Keeping Watch over Vast Winter Nights

Published in the Christian Science Monitor

            Winter in Whitney Valley brought a radical change in all my routines.

            Cutting the wild meadow hay I had irrigated into a heavy crop marked the beginning of my run toward winter. The contractor's crew baled the hay and hauled it down to the owner's home ranch. Riders brought the cattle out of Forest Service range down onto the meadows soon after the contractor hauled the hay away, so I checked the fences again to make sure my summer's repairs had stood the tests of time. I repaired ditches and set them up for the next spring's irrigation.

            Then I cut and sold firewood. There was no ranch work in winter, so what I made from firewood paid our way until spring.

            When the first heavy snow accumulated on the meadow, we fed cattle for about two weeks, until the crew from the home ranch could get up with trucks to haul them down the river road or with horses to drive them down. Then I cut and sold more wood.

            When storms delivered enough snow that getting across the river and meadow to the beetle-killed trees and getting the wood out became difficult or impossible, I had finished most of the outdoor work, and my winter routine began.

            I helped with Amanda's and Juniper's education. I skied on the meadow and investigated what the animals who had not left for the winter were doing. Whatever daytime activities I pursued during our coldest time, I pursued them late in the day, because I stayed up all night.

            Nothing about the old, inadequately insulated, electricity-less, plumbingless house we lived in operated automatically. We had no thermostat to set and leave in charge of keeping the house warm through the night.

            We had a wood-fired heater in the living room and another in the back room. The back room served as the master bedroom, my study, and our conference room, reading room, and play room. It was better insulated than the rest of the house, since a friend and I had removed the inner and outer walls and then put the room back together with insulated walls and ceiling.

            We had a wood-fired cookstove in the kitchen. On our coldest nights, I kept fires burning briskly in all three stoves.

            I positioned three kerosene lamps on my study table in the back room, and I wrote and read between times of feeding wood into stoves.

            There was no other time like those night times, remote from all the commercial world, very much in contact with the earth at its most elemental. I was independent in my thoughts and my way of living, yet dependent on the orderly progress of the night, the orderly progress of each fire contained in each stove for survival minute by minute, and I was depended on for survival by my wife and daughters. who slept soundly through the night.

            I had built the flue that carried away the back room heater's smoke, and I knew it was safe. My firend Ash, a stonemason, and I had repaired the brick flue that served the livingroom heater and the cookstove, and I had replaced the wood-shingle roof, where a spark might settle and start a fire, with galvanized metal roofing.

            I walked outdoors some of those cold nights, but usually not far. Even though I thought the stoves and flues were safe, I wasn't willing to leave them untended for long. I could close the stoves down, so the fires burned low and burned longer, but the house cooled off rapidly when I did that. I wouldn't leave the fires roaring while I walked, so I had to get back soon. I took a brisk walk or trotted down the graveled road, which was sometimes plowed free of snow.

            I sat at my writing table. Kerosene lamps don't glare like electric lights do. I could still see out the windows, to the snowy, moonlit night. The story or the essay or the poem I worked on progressed.

            Sometimes I blew out all the lamps and let moonlight or starlight, magnified by its reflection from the clean white snow, light up the night. I took my guitar from its case and played and sang, gentle songs that wouldn't wake those sleeping in the house.

            The moonlight shadow of smoke rising above the chimney danced on the snow, the only motion all across the meadow at two a.m.

            Sometimes, during the coldest nights, an explosion echoed across the meadow and startled me. I think the sap in a tree freezes solid and bursts the tree. I don't know why it happens to a few trees and not all trees. I am favorably impressed by my and everyone else's lack of knowledge on this and many other important subjects.

            I am favorably impressed by how delicate humans are when they aren't surrounded by all the mechanical paraphernalia that protects them and alienates them from a natural environment. I was impressed by how very thin the walls were at forty degrees below zero, or at our all-time low temperature of 56 below zero.

            I was not the only one awake on those cold nights. Sometimes I heard an owl call from over by the barn. Another owl answered from across the meadow, up in the timber. Coyotes sang a song at three a.m. over in the timber, up by the spring in the aspen.

            I achieved some good work those cold winter nights-- essays, stories, poems, and songs I still like a lot. Projects progressing through the night knit the night watch together, but the projects were not the most important part of the nights.

            The deep cold, the vast winter nights, the infinite heaven spread out above testified to our tiny human endeavors. My experience, humankind's experience, at its best or at its worst, is insignificant against the vastness of winter and 56 degrees below zero.

            Watching the cold nights through became humbling and humanizing, an experience I recommend as a prerequisite to understanding humankind's role in the universe. The experience brought me depth of perspective I could not have found anywhere else, that adds to everything I have experienced since.