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Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Fooled by false Spring
Wild Side: Warm days in early February had Orlan Love thinking about maple syrup and open-water fishing
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Among proverbs with more than a kernel of truth: There’s no fool like an old fool.
Fraudsters know we may be in cognitive decline, that we tend toward credulity and politeness and, as digital non-natives, we are less hip to modern, high-tech scams.
They would of course drool if a potential mark ever even used the antiquated word “hip.”
But when your typical winter day consists of drinking coffee, reading, getting the mail, ordering garden seeds, closing your eyes in the fully reclined recliner, taking out the trash, eating supper, watching TV and going to bed, you are susceptible to the promise of better days ahead.
At the risk of exposing myself to further unscrupulous exploitation, I confess I was duped by the recent charade perpetrated by false spring.
You’d think a veteran of 77 springs would know better, but the scammers know we want to believe and that we’ll rationalize almost absurdly to support our wishful thinking.
So when unseasonal warmth arrived in early February, followed at mid-month by five straight days with highs in the 50s and 60s, I thought back to the spring of 2024, when I was boiling maple sap on Feb. 5, watching winter ice depart the Wapsipinicon on Feb. 8 and catching my first open water fish of the season on Feb. 10.
What with the ongoing climate change and all, I rationalized, winter is over and spring is here. My delusion was reinforced several times a day by “unmistakable” signs of spring.
My sugaring partner Dean Kress and I tapped our first maple tree on Feb. 7. Though it hadn’t rained or snowed, topsoil in my garden shimmered wetly each morning as frost seeped from the ground. Sparrows gathered dry grass and leaves for under-construction nests. My pin oak loosened its grip on the brittle leaves it had clutched all winter. Snowplow-deposited glaciers retreated. Coats, gloves and tall boots were forsaken. And on Feb. 18, when the definitive sign of spring’s irreversible arrival arrived — the departure of ice from the former mill pond in Quasqueton — I honestly believed there was no going back. I went around spreading the good news.
On the last “nice” day, Feb. 19, I predicted to everyone I met that hordes of robins would soon descend upon the lawns of Quasky to harvest all the earthworms summoned toward the top of the warming soil.
Then, that night, a predicted winter storm that I was sure would miss me unloaded 10 inches of wet, heavy snow on all my concrete surfaces. Some of it may have drifted in on the blizzard-like northwest wind, but how it got there makes no difference to the shoveler.
It ushered in six days’ subfreezing and at times subzero temperatures that halted the sap flow, refroze the river and drove me back to the recliner, where I hoped to avoid all the people itching to ask: Hey, what about that spring you were talking about last week?
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