On Winter Hags & Climate Change

They come with the gloom. So I wait, wait as the skies turn to deeper shades of grey, wait as the temperature moves into that space of slippage between rain and snow, wait until they are ready.

In my mind they are Winter Hags, this accumulating ice that gathers and builds along the Precambrian shield that skirts the highway near me. They start out as water flowing through cuts and crevices in the rock, making their way past the trunks of the scruffy white spruce to then tumble over the cliff edge, sinking their claws into the deep geological time of the rock face, accumulating and thaw/freezing their way into their milky green or rust-coloured shards. To me it looks like a great hag’s hair: long, shaggy, beautiful.

The rockface that these ice-streams descend upon were there when the massive glaciers pushed across northern Ontario some 10,000 years ago. It has witnessed and felt those tremendous shifts and scrapings along its old surface. The rock is all greys and ochres and reds - it is the iron rust in the rock, I believe, that sometimes turns the Winter Hags a reddish-brown. I have no idea what makes the pale green colour of some of them – but it is truly ethereal.

This year it is soggy, too soggy still, for their formation, and so I have a certain anxiety about their arrival. Each new year of this turbulent global shift in climate causes me to worry that one year they just won’t be there, that winter will be too weak, too gutted, to manifest these harbingers of cold and dark.

It is a worry because this place needs winter, needs the snowpack, needs the cold, needs the ice forming over the waters. My subnivean neighbours are waiting with me; they need the safety and insulation of the snow, as does the partridge that pecks at the seeds in my yard. The lakes too need it, it is their seasonal reset, helping with oxygen levels and stable temperatures. Everyone - hare, partridge, mouse, streams and me - living in this place, are part of the exquisitely synchronized rhythm of the seasons. We are bound to them.

So I have no choice but to keep my vigil, to watch for those first hatchlings of icy waters that are able to take hold, the hardiest that will carry the rest on their backs as the thaw/freeze creates these incredible formations. We need the seasons, and the seasons need us, need us to limit the warming of climate catastrophe. Need us to yank the petro-needles out of our arms, to get to work building a new society that is part of the ecosystem, not warring against it.

If you like my writing and would like to support it, please pick up or order a copy of my new novel, The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien at your local, independent bookstore or order direct from my publisher, Latitude 46: https://store.latitude46publishing.com/collections/featured-books/products/the-haunting-of-modesto-obrien You might also be interested in my climate change trilogy: The Wintermen, Wintermen II: Into the Deep Dark & Wintermen III: At the End of the World, also available for order from https://store.latitude46publishing.com/collections/fiction/products/the-winter-men