On this kind of day I am an inland lover. To be wind-cut and sandblasted serves no good human end. As if in general proof of that, I meet no more than a car or two on the highway, and see no one on the streets of the town. The shore is desolate, hissing with driven sand. On the surface the bay waters in the distance are being stiff-armed and flung away. New ice, morose and slow, is nudged by an outgoing tide in the inlet at Paine’s Creek. Gulls drift slowly upwind like clouds. And on the wide tidal flats--the searing, biting, turbulent grounds--groups of Canada geese are stalking through shallow purple waters that reach, wind-scudded, over shoals of peat. Then a new group wheels in low and settles down with the rest. I can hear their honking under the sound of wind and sand. Beyond them, in steely waters speckled green, is a small flock of black ducks. This is no inanimate landscape. Under the given power, the abandon of the wind, the restrictiveness of the cold, is still an all-containing balance. I listen to those famous travelers the geese as they communicate and am taken a little further out on violent and unreceptive grounds, past my own shivering. Inland again, listening, taking shelter in the lee of the wind, just as a rabbit jumps away from me and runs under a tangle of bull briar, I am conscious of all the unseen hiding and endurance around me. What else moves here, beside the wind that suddenly rushes in and roars so loud that it makes the trees groan and the large round clouds hurry on? The trees, swaying and creaking, are the most obvious, the most exposed. They are half dead, rigid, hard, inert. The sap coagulates in the extreme cold. I cut a twig with my knife and the pitch is dark and frozen. The trees in their containment, adapted to less water and light, getting scarcely any nutriment, are able to make their stand in the open while other lives must hide. In the late afternoon the ground stirs harshly. Leaves run in dead abandon. The wind seems to sound a burst of doom, and then seethes in lively rage. A dead limb cracks. I am on the trigger edge of ultimate need. Blue-gray clouds hang over the shaking fingers of the trees. There is a collective power that flays us all, without discrimination. The shadows have left the earth. Light stays in the sky, and then begins to go. There are rims of pale electric light in the west. Long cloud shoals, now white and pearly gray, stand against wide bands of blue and mauve and pink, like the baked desert cliffs of the Southwest. Finally, and I feel all finality, as the ringing air sheds down enormous heavy cold, received numbly by the earth, the sky turns a startling gemlike blue. We are turned into night. The sky’s mineral beauty shifts to pure blackness lighted by the stars. There is an almost shrilling intensity in the air above the earth-binding wind, and I am conscious of nothing but height, height beyond reach. _Ice on the Ponds_