Is That a Toad in Your Pocket?

I know I’m troubled – bored, impatient, just not getting my way -- when my mind turns to theorizing. As you see, I just came up with a theory about theories, and that’s not a good sign. People who devise theories have too much time on their hands and too little capacity for leaving the damn world alone – an essential gift if we hope to remain reasonably sane and useful. Behind most theories lies the ill-disguised will to impose them on others, regardless of their wishes, and we rationalize this by proclaiming our good intentions (all intentions, of course, are good).

I come from Northern European stock, and was a lifelong Northerner before we moved to Houston almost two years ago. I had made only a few brief visits south of the Mason-Dixon Line in all my life. My being is imbued with the sturdy, good-natured melancholy of the North. The winter is long and sunlight is rare. Where we lived in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., snow remained on the ground six months out of the year, departing only in early May when the last black iceberg melted in a grocery store parking lot. From the annual experience of surviving the winter with sanity and morals intact, especially those long dark months without real holidays after Christmas, we unconsciously come to think of spring as a reward for a job well done. By April, we lust for green, the pale green of newly leafed maples, and one morning it’s there, the color of hope rewarded.

This theory doesn’t work in Houston. The seasons here have no demarcations; they blur, varying only by percentage of humidity. Our neighborhood is thick with oaks but the leaves don’t dramatically change color in the fall. They grow gray-green and a little dingy and drop incrementally between October and March. The branches are never bare and nothing is stark. The only bird songs I recognize, like voices from home, are blue jays, cardinals and, more recently, robins. We see butterflies and lizards in February. Snow is a memory, though on Christmas morning 2004, our first Christmas in Houston, the Chronicle published a front-page story about the previous day’s snowfall. I saw it, mid-morning, as I was leaving my middle son’s doctor’s office – a snowfall that could most conveniently be measured by the flake, not by the inch or foot.

I do not miss driving in the snow but otherwise I do miss it, especially in the afternoon when the winter sun is low and shadowed snow turns Delft blue. Thoreau’s journal is filled with loving descriptions of snow and the winter landscape in Concord, Mass., just three hours east of where we lived in New York. This is how, vicariously, I relive winters past. Here’s one, from Feb. 12, 1854:

“To make a perfect winter day like this, you must have a clear, sparkling air, with a sheen from the snow, sufficient cold, little or no wind; and the warmth must come directly from the sun. It must not be a thawing warmth. The tension of nature must not be relaxed. The earth must be resonant if bare, and you hear the lisping tinkle of chickadees from time to time and the unrelenting cold-steel scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold; hard, tense, frozen music, like the winter sky itself; in the blue livery of winter’s band. It is like a flourish of trumpets to the winter sky. There is no hint of incubation in the jay’s scream. Like the creak of a cart-wheel. There is no cushion for sounds now. They tear our ears.”

And this, from April 2, 1857:

“A great change in the weather. I set out apple trees yesterday, but in the night it was very cold, with snow, which is now several inches deep. On the sidewalk in Cambridge I saw a toad, which apparently hopped out from under a fence last evening, frozen quite hard in a sitting posture. Carried it into Boston in my pocket, but could not thaw it into life.”

There’s no suggestion of complaint in Thoreau’s observations, you’ll notice, even as he carries a frozen toad in his pocket. He’s a Northerner and a Yankee to boot, so it takes more than a dead amphibian to compromise his sense of – what? Wonder? Appreciation? Thoreau was grateful to be alive in so bountiful a world, where boredom is a crime against creation and theories are optional.