Having arrived Saturday, by Thursday the ghost of Marilyn Monroe wafted through singing a hushed and sultry "Heat Wave." The mercury rose to 48. Icicles fell, the river ice turned to slush, and great globs of snow in the pines whumped to the ground - falling snowdrifts big enough to make a guy's wife a sudden widow. And the car, a groaning protester of 10-below starts, had to be moved from its place on the logging trail to a better location so it - and its driver - wouldn't be mired in mud till June.
Maybe the thaw was global warming on a scale to please a junk scientist's heart. Not that we're not in a warming trend - we are. The unanswered questions regarding it are about the cause - carbon emissions or, say, solar activity. Interesting that Greenland probably got its name before icing over. It has lost some of that accumulated ice cover, but contrary to stipulations in Al Gore's Oscar-winning horror flick (Al believes - his words - in "an over-representation of factual presentations" to keep things stirred up), the ice loss there seems to have stabilized and 20th century temperatures in Greenland cooled.
Why these solitary sojourns at a wilderness dacha, particularly in winter? Lots of reasons: retreat and restoration, to do the things they say you can't, and - closer to the elements - to gain perspective on elemental truths and confounding questions. For instance . . .
Truth: Science is not so much about unanimity as about making sense of constants and variables. Question: Why does an entertainment-consumed population fritter at the edges, and concern itself with conjured cataclysm (global warming) based on "an over-representation of factual presentations," instead of with here-and-now threats to life as we know it - threats we can do something about, e.g., jihad?
The thaw came, and stayed. Sap began to quicken in the trees; the phoebes returned to the mud-daub nests they tuck-point each year. Soon the peepers will begin tuning up in the lowgrounds. Some may see in all that the dark hand of global warming. Others see it as the onset of spring - officially now just a week away.