Field Notes: Birches In A Storm

When a winter storm hits us with thousand-mile momentum, as happened Tuesday, the snow descends on the bias, ripping across the grain of gravity, angling past the brims of our hats to slap us in the face. The affront drives most sensible people inside. And through the window we watch the all-consuming storm slowly erase the landscape until almost nothing is left on the blank white pages of its reductive art — nothing except the trees.

With leeward bark black with wetness, trees manage to etch a persistent identity even in the worst of winter storms. These stalwarts endure to define for us a horizon, over which the end of this particular hardship will come. This is true for all trees except white birches.

In midwinter, white birches unfurl curlicues of papery bark, feathering their edges into the white surroundings. In a storm, they are like ghosts waving hankies, bidding adieu to the world’s solidity. They would be invisible but for the scars of knots and fissures that stand out on their bark like the black caps of chickadees, who normally grace their thin branches but have taken refuge from the storm in hedges and hemlocks.

When the storm moves on to be swallowed by the sea, we head back out with shovels to help the world regain its definition. And the chickadees return to their perches in birches to sit for another month or two, considering the utility of white paper curlicues for the construction of a nest.