Even now there are several roadside heaps of it where the snowdrifts had been so high that we were entirely cut off for three days. These vestiges hardly conjure the power of that extraordinary storm, but it has been fascinating to track the whole system as a single organism.
The most notable thing about “the beast from the east” was the speed of its evolution. For example, on the morning the storm left it was astonishing how the natural world responded. Suddenly there were life-sounds everywhere – starlings or greenfinches singing, a woodpecker drumming and sparrows re-immersed in their hedgerow palaver as if nothing had happened.
The snow that morning was entirely different. Every step raised a cleat-pressed pancake that snapped mid-point as it fell back into the footprint. The going was heavy and so unlike the snow at the height of the storm, when you could walk through it as if it were water. This virgin stuff was so loose it had blown deep into the heart of the vegetation and created a landscape so monochromatic that it was hard to distinguish photographs taken in black and white from those in colour.
On the marsh itself I experienced one of the rare moments in lowland England where I thought: “You could die out here.” The cold from the wind and horizontal snow burned your temple and cheeks. Nothing stirred and the only warm-blooded life I saw, two swans midfield, were just curvatures of white enfolded in a wider whiteness.
The storm’s most powerful effect was the silence. The whole world had become a sound-proofed closet, but for the intermittent static from the easterlies and the faint-scratched footprint of every new flake. This atmosphere, however, triggered its own emotional impacts, for out of it, at one point, swung a lone blackbird, over the gate and into the oaks, until its going was obliterated in white. To see that bird, to know it was still here – that little feathered dinosaur, inheritor of the Jurassic, bringer of spring, announcer of dawn – among all that whitened silence, was as comforting as a flame in the dark.
