The wind was just starting to come up, setting the trees to swaying, cracking and popping like arthritic old limbs when I took a short walk down the dirt road yesterday. A few of last year’s oak leaves still on a branch rustled, and the top boughs of the giant pine sighed as the wind intensified.

This kind of cold is not to be trivialized or dealt with lightly. It takes precedence, sending oil tank gauge needles plunging, setting heat ducts to banging, and keeping cats inside. Despite the wind, there is a stillness across the wooded landscape, as the trees stand patiently bearing up against a Maine January.

I’ve often wondered how extreme cold affects trees.  Some species, such as oaks and ashes, manufacture chemicals that act as a natural antifreeze, keeping their cell fluids in a liquid state in temperatures as low as 40 below. Lower than that, and their sap freezes, expands, and splits the cells, killing them. Some trees, such as white spruce, have the ability to redirect the sap into the spaces between their cells, where ice crystals can’t damage any of their vital parts.

John Claudius Loudon, in his “Encyclopedia of Gardening,” published in 1822, wrote that some trees could split from the extreme cold that caused their sap to freeze, a sound he described as a gun going off. In her 2007 book entitled “The Essential Wild Food Survival Guide,” author Linda Runyon tells of hearing a loud crack in the woods behind her and seeing a maple with a large split in it, along with lying awake on nights when it was 40 below and listening to trees exploding. While temperatures here in these woods have never dipped that low, I have to wonder if the single loud pop I hear occasionally on a very cold night isn’t a tree splitting.

If nothing else, this makes me admire trees more, along with the awesome power that nature has imbued them with to produce their own means of surviving these dangerously low temperatures. Leafless, they bend with the wind that could ultimately kill them, powerless over the forces that dominate the winter landscape here and all across the upper northeast.

Winter is a humbling time, and nowhere is that more noticeable than in these outlying places. We must scramble to survive it, stocking up on fuel and food, heavier clothes and candles, and whatever else we might need to see us through to another spring. There might be humor in the mass rush to grocery stores when a big storm or other severe weather is predicted, and it might seem foolish in view of the fact that most of us are never down to our last potato or grain of rice and on the brink of starvation if we don’t get to the store. Truth is that the fear of the elements is deeply rooted in us, in the threads of stories imprinted on our brains that we might have heard growing up of the winter hardships our forebears endured, of the suffering and the going without. I think it’s safe to say that we, like the trees, are imbued with a means of survival, and despite our proximity to whatever it is we need and to the ready availability of most goods and services, the old survival instinct kicks in whenever bad weather threatens.

Thus we are not so unlike the trees after all, bending to the wind’s whim, when we head to the grocery store before a storm to get milk and bread. As they call upon their inner reserves, so, too, do we as we ready ourselves for whatever happens. With so many trees around me, I am daily reminded of that in a most wonderful way.

”“ Rachel Lovejoy is a freelance writer living in Lyman. She can be reached via e-mail at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.