As it rains here in Duluth, MN on this 6th of November, the American election day, I wonder again if we're going to see a rock-hard and snowy winter this year or if it will again be bare ground, frost and slush. As Bill McKibben of 350.org said in a recent taped interview, those of us who remember the four seasons for their older weather patterns are the true conservatives, not the people who promote business mega-growth-at-any-cost and refuse to believe that we are on track, in all our fossil-fuel-charged expansion, to make earth's atmosphere too hot and unstable for civilization to endure. After all, what is really worth conserving if not civilization and Mother Earth.
I always did love winter and outdoor exertion in it, warming my body by my own blessed inner workings. I grew up envying school athletes and Olympians just a little bit, heroes unafraid to push themselves and compete with others, though I forgave myself that I didn't have that kind of personal drive. At least, I felt, I had space and could travel it for hours without automation. A great, sweeping loss of public health, I am sure, has resulted from people growing up disbelieving that winter locomotion outdoors was any good for them, body or soul.
Somehow, for more than economic reasons,walking in winter feels like a waste of time for a whole cross-section of people. The prevalence of roads and cars and trucks is a relatively recent driving force--especially those mega trucks with molded curves like muscle, making up for shallow real muscle on many a sedentary driver underneath the clothing. Loud exhaust pipes compare well with power-farts of pride and contempt.
In the first week of February 2012 I sat in soggy snow near the shore of an island at Camp Menogyn, at the top of Minnesota near the Canadian border, where I drew and painted winter spruce twigs with my fingers bare, the sun balmy on my head and hands, moisture soaking into my snow pants, a pair of snowshoes keeping me from sinking all the way through the snow pack. The iron grip of classic mid-winter felt to me tamed for all time in my remaining life, so that our crossing the lake ice and snow to that island on foot with sleds seemed in retrospect a marvel and impending risk. It was just past high noon, my waterlogged pants soon to hurry me back to the fire in the lodge, the painting of redpolls whirling from a traditional snowdrift bristling with tips of frozen-crisp spruce an outdoor accomplishment that shouldn't have been possible. Complacent at what I was making--pleased, too--I was and remain chronically troubled by what's happening to the boreal January and February. My watercolor of redpolls, winter finches of the northland, is now done, with reference to a published photo from the 1970s of what a snowbank in the North Woods used to look like. The present winter just didn't have any high, frozen-stiff snowbanks to offer; the snow on location was real but sinking in the broad light of day. Blank Note Card: a Redpoll Explosion on a Winter's Morn at https://www.etsy.com/listing/110077614/art-card-redpolls-winter-scene-for
