani indians.

Scavenged wood from the forest is used to make all sorts of benches and tables, all of which are too big to bring home in a suitcase.

The store offered more portable objects hewn from the local wood. The Aripuca site has a strong emphasis on ecological stewardship of forests--something much needed since most of the Misiones forest has been destroyed. The famous Iguazu Falls is one of the few protected remnants.

Our selection, as mentioned, was the bowl with the attractive grain and markings. A week later, we carried it obliviously through U.S. customs, not knowing it was a Trojan Horse with little hitchhikers, a few of which would gnaw their way out the following month.

They emerged as adults, some in better shape than others. This inadvertent insect-smuggling can be a potential menace. Consider the Emerald Ash Borer, which has killed "tens of millions" of ash trees in the U.S. and Canada since it hitchhiked to the U.S. from Asia in wooden packing crates.

The long antennae on the beetles emerging from our bowl suggest it is, surprise, a longhorned beetle. The most notorious hitchhiker in this category is the Asian Longhorned Beetle. Nicknamed ALB, it should strike fear into even those who lack any fear of bugs. Readers may be unaware that the U.S. has been at war since the late 1990s with the ALB, which could decimate our forests if it spreads. Its favorite tree species are maples, which gives you a sense of what's at stake. The ALB, like the Emerald Ash Borer, comes from a climate similar to our own, so has been able to survive our winters.

Because ALB is slower to spread than the Emerald Ash Borer, there's been some success in eradicating it, but at considerable expense and sacrifice. All maple trees and some other species need to be removed in the vicinity of an infestation, which means many non-infested trees are destroyed to prevent spread. Current infestations are in Ohio, New York and Connecticut. Late 1990s infestations in Chicago and NJ were reportedly eradicated, though it's hard to be completely sure.

The longhorned beetles sprouting in our house had markings unlike the ALBs. There were just a few of them, and coming from a tropical area, they likely wouldn't be adapted to survive a NJ winter. Still, I wondered about the sawdust marks on the firewood in the living room.

And what was this substantial pile of sawdust, made visible as I burned the last of the logs? Probably the work of native insects that hitchhiked indoors from the backyard woodpile.

One morning in mid-December, we were greeted to the sight of two more emerging, as if the bowl was playing the role of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens. They didn't make it out, though, apparently stillborn in dry indoor conditions.

I've emailed Aripuca about the situation. A tourist from a climate similar to tropical northern Argentina could potentially spread the insects to new locales where they could escape and become established.

The biggest problem is the wooden pallets and shipping crates used in global commerce. Regulations now require fumigation of shipping crates. One has to wonder, though, what the automatic, indiscriminate budget cuts put in place by the sequester are doing to the nation's ability to adequately inspect shipments and continue to do battle with the infestations.

I'm the sort who, long aware of the threat invasives pose, will inspect my shoes before traveling out of NJ to make sure I'm not carrying seeds of Japanese stiltgrass or garlic mustard. So there's some irony in being an accidental vector for alien insects. The bowl is probably free of the beetles by this point, but we'll continue to keep an eye on it, and be more leery of bringing home interestingly marked wooden souvenirs in the future.