“There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.” — John  Hay in The Immortal Wilderness

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On 3 January, spouse and I snowshoed (though boots would have been fine as the snow wasn’t deep) with a small group of people on the property of The Fells, the estate and gardens of diplomat and statesman John Milton Hay (1838-1905), who was a private secretary to Abraham Lincoln and later U.S. Secretary of State for William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay and his wife, Clara, bought the land and built the house in the late 1880s; he died there in 1905, after which their son Clarence Hay (and his wife, Alice) remodeled the house and turned the land into a working farm. (Clarence was a curator of archaeology for the American Museum of Natural History in New York.) Clarence’s son (John Milton Hay’s grandson), John Hay (1915-2011), was a conservationist, naturalist, and gifted nature writer; it’s his quote above.

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Water spoke to us that snowy day (high temp of 35F, low of 24F) in many forms: it burbled and rumbled in the brook; it cracked, tinkled, shifted, shimmered on the lake, in icicles, in ice crust and glassy casing; in snow, the ice crystal congregations sighed and crunched; and stormy clouds formed of water droplets and ice particles soared and darkened. Moss, lichen, heather, and fern projected here and there, breathing their way through snow, articulate reminders of what lies beneath, waiting for us to “wait and receive.”

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I took a short video of the brook — you can hear Earth’s mysterious language!

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Featured image: snowy patches on the still-liquid brook.
This is one in a series of posts revisiting field trips taken from January to June 2019, as described here.