Gloomy

Overcast and gloomy skies are certainly dominating this winter so far.  That’s unusual for this area, where a sunny winter is more typical.  The cloud cover and shortened hours of daylight make it difficult for someone like me, who works away from the cabin, to get photos in either the morning or evening.  The progression to longer daylight seems utterly halted by the overcast sky.  Most of the time I couldn’t even tell you where the sun should be, as not even a bright spot can be found overhead.

This time last year, I found the sun rising through the forest at the time I normally head out to work. This year, not yet. This morning did bring a few moments of brighter sky before the sun disappeared into the cloud cover yet again.  The harsh cold of last week is abating somewhat, though the temperature remains below freezing, if no longer by double-digits.

The mountain roads were skating rinks for a while.  Seriously, hockey games or triple lutzes could have been done for a few days. I slipped even in my trusty Yak-trax.  Yesterday, a thick layer of stones was applied to the roads, and that helped a lot, though my Yak-trax are still firmly attached to my boots.  I am just happy that I can get the car up the mountain now and so don’t have to slip and slide a quarter mile down the mountain to my car.  It’s the little things that matter.

Gloomy morning

Not taken this morning 

I’m not used to mornings being as dark as it was this morning, though in a few days time I’m going to have to get used to it.  This morning darkness wasn’t caused by the impending time change or by me getting up earlier than usual.  The sky was overcast and the clouds low, almost misty. The effect made the morning as dark as night. Even at 7 a.m. I needed a headlamp when I went to feed the chickens.

Likely the extra dark morning is why I didn’t hear a peep or see any forest dwellers other than Doodle, my rooster, this morning.  Baby Dog and I took our usual walk, and even the headlamp didn’t help much.  I kept remembering Robert Jordan’s description of “the Ways” in his Wheel of Time series, an underground passage where light didn’t penetrate and travelers who got too far behind the leader never found their way out.  That’s what this morning felt like.  The darkness seemed to gobble up the light from my lamp and didn’t illuminate but a few feet in any direction.  Even Baby Dog seemed subdued and hung by my heels more than she usually does. This kind of darkness is a far cry from a clear night’s darkness that is hung with familiar stars overhead to keep me company and guide my way.

October is soon coming to an end, and with it the last of the leaves will fall.  When I’m not encircled by clouds, I can see, barely, portions of the slope of Nell’s Hill to the west of my cabin.  I can see it clearly all summer whenever I walk out of the woods and onto the abandoned ski slope, but 50 yards or so of forest separates it from my view during the leafy seasons. Even after the leaves fall, the view is striped by tree trunks but that seems a minor veiling.  Certainly, it’s nothing compared with the gloomy gray blanket that covered the mountain this morning.

Gloom but no doom

E. Ridge Rd. Monaghan Township, York County PA

Thick fog and overcast skies made my morning walk with Baby Dog as dark and as quiet as midnight.  Not even an owl called, let alone one of the earlier-rising day birds.  Baby Dog stays close by my side and doesn’t stop to sniff anything.   I think she misses the activity of daylight on our walks, too.

I actually find these next two months or so the darkest time of the year for our walks.  Once the leaves begin to fall, the sky overhead becomes visible and that opened-up vista makes walking at night much easier, even when no moon lights the sky.  At the moment, the leaves serve as an impenetrable barrier to light from above.  And so we walk more cautiously now.

The headlamp lights the way but doesn’t help much with navigating the little ups and downs of a dirt road.  The depth of potholes or even uneven ground is hard to judge or to see. It takes some getting used to for me, accustomed as I have been for these last 4-5 months for walking in the morning light.  I have reached the time of year when our morning walks no longer venture off the dirt roads.  Early in the summer we wandered off-road and even off-trail. No longer. The footing on the dirt roads is chancy enough.

The gloomy weather is also slowing or even halting migration this week.  Counters sit on hawkwatches all day long and don’t see more than a handful of birds. I’ve been searching diligently for nighthawks to no avail. Either they aren’t flying or they are flying above the gloom.  I will keep looking. They are a cool bird, these odd little nightjars.  Tonight doesn’t seem as though it will be much better, but I still will look. Perhaps it will clear enough or perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to see them.

Topsy-turvy and backwards

If I have ever lived through a winter that had gloomier weather than this one, I can’t remember it. Truly, those “Twilight” vampires could live here and cavort at high noon without a getting so much as a blister.  This morning at 7:30 a.m., I had to wake the chickens up to feed them.  My oldest chicken, One-Eye the Pirate, didn’t even come off her perch for a while.  It was that dark.

This time of year, the overcast sky means it is too dark to take a photo in the forest before I leave for work. So I head out of the cover of the forest, and usually the open sky over the fields and orchards next to the mountain offers enough light for a photo. Not this morning. I drove 7 miles and it was 8 a.m. before the sky brightened enough to grab even a dark photo of distant cows.

One-Eye isn’t the only avian resident that seems to be affected by the constantly dark skies, though the wild birds seem affected in odd ways.  A Carolina wren was singing this morning at 5:30 a.m. under a streetlight at Roundtop, as were a few bluebirds.  Meanwhile, a great-horned owl hooted nearby even as I was leaving for work.  It’s not every day I hear an owl backed by a chorus of bluebirds and wrens.  Even at midday the light is more like dusk than day.

The clouds are heavy and dark. Today, the gloom is ahead of a spate of the dreaded “wintry mix” that will fall later.  The term simply means that forecasters don’t know what will fall from the sky. In this area, it usually means that every kind of precipitation known to weather will drop, possibly even all at the same time. With a forecast like that, even a few minutes of freezing rain can cause treacherous driving conditions in the morning.

Here at work, my colleagues and I are already planning to lug our work laptop computers home so we can work from home if the roads are extremely bad in the morning. That prompted one to remark that the surest way not to get freezing rain is for us all to take the computers home, as the forecasts never amount to much whenever we do this. I can only hope.