LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM
MOON WALKS
By Barbara Tatham Johnson
A winter moon, the Wolf Moon, in fact, reflects on the snowy meadow outside
the window with a brilliance that invites a walk. At the cold time of year,
the air is clear to a sharpness not present in other seasons, and moon and
stars shine with polished brightness. I love to walk on moonlit nights any
time of the year, but the crispness of a winter night with intensified
sounds and smells excites me. I urge my husband, snug in his chair before
the fire, to accompany me. He mentions the lateness of the hour, the chill
night air, but he joins me.
A fox barks beside the brook as we step out the door, so close we stop in
surprise. The three-note voice is hoarse and high as the animal moves north
away from us, and the bark becomes hootlike across the distance, finally
becoming only a pulse of sound. Left with whisperings in the breeze from the
woods and deciding the fox went in a direction opposite from the way we will
take, we start out on our walk up the Ridge.
The air is bitter cold but quiet. The only noise we hear is our footsteps on
the packed snow of Ridge Road, but the bark of the fox is at the back of my
mind. “Oh the fox went out on a starry night. He prayed for the moon to give
him light,” I hum to myself as we pass the orchard’s rows of trees whose
silvered branches throw patterned shadows across the snow cover. The
otherworldliness of the moonlit scene appeals to my love of mystery and
hidden worlds. The familiar seems foreign and changed.
The cold air gives the moonlight a hard edge. At the crest of the Ridge, we
look west across the open fields of a dairy farm toward the Presidential
Range in New Hampshire, sixty miles west, and imagine snowy crests—in
reality, a cloud bank snagged across Tuckerman’s Ravine. The lights of farms
and a village center flicker and glow where moving branches on intervening
wooded slopes give a sense of motion, mimicking embers in a wood stove. We
head home.
When we pass the orchard, we hear the faint rhythmic cry in the forest east
of the road. The fox repeats his wooing song. The sound reaches us from the
echoing trees, and we realize the fox is moving our way. In the deep shadows
of the roadside, we wait beside a pasture, and from the blackness of the
trees, a small dark figure moves out onto the snowy moonlit flat as if
following a track. Without pause he leaves his scent and trots along, tail
straight out behind, barking his three note-song of love and woe, certainty
and chance, fulfillment and longing. The mating season of the fox is on, and
we are, momentarily, part of it.
The Ridge Road provides moonlit outings that allow wider views than do walks
beside the meadow edge or along wood paths. On the paved road an occasional
passing vehicle reminds me I am closer to the civilized world. The walks I
take by the meadow edge and into the woods on bright nights bring me closer
to the primal. Here I walk to measure a night’s qualities. I follow the edge
of the snowy meadow, stopping once beside a gathering of birch trees to
quiet the sound of my footsteps and breathing. The woods are deeply dark.
There are subtle sounds of shifting branches, snaps, and whisperings. I
imagine animal eyes gazing at me, muzzles lifted to test the air, to
identify my scent. My eyes adjust from the brightness of snow reflecting
moonlight to the shadows, but I see no distinct form. The chilly air carries
hints of smells I cannot identify. I sense the smell of fresh fish mingled
with balsam oils lingering from the warmth of the sun, but this is the home
ground of wild creatures. They have the advantage over my abilities to
identify the messages carried in the night air. Snowmobiles buzz over
distant fields. The high, excited shouts of the drivers seem to me similar
to the voices of a coyote pack. The muffled commotion adds to my pleasure.
The silvered world in which I listen and watch is private, yet, I feel
connected with all the night’s activities.
For some the heatless brilliance of moonlight chills the delight of a night
walk. Emerson wrote in his journal, “The sublime light of night is
unsatisfying, provoking; it astonishes but explains not. Its charm floats,
dances, disappears, comes and goes, but palls in five minutes after you have
left the house … I become a moist, cold element.” Metallic stony words
describe the moonlight in literature—pewter, steel, alabaster, chalk, and
the like. The light of the moon comes not from a furnace, after all, but
from the reflection of our solar system’s fiery powerhouse.
Thoreau, on the other hand, appreciated moonlight not only as an aid in
night travel but as a muse. “The moonlight is more favorable to meditation
than sunlight,” he wrote in his journal. His descriptive words are touched
with enchantment—“gossamer blanket” and “phosphorescent,” for example.
In contrast to the cold months, moonlit nights in warm weather encourage
impressions in me that are as sheer as curtains. On an early April evening,
we walk up Ridge Road in the hope we might hear and see the mating flights
of the arriving woodcocks. A small herd of deer grazes the grass exposed
from melting snow in a pasture, and we stop to enjoy the sight for a few
moments as twilight deepens. The air is cold and damp from the snowmelt, and
the huge orange-yellow arc that is the full pink moon has a hazy look as we
catch sight of it rising over the wooded horizon. The deer do not notice us,
and we watch the moon rise higher in the blue-black sky over the animals in
the snowy patchwork field. The herd moves westward, crosses the road, and
slips silently into the shadows of the orchard. Did we really see this, we
wonder.
A full moon rises in a kind of beautiful cloud grotto in an otherwise clear
twilight of deep slate with a latent brightness. A nighthawk swoops and
sweeps silently and low across the meadow. I am out in hopes of seeing, as I
peer through binoculars, migrating birds cross in front of the moon’s bright
plane and of hearing their distant vocalizations as they pass. The evening
is not quiet, though. Dogs bark in the distance and toads trill in the wet
grass. The meadow and pond vibrate with frog song. The moon ties this all
together as the cloud cavern unravels and the moon displays its full
opalescence. I watch and listen for a long while, but the only avian
returnee is the quiet nighthawk. As I turn to go indoors, a June bug buzzes
past and whacks the clapboards under the lit kitchen window with a sound
that reminds me of a clap, and I softly applaud this evening before I take
leave of it.
The sky remains bright well after eight o’clock in the evening as the moon,
the color of Yeat’s “honey pale” moon, rises in early June. I see clearly
the shadowy figure described as the man in the moon, although my eyes
interpret it as the maid in the moon, a Gibson girl type face in profile,
chin slightly tilted upward in a kind of sassy pose. The maria, enormous
floodplains of lava on the moon’s surface, appear darker than the
mountainous areas and present the face of a man or a woman according to the
viewer’s choice. I take every chance I can to welcome the pleasant visage.
She encourages a walk in a world of silvered patina and luminous inspiration
at all times of the year. When clouds give way to clear skies, who knows
what we may see and hear.
