The winter of my discontent

I’m supposed to be writing here about something natural and beautiful.  Problem is, everything right now seems unnatural and weird, and I’m not sure what to write. 

That’s because as I sit at my computer today in mid-January I can see some kids playing in the park with Capri pants on their legs and flip flops on their feet, and yesterday, while shopping at Target, I overheard a supervisor telling her workers to put all the woolly hats on the super sale shelf and move the sandals up to the front display.  By the time you read this it might be cold, but as I write the thermometer reads 63 degrees.

Twice in the last two weeks I’ve also watched landscaping crews bring out their mowers and get to work.  It was startling, because mowing is a summer sound, not something you hear as you take your Christmas tree out to the curb on trash day.  Both times they were being used to clear brown leaves off the lawns and not for cutting grass, but this is wintertime folks, and as far as I’m concerned those mowers should be sleeping off the cold in sheds and garages somewhere like giant metal bears in hibernation. 

Everywhere, as you undoubtedly already know, this winter has been odd.  I recently read an article about the weird weather year in the Washington Post.  “Disgusting” was the word one Moscow resident used to describe their warm winter.  Russia, he said, should be cold and full of frozen white drifts of snow.  Instead it is rather warm, grey, and gloomy.  In the Alps there has been little or no snow either, and wildflowers are even blooming on some mountainsides.   Reuters reports that parts of Canada, too, are strangely green this year, with golf courses still open and ski slopes silent and empty.  No one can recall a winter quite like it up there. 

Warm years are somewhat normal.  I can recall many winters of my childhood in Baltimore when we waited in vain for a good, deep snow.  One day spring would arrive in early March and we’d just put our sleds away, unused.  Meteorologists back up these anecdotes; they say that an El Niño year like the one we are seeing now is just part of a cycle which turns about every three years, with unusually warm weather occurring in some areas and unusually cold temperatures and an abundance of snow in others. 

But back here at home everything just seems unusually wacky.  On TV, those perpetually cheerful anchor people keep saying things to each other like, “Wow, isn’t that great Stacy– jogging along the Tidal Basin in January!  Too bad weather like this has to end, eh?”  But it doesn’t end.  Like their forced, cheerful chatter, this damned weather just keeps on a coming. 

And I really feel like I can’t stand it anymore.

The problem with the warmth, I’ve realized, is not just that I miss the winter.  It’s that I can’t escape the gloomy doomsday thoughts in my own head.  The warmth, which could be wonderful, instead feels like a constant reminder that everything is slowly going off course around us.  When nature is my worry, then I have no place to escape and let go. 

This is because normally, “outside” is my refuge.  A walk alone, a long meditative seat under an ancient tree, some time spent throwing rocks into a creek… all of these things serve to clear my mind.  I contemplate the change of seasons, the passing of time, the regularity of temporal patterns seen in things like frost, snow, and the first spring wildflowers that replace them.  These patterns seem to put the stupid problems of my singular human existence into perspective, bringing peace to my soul even on the days when I am uncomfortably cold.  I feel small again and it is wonderful.  Problems seem surmountable; obstacles seem easier to overcome. 

Now, though, long walks just seem to remind me of the world’s problems.  There’s no way to be in denial.  It’s like always having Al Gore constantly tugging at my sleeve.    Instead of thinking about things like the perfect beauty of a snowflake or the strange way the skunk cabbage plants can melt ice and snow, I’m out there thinking about global climate change every damned minute.

It is a bit like watching a friend come down with some sort of slow, degenerative disease.  Standing around on the playground hearing people in short sleeves say things like “Gee, I guess this is the good part of global warming!” feels a bit like listening to someone tell a cancer patient, “Well at least you’ve finally lost those pesky extra ten pounds and you look great without hair!” 

Most of the time I try to hold my weather discontent to myself, saying nothing when people wax on about the wonderfulness of a warm January.  But I found my apocalyptic thoughts were somewhat validated in early January, when researchers announced that although the immediate weather was due to El Niño, the record warmth was a long term warming trend which has been linked to global climate change.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, while acknowledging that December 2006 was the warmest on record in the US, released a statement saying that increases in greenhouse gases have “made warmer-than-average conditions more common in the U.S. and other parts of the world.” -1 Although it is unclear to scientists how much of the recent anomalous warmth is due to greenhouse-gas-induced warming and how much was due to the El Niño-related circulation pattern, the 2006 annual average temperature was 2.2 degrees above the 20th Century mean.

So although the odd weather is part of a normal cycle, the extreme swings of that cycle are somewhat surprising and may not be normal.  And although two degrees may not seem like a big rise, researchers elsewhere tell us it can actually mean quite a lot to thebalance of many ecosystems.

Reading the news these days, it’s easy to find examples of how we’ve screwed up big time.  Parts of Greenland are melting away, the snows on Mt. Kilimanjaro are decreasing, and an ice shelf the size of Manhattan has broken off in the cold barrens of northern Canada.  And those were just headlines from January.

All of which took me to the bookshelf on a search for Aldo Leopold.  Reading through his contemplative, scientific works felt a bit like calling an old, forgotten friend on the phone to commiserate.  “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” he wrote in Round River-2,  “is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” 

Although I am only a layperson myself, I understand all too well what he means.  Flip-flops in January might be fun, but the scene just ain’t right.  The knowledge of its wrongness brings no joy, no pleasure, no insight or relief.  I wish sometimes that I just didn’t know how wrong it was.

So a few days ago I walked along the trails near Sligo Creek and tried to enjoy the day for what it was.  Families were out playing, birds were chirping away in the trees, and sunshine glittered on the water.  I tried to play along and let go of my gloomy thoughts.

Bare limbs of trees gave away the real identity of the season, however, and I found myself longing for snow and ice.  I thought of the beauty of a cold morning, when cardinals flash against white snowdrifts and blue jays sparkle against frosted evergreen branches, and found myself dreaming of icicles freezing along the creek’s bridges.  The sunshine, in comparison, felt weird and surreal.

I really hope that you find yourself reading this edition of the Voice while huge drifts of snow pile up outside your window.  I hope that all of us will at least get to enjoy a bit of real winter before the season comes to a close.  Although I know the coming of a cold snap won’t mean the course of climate change has been reversed, at least I’ll get a break from thinking about it all the time.  And maybe I’ll get to go out sledding, too.

1- Easterling, David and Lawrimore, Jay. "NOAA Reports 2006 Warmest Year on Record for U.S..  General Warming Trend, El Niño Contribute to Milder Winter Temps." Climate of 2006 - in Historical Perspective: Annual Report, National Climatic Data Center 01.09 01 2007 1. 29 01 2007 <http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2006/ann/ann06.html>.

2- Leopold, Luna B. ed.  Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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