Spring Break Up at the Cabin

I sit, just inside the spruce along the cut banks of the Chena River immersed in the crisp, frozen silence of a forested winter landscape.  A silence that gives birth to a cacophony of sounds for the one who stops to listen and accept the opportunity to let the voices of man fade into the distance and allow oneself to be swept away.

The sun is beating down from above warming me and the frozen river as the forest slowly comes to life with the arrival of spring.  The river ice is now bare.  No longer covered in snow it shines bright with a slight greenish tint and pools of standing water.  There are slight undulations to its surface and it cries out with strain as the snow melt heaves against it from below.  The cracking and popping of the river is joined in chorus by the song of birds just arriving for spring, the chattering of squirrels, and the croak of the raven sitting on high.

Bubbling water bursts through cracks in the ice and cascades down stream as I lean back in my camp chair basking in the sun and listen to the excited babbling of the river as it comes to the end of it's winter song.  The sound of the water bubbling out of ice is as a person gulping water from an endlessly flowing tap, and I suppose in a way it is.  I suppose it is the world drinking gratefully the cold, clear stream of a river previously locked in ice for six months.  A river once more breaking free.