On the eve of Saint Peter's Chair - a pattern breaking?

 

Five years ago, I was living in my native village and I wrote a blogpost on how the feast of Cathedra Petri, or Saint Peter's Chair, on February 22 was regarded as a seasonal turning point in Norway. This year, I am once again living in my native village, and just as I did five years ago, I have been noting how climate change causes the old patterns to break. These were the patterns that allowed for such seasonal rules of thumb, where the deviations from year to year were not sufficiently significant that the pattern could be said to be incorrect. This year, however, winter has been unusual in the fjords. For a month - from early January to mid-February - we had no precipitation. The absence of snow caused waterways to freeze and huge ice formations took shape along the roads, where roadwork had cut through subterranean trickles and exposed them to the cold air. 

Yesterday, on the eve of Saint Peter's Chair, my youngest sister, her dog, and a mutual friend went for a walk on the ice during two hours of waning light. Recently the weather had changed and we got a few days of snow, followed by a downpour which turned the ice atop the lakes into slush. So far, this was according to the old pattern. It was said that Saint Peter would cause lakes and harbours to thaw, and this belief was illustrated by the saying that he tossed warm stones into the water to unfreeze it. For this reason, both the date and Saint Peter himself were referred to as Per Varmestein, Peter Warmstone.  

Walking on the ice after such shifts in the weather proved to be an odd experience. Before the rain had set in, strong winds had blown the dry snow into small drifts, meaning that some parts of the ice were covered in snow - which then turned to slush - while other parts were uncovered, leaving the rainwater to freeze into a top layer of the already thick lake ice. Consequently, when we walked on the ice, the top layer cracked - either rapidly or in a slow-yielding motion like a fleshy membrane, depending on how cold that part of the lake was - and it did sometimes feel like we were constantly on the verge of falling into the water. Then we would occasionally drill a hole into the ice to measure the thickness of the old layer, and this proved invariably to be somewhere between 40 and 50 centimetres. For reference, ten centimetres of ice is usually sufficient for walking safely.  

What made the experience even more atmospheric was that in the three-day period before the rain set in, the snow had caught the tracks of crossing animals - mostly foxes - and the rain had essentially fossilised these proofs of lives otherwise unseen. At one point, we could even smell the rancid, sickly stench of a fox - they are in heat at the moment, as one of them loudly made clear a few days ago - and the world around us was closer. This is also part of the old pattern. 

Today, as I write this, on the feast of Saint Peter's Chair, the weather has again changed. The thaw and rain we were promised has turned into snow, and I have recently been shovelling the driveway in anticipation of much more to come during the night. As I was shovelling, I met a friend and neighbour, who is also a fellow medievalists, and she remarked that she had not been on the ice because according to the old runic calendars, this was not a day when you could expect to be saved from the water if you went onto it. Normally, I would agree, but yesterday's experience combined with the ongoing snowfall made me hesitate. It does not look like we are losing access to the ice just yet. The question is whether this is the pattern breaking in a rather unexpected way, or whether we are just within that margin of deviation which means that the old pattern is still in place.