Creak. Creak. Creak. When the weather is really cold, walking on snow produces a creaking sound with every step. When the weather is colder still, the snow makes a new sound. It still creaks, but there’s another sound below that. The pitch is deeper, and there’s a sharp linearity to the noise. It’s more of a crack, starting under your foot and extending far into the woods in front of you. We’re still deep in the throes of snow cracking weather.
My sister Carol lives further north and by a lake. The lake makes what she describes as burping sounds when it’s frozen. “Deep belching noises,” she elaborates, “and they’re loud. We can hear them through the walls of the house.” She associates the sounds with the pocket of air between the ice at the surface and the liquid water below. People like to ice fish out on the lake, and when she sees them out there making holes in the ice, she likes to think they’re making more openings through which the lake can burp.
The weather has been so steadfastly cold of late that people have been expressing concern over exploding trees. My first thought on hearing this was, oh, the poor trees. The second was, we’re surrounded by bombs. For the real skinny on exploding trees, I consulted my friendly neighborhood physicist: my husband. He assured me that trees do not, in fact, explode in extreme cold. They can, however, be weakened by vertical cracks when the sap freezes. Our outdoorsman friend Don has heard these cracks happening.
“Creaking and cracking are the sounds I think of in winter,” he says. When pressed, he also described another noise. “Sometimes in the winter, when you’re out walking in the snowy woods, everything’s so quiet you can hear your own heartbeat coming out of your mouth.
“It used to scare the crap out of me when I was a kid. I’d be out hunting rabbits and hear that sound and think I was being stalked by wolves, especially in places that had wolves. I’m not doing a good job of describing it. It’s kind of eerie, hearing that sound coming from your mouth and throat.” It was eerie just hearing about it.
Rascal discovered a new way to enjoy winter on yesterday’s walk. He came upon a cone-shaped hole in the snow at about eye level to an Affenpinscher. So he put his head in it. The opening seemed to fit his muzzle perfectly, and he stayed plugged into it for some time. What was the appeal? Did the shape of the hole collect and concentrate scents even better than the rest of the snow? Did the cold fitted snugly around his face and head feel good and wake up his brain? We can only speculate about our furry conehead.
At the site of a fire station under construction on the south side of town, we saw a couple men having their own close experiences with cold, with the added element of danger. They were seated opposite each other, each one straddling a steel girder as a crane hoisted in a joist into position to connect with the girders. The men looked to be wearing safety harnesses, which is good, but they had only their clothes to protect them from the cold and wind.
A couple elementary schools are under construction in our neighborhood, but both sites are pretty well screened from view. You’re aware of hustle and bustle as you pass them, but you get only glimpses of what’s going on. What you mostly get are sounds. There are engine sounds, of course, and the sound of voices. There are also mystery sounds, some of them enormous, especially as propagated through the cold air above Thurston Pond’s ice.
What was that massive squeak, for instance? No idea. And what produced the reverberating crash that sounded like a shipping container hitting the ground after having been dropped from a height? If only we could see what’s going on.
A young man at the Thrift Shoop yesterday had blond stars bleached into his close-cropped dark hair.
“How did you do that” I asked him.
“My friend is a stylist,” he said with a smile. “She wanted to.”
“They’re great,” I gushed, “but don’t people want to pet you wherever you go?”
“Yes,” he said with a bigger smile. “It feels so good.”
It wasn’t clear he meant touching his starry hair felt good or having people pet his hair felt good. The staff and customers listening to him contented themselves with just looking. He was a bright spot on a winter day.
30 January 2026