This silence may be just as alarming to some people as a “sonic boom.” Nothing seems to be going on. There is an intensity of rest. The demand for something new is unsatisfied. There are men who stray into nature from a city’s booming, reassuring hive, and are frightened by being caught in necessity--one of the year’s cold, unspeaking tides. Perhaps they also recognize how much the sun provides us with other than pleasant company. There is a winter in us from which we will not soon escape into warmth and joy. Still, this frozen land contributes to a global art. It is cold and silent here because it is hot and loud in India. And how can we spread our wings without a knowledge of deprivation? While I am closed in I know there are redstarts wintering in Mexico and arctic terns in the Antarctic, and when I greet them on their return it will not be only because they have come home (a bird’s nest is not a house but a platform from which to start), but because home comprises so large an area. Some birds, if they survive their first year, will reappear in the vicinity of the place where they were reared. So will salmon, shad, and alewives, returning to their parent stream after years of absence. We are conscious of the great amount of space their journeying requires. Species of fish or birds show great variation in the extent of their migrations, and the whole pattern is wider than a continent. Their movements are not only consistent with periodic motions of climate, weather, the tides, but may be visible evidence of earth changes that go back for incredible lengths of time. They require an unrestricted measure for their lives and deaths. Men alter, restrict, or use up, to suit their needs and fancy. Then they move elsewhere. I see that one of the young men who has been designated for training in space flight, an “Astronaut,” says he accepted the challenge of being sent aloft in a capsule because we were “running out of interesting things to do down here.” The destruction and denial of earth’s resources must have gone farther than we realize. But the life journeys continue, from one sunny round to another, over the earth and its wide-ranging waters. How much we must be missing, even in the wintertime! Before dawn, after the windless day, the temperature drops to 10 degrees. A walloping, tugging, brutal wind sets in. The frost so rigidifies the needles of the pines, burning into their cells, that they look dark and scorched. I feel as if the rigid and dizzy earth were being kicked around, rocked like a topheavy boat--the trees its masts. The wind cries: “Remember poverty!” and I go gasping for breath through the fierce air, feeling as perishable as a moth. We may be having the mere taste of an extreme, but this penury weather is huge and mighty all the same. It is the result of a Labrador storm one thousand to two thousand miles in extent. Its balanced fury tests all it meets.