A Naif in the Forest by Darrell Berger

Wing Tips to Hiking Boots: Musings of a New, Full-Time Poconos Resident 

This is Hornbeck’s Creek near my part of the forest, the day the temperature reached the mid-60’s. Three days before my thermometer registered -8. I’ve never experienced a more than seventy-degree change within three days. 

This is also the highest water level I’ve ever seen, except for last spring when a beaver temporarily turned the creek into wetlands. Usually I see this level in April, after the spring thaw. Since the recent warm spell melted most of the snow, I call this the “winter thaw.” 

This isn’t all bad. I’m happy to have no ice and snow on the roads and driveways. The next storm will have to start from scratch, not build on already accumulated ice, which is what makes local travel dangerous. 

Yet, if the amount of precipitation continues as it has since last summer’s imitation of a sub-tropical rain forest, the winter thaw might be followed by another new term, “the spring flood.” 

That won’t bother me much. We live up the mountain from the creek and the worst thing would be that Violet the Corgi would lose her nearest wading pool. Our neighbors, however, who live just to the left of this photo, might not be so lucky.  A few inches change in the peak level of the creek might bring water into their back yards, perhaps into their homes. 

It remains to be seen if “winter thaw” and “spring flood” become permanently descriptive terms in the forest. Are the most recent seasons anomalies or, to use a current term, “the new normal?” 

The old saying, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” was coined either by Mark Twain or his friend Charles Dudley Warner, the editor of the Hartford Courant, in about 1897.  A century ago this was humorous, as doing something about the weather was so obviously out of the realm of human possibility. Today, as the high water from the creek flows to the Delaware, humans actually can do something about the weather. Twain or Warner’s phrase has changed from witty to tragic.