Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year
One of the great American songwriter Frank Loesser’s few “melancholy,” heart-on-the-sleeve songs was written in 1943, but was revived and became a hit for Sarah Vaughn in the mid-1950s. It was titled “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year.”
The prophecy in the song title came true once again this year at virtually the exact moment of the vernal equinox: The last, lonely bronze leaf on the red oak outside my office window, having weathered all the winter storms, finally surrendered its grip on the twig and fluttered down. Apparently, the leaf gave up waiting for spring as hopeless, as across most of the “roof” of the nation, the scene is a long way from “vernal.” Indeed, if it weren’t for the conifer trees, the view everywhere would look like an Ansel Adams photo — a study in white and black, with white definitely the dominant color.
Certainly there are years when King Boreas displays a little compassion and the snowfall is limited to manageable amounts, but those years happen way too infrequently for both dogs and humans living in northern tier states. Snow usually is an adversary that has to be plowed, blown and shoveled off driveways, sidewalks and out of kennels. In what had to be one of the more all-time stupid moves when my kennels were built was the failure to take into consideration how wide the doors needed to be to get the snow blower through them. But then they were built in July, and snow removal is not exactly a priority in anyone’s mind in mid-summer.
While we humans try to make the best of it by sledding, skjoring or going on late-season hunts with the dogs, that only works up to certain snow depths. Speaking from lengthy personal experience, sparkling snow quickly loses its allure when you’re trying to wade through a field where it’s thigh-high, doubled over, sucking wind and having to use the shotgun as a crutch to prevent toppling over — and this occurs before you’ve managed to cover 10 yards in that stuff. If fatigue doesn’t cripple you at the time, the pain in unused muscles will take care of that oversight the next day and for many days thereafter. Snow also gets unfavorable reviews when the dog jumps out of the truck and disappears in a snowdrift.
It probably goes without saying that all the house dogs are definitely tired of having to conduct their bathroom duties in snow that’s up to the bellies of even the big dogs. In fact, a lot of them are so tired of dealing with snow that they have resorted to the “Ah-forget-it-I-can-wait-a-bit-longer” look when the door is opened to let them out. If the big dogs are sick of it, it’s not hard to imagine that a simple trip outside for the smaller breeds must be something akin to entering one of Dante’s nine circles of Hell minus the heat. It’s surprising that those dogs are willing to go out at all and haven’t demanded or found some sort of indoor toilet facility.
As for activities that the dogs found fun at Thanksgiving, friends of mine with arctic breeds say that even those snow-loving dogs start to cast something of a jaundiced eye on romps through massive drifts by the time March rolls around. Other breeds with considerably less love for the white stuff are reduced to simply staring forlornly out the window, hoping that somewhere a patch of bare ground will appear.
Despite what the poets say, it isn’t the arrival of a stray robin or buds swelling on the willow trees providing the promise of pussywillows that generates the real hope that spring is just around the corner. Nor were the three sandhill cranes standing on a four-foot snowdrift on the edge of one of my dog trainer’s cattail sloughs in mid-March. That same day, I watched five whistling swans touch down on one of my neighbors’ deeply snow-covered fields where manure from his dairy operation had been spread and where, at least twice during that operation, his state-of-the-art, large and powerful tractor had been stuck in the snow.
All that the arrival of birds that migrate by the calendar means is that it’s technically spring. Realistically, given the current amount of snow, those birds definitely acted in haste. True spring — meaning when the ice will be gone so there is swimming water for dummy fetching or land areas dry enough to set out obedience jumps or agility obstacles — is still several weeks away.
Instead of bird arrivals and pussywillow promise, the real harbinger of spring is the first patch of bare ground. After months of nothing but white, patches of brown earth or the bleached-out tan of dead grass are truly inspiring colors, and the psychological impact of those little spots of exposed dirt or sod is profound.
A person can learn a lot from watching their dogs. Perhaps it is their live-in-the-moment nature that causes them to make the best of whatever is available. The dogs teach us that on the coldest days, a mere ray of sunshine beats no sun at all; that on hot days, the spindliest sapling provides a lot more shade than open ground, and that a patch of brown after months of nothing but a sea of white comes close to the biblical description of paradise.
By the first part of March, when the thrill is gone from romps in the snow or rooting in drifts for the vague scent of a meadow vole, the dogs can be found in the area of any sort of brown, and that little patch of earth is an objective on which they are focused like a laser beam. The bigger the patch gets, the more they are drawn to it and the longer they stay on it. Often, they just sit there, seeming to enjoy the simple pleasure of sitting on something that is not freezing their tails off as they turn to catch the most benefit of the sun when the days lengthen and the nearly interminable dark and cold of the winter solstice begins to recede. Even folks with Alaskan Malamutes, Siberian Huskies, Chinooks and Samoyeds have noted this phenomenon with their dogs, who are hard-wired to love everything about winter.
With my hunting dogs, at first I thought they went to those spots because there are some pheasants and grouse that winter in the shelterbelts and spruce groves that surround the house that use them. As the snow melts, the birds are drawn to the bare spots to scratch for gravel blown into that area by the snow blower and to pick away at the seeds the blue jays and cardinals have scratched from the bird feeders. But long after they have run out and chased the birds away, the dogs still linger in the area of the bare ground. I’ve also noticed that in other homes that had dogs with little or no interest in these birds, the dogs gravitate to those patches of bare earth as soon as they appear. A lady I know has a pair of Whippets and another who has Affenpinchers — not exactly breeds known for their birdiness. Both have game birds as regular winter visitors in their yards, and while their dogs show absolutely no interest in the birds, they are strongly attracted to the bare spots.
With winter shoving doggedly forward despite the calendar saying it’s spring, both the dogs and their people “up north” are getting tired of having to sit on the warm side of the storm windows watching piles of dark, nasty-looking clouds scud across the western sky and dump still more snow on a landscape already inundated with the white stuff. This particular winter may now be an old fighter, but it shows no signs of being willing to throw in the towel and yield to spring.
Fortunately, in a winter like this one, dogs have a wonderful ability to do absolutely nothing — to just snooze, stare blankly out of half-opened lids, stretch a bit and then curl up to sleep again. They come by this ability naturally, as their wild-dog brethren — wolves, coyotes — rest through the bulk of the day, rousing to action only when there is a good reason to do so. There are many things to admire about the dog family — almost everything in fact, although perhaps envy is a better word — but especially their ability to relax and kill time when there’s nothing to do but wait.
This year, the wait for winter to lose its grip has been a long one. Still, dogs seem to know that if they do nothing long enough, something is bound to happen. With such a broad-based philosophy, they can’t go wrong.
There are a whole bunch of theories about why dogs have this love affair with little snow-free spots. However, most have been discarded in favor of the simplest: They do it because it meets some need in their canine psyches. Maybe their brains have become as winter-weary as their owners’, and even a small patch of brown eases the tedium of a sea of white. Maybe after months of frozen snow balling up between their toes and icicles hanging off their whiskers, they just plain get tired of both. Maybe standing on bare earth lifts their spirits just enough to get them to April, when they can forget about looking for bare spots until the land again turns white and unforgiving.