Stinging Frosts Are Good For The World

Stinging Frosts Are Good For The World

We have a small friend who, as the frosts have begun to bite during this winter, has filled a steadily growing number of hot-water bottles to take to bed to keep warm.

She really feels the cold, this wee lass, and we have a joke that as well as leaving her lekky-blanky on 178 all night, she also wears a long coat quilted on the inside with hot-water bottles. And she was sure she was going to get swine flu, although we pointed out she was too small and that at best, she would only ever get piglet flu.

In any event, she, and we, and most of the rest of the population, have survived the frosts, and have been delighted with the crystal days that follow. On these beautifully clear mornings we have been able to see right through to Ruapehu, standing majestic and aloof  on the far southern horizon, usually clad in the faintest shade on pink as an early sun catches its snow-clad lines.

If we’re lucky, we get to see that sight maybe a dozen times a year. The rest of the time, at best, is a lump of the much-closer Rangitoto Ranges, and the perfect little cone that is Kakepuku, while out the front windows maunga tapu Taupiri and the Hakarimata Ranges cut clean profiles into the soft blue sky.

I’ve always preferred to live high on a hill, and from our ridge we can see wide open spaces out across some of the Horsham Downs flats. Often too, we see balloons flaring up out of central Hamilton, to drift away into the distance. 

But sometimes, just on sunrise, there will be some form of temperature inversion, and in a matter of minutes the wide open flats below us will be stealthily smothered in creeping mist that gradually condenses into a sturdy white fog, blocking out fences, early morning families of feeding pukeko, mobs of cows still resting neatly on folded legs and other things of outdoor interest.

Then, all that can be seen are little islands of hilltops and the crowns of tall trees jutting up through the blanket of ground-level cloud – and that, in itself, is a stark and interesting sight.

Yet it seems to me that until this winter, we’ve had little in the way of good frosts for some years, at least here in the Waikato.

Certainly down around Taupo and the central King Country good stinging frosts are common on an annual basis, but it’s been a good while since we Waikato-ites have had some healthy minus temperatures.

And I’m sure they’ve got to be good for the world in general – those chills certainly whack a great deal of the flies and other pesky insects about the place, and no doubt they also weed out the old and the feeble among a wide range of wildlife: rats, mice, birds, rabbits and so on, leaving the more robust among them to live and feed on the additional food available, and thus be more able to recycle life again in the spring.

One of my very earliest memories is as a little boy of perhaps three, going with my father to bring in the milking herd on our farm at Te Mapara, near Piopio. 

Initially he had 23 cows – a modest but adequate herd in those days – and the mud round the tiny milking shed was belly-deep on the cows, frozen to a crust in the early mornings, but a treacherous sludge later in the day.

This particular morning I discovered a tiny mouse almost dead from the cold. It was near the gateway into the cows’ paddock, and I picked it up in my woollen-gloved hands and cradled it for a minute or two, then put it in a feeble ray of sunlight at the foot of a massive old kahikatea.

He moved slightly as I put him down, and now, six decades on, I still wonder whether that little critter lived. Somehow, I hope he did – he was a good-looking mouse.

That Te Mapara area was a shatteringly cold place in the winter, steep, hard country with dark, menacing, dangerous limestone bluffs, and ragged paddocks not really suited to dairy cattle at all.

There was one high hill paddock on the place that in winter attracted such heavy frosts it looked as though it was covered in snow; and in the early autumn it went white again, this time absolutely smothered in wall-to-wall mushrooms.

My two big sisters brought home billies piled with “mushies”, and nobody I’ve come across could cook mushrooms quite as tasty as our mother. Just the sauce alone – rich and thick and dark grey and slightly peppery – was a meal on its own, drizzled over a doorstep of toast.

The ice on puddles was so thick we couldn’t break it by jumping on it, and I can vaguely remember squealing in agony as my mother thawed my wet, frozen fingers in front of the kitchen fire.

Then we moved to the Otewa Valley, not far from Otorohanga and still in the King Country. The frosts there were lusty and tough too, hanging about from one day to the next on the south side of a barberry hedge.

Along the banks of farm tracks there was frost-heave, where the cold had squeezed moisture out of the ground, and thin, brittle spikes of ice stood an inch tall, capped with tiny crowns of soil that quickly turned to mud in the morning sun.

Bringing in a herd of a hundred or so cows for morning milking in early August showed a moving cloud of steam as they trudged grudgingly to the shed, each blasting hot breath through distended nostrils.

Later, after milking, we fed out a dozen and more bales of sweet hay in a long curving line across a crunchy, starched, frost-clamped paddock, and the animals lined up, herring-bone fashion, and snuffled and snorted and sneezed as they hoed in.

Then we would go in for breakfast. Always it was big bowls of dense porridge swimming in rich cream and laden with raw brown sugar.

It was, my father often said, “the best breakfast”.

And then we went outside and worked in the cold sun, and it froze again that night, and the next morning glittered with ten million points of light from yet another frost.

I’m sure they’re good for the world.

Kingsley is a columnist with the Waikato Times in Hamilton. His Outdoor columns appear fortnightly, and he has recently published his second illustrated volume of selected columns He is now working on Volume III. He can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz                                                       

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