Last night about 9 a buddy and I headed into the woods on snowshoes by moonlight. No flashlights, just the moon on the snow, and 0 degrees F. This is in Vermont.
It was remarkable, and so beautiful. Tonight, the actual full moon, it looks like we'll be clouded over and snowing, so I'm glad we went out last night.
I was reminded of my teen years in the last half of the 1960s. In winter, on a Friday night after the School and Service meeting, we'd come home about 10 pm with a full moon turning the night into nearly day. I lived in a really rural area, in the mountains on an old farm, surrounded by forest and old, abandoned hillside pastures with not an inhabited house for a mile or more.
Those nights so energized me that I'd change into my winter gear and hike with my skis on my back up into the hillside pastures and ski down by the moonlight til after midnight. Christ, it would be -20F, just so outrageously cold, and no one out there with me. I never thought of it as dangerous, just that I felt amazingly alive and connected with where I lived. The biggest danger, besides freezing to death, was that the snow would be a few feet deep, but leave the old barbwire fences just sticking a few inches above the snowline. If you caught your skis under those, it was a very nasty fall, for sure!
God, it's good to be alive in a place so connected with the wild world that surrounds it.
S4