For the love of winter

Walking (and snowy photo) composition

5% of this quarter’s On the Commons revenue will be given to Piikani Lodge Health Institute. I am changing the makeup of these a little to incorporate two local not-for-profits that are near and dear to me: Flathead Warming Center (a low-barrier houseless shelter) and Glacier Queer Alliance, two organizations providing support in a region whose politically elected leaders are hostile to most people they serve. Next quarter’s 5% will go to Flathead Warming Center. You can read more about some of the local political pushback they’ve faced here.

These snowghosts! I like to think of them watching over the winter-quiet ranges all the way to Glacier National Park (the peaks of which you can see from here on a clear day) and beyond.

Audio version:

Winter is my most joyful time. It came late this year. We didn’t get significant snow and it was barely what I’d call cold until a little over a week ago, when usually we’d have feet of snow by December, or at least mid-December.

Winter is being driven out of much of our lives. Being aware of the shift in temperatures and the decreasing snow packs and number of snow days breaks my heart; trying to pretend it’s reversible at this point would break my brain. Maybe we find our sharpest, brightest shards of humanity in loving most fiercely what we know will be lost.

Last Sunday I shortened my usual early-morning routines involving coffee, greeting the morning air and sky and ground, writing by candlelight, and some other rituals, and threw my ski gear into the car to meet my sister and father up on the downhill ski hill just outside of town. It had been dumping snow for over twenty-four hours after weeks of winter being just out of reach and, while everywhere was still gray and foggy, my spirits were soaring. The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” blasted too-loud in the car as I joined the line crawling uphill to chase a powder day.

By the time I’d finished making coffee, my phone had already gone off with texts from friends with ideas for the day. “Anyone want to join for a ski around Loon Lake?” “Snowshoeing in Glacier?” “Good day for a bonfire! We’re going to hike up the forest service road and roast brats.”

Not everyone where I live is a winter-lover. By March, many minor exchanges are guaranteed to have a complaint about wishing the snow would stop, or the inversion layers would lift and Sun make an appearance. But aside from difficulties that many have with the near-perpetual gray skies, which can bring on an undeniable depression (not for me but for many people), I’m fortunate to feel surrounded by people who, like me, seem to come alive in winter.

I love the cold and snow of these months, and mourn their passing even while delighting in spring. The long, dark nights are like a blanket to wrap up in. The overcast skies for weeks on end don’t bother me much, though I do find a surge of energy overtakes me that one day in February when Sun comes out, and the three nights I’ve seen Moon in the past month—I’m looking at Her right now!—have brought me pure, intense joy. The beauties of winter, which

Freya Rohn

portrayed lovingly in poems and photo-poems in

The Ariadne Archive

, work their fractal way through my imagination and attention like so much flower-frost on an old window. The magic of winter is unparalleled, from the fox tracks my niece and I part-followed on our route to school last week, to the sun halos that burst out every few years on the ski mountain.

Sun halo and sun dogs, from 2021

Nothing makes me believe more in something more about our existence than Nature herself, Earth herself, Moon, Sun, trees, rivers, ice rime on a ponderosa pine, coming across a snow-covered bear den or snowshoe hare tracks when out hunting, a glorious sundog following me all day around a ski mountain—all of it, themselves. No matter where we originated in this world, there have always been forces and delights and entities to remind us that what we call creation or life is always in the process of becoming, and astonishing us. To feel humble before it all, and love for it all, might be our greatest calling.

This weekend has been bitterly, unbelievably cold. I’ve experienced this kind of cold before but not often. Thursday and Friday nights were around -58°F (-50°C) with wind chill, and it was very windy. Saturday morning dawned with -31°F (-35°C) even without the wind, but there was no wind, and with Sun making a rare appearance it was one of the more beautiful days I’d seen in a while.

Frostbite is a real issue, as is hypothermia. So are cabin fever and depression. I take all of it seriously. After spending Friday mostly crawling out of my mind with near-claustrophobic irritability from staying inside, on Saturday I dragged a heavily bundled and face-wrapped kid out for a walk, and then spent an hour by myself sliding around the neighborhood on cross-country skis a friend had lent me for a couple of weeks.

This friend and I had gone cross-country skiing on a nearby lake before the cold front came in. Her dog romping free across the ice and snow, we sh-slshed among silent woods under a rumpled silver sky for a little over an hour, sometimes talking, sometimes just skiing. I haven’t felt that good in a long time, like I was convalescing from a severe illness and was rediscovering what it was like to move my body through the world.

I’ve been meaning to get back into cross-country skiing since moving back to Montana nearly ten years ago, but with kids and work and life in general, haven’t managed much of it. Luckily, most of my close friends are avid cross-country skiers and started getting me out last year. Skiing is one of my favorite things to do, whether downhill or cross-country, but the environmental impact of downhill skiing, which I started doing at the age of two and enjoy more than almost any other activity, has been weighing on me for years. From energy consumption to broken wildlife habitat to the economic inequalities that tend to explode in ski resort towns like mine, it’s a lifelong pleasure whose real-life impacts are impossible to ignore. Even most ski wax contains endocrine-disrupting PFAS chemicals.

Cross-country skiing brings similar joys without nearly the impact (not to mention cost), and is something people have been doing without chairlifts and heavy-duty boots for centuries. Some of my favorite scenes from Sigrid Unset’s trilogy of novels Kristin Lavransdatter, set in 14th-century Norway, involve Kristin strapping on a pair of skis and heading off into the woods alone.

There are bigger changes to make than giving up downhill skiing, but I’m looking forward to shifting more of that time toward those quieter snow-graced days. For however many years we continue to have snow to treasure, I hope to spend more days sliding quietly across land and water untouched by grooming machines.

Silent lake-skiing under a rumpled sky

Who knows how many true winters my part of the world has. All I know is that I’ll welcome every one of them, every hour toward Solstice added to beloved darkness and starry nights, visible or not, every flake of snow that makes it from the clouds to land on laden spruce trees, every story told in an animal’s tracks, every footstep or glide of skis, every frosty breath and peek of Moon from overcast skies, every ice crystal refracting light to result in a sun halo, every single moment of creation that persists in living and creating despite the worst that humanity tries to throw at it. Every bit of it that reminds me I am an evolved animal capable of living joyously on a planet very much alive, and that I intend to do so.