The two red pennants — signifying a gale warning — over the harbormaster’s office snapped in the winter wind sweeping down out of the northwest. Walking across to Fairhaven, I noticed that the frigid weather of the past few weeks has finally caused a thin skin of ice to grow across a good part of the shallow water between New Bedford and Fish Island. The waves kicked up by the wind reflected off the edge of the ice, but the ice was so thin that the waves also passed through it in a diminished state; the ice was so thin that it was still flexible. When I got closer I could see that the ice had faint lines running through it, so that it almost had the texture of skin. Of course there was no ice between Fish Island and Pope’s Island’ that’s where the thirty-foot deep channel for shipping runs. But ice stretched all the way from Pope’s Island to Fairhaven, and from Fairhaven to Crow’s Island, and thin sheets of ice covered much of the water all along the Fairhaven side of the harbor.

In spite of all the ice, I read today that a thousand Red-Winged Blackbirds arrived in Dover last weekend, just twenty miles north of here: the first rumor of spring.