The hillside outside my office window presents a vast expanse of sagebrush, which is unusual for the third week in December. In normal years, snow covers everything except the vertical surfaces of its hoodoos and cliffs, but we had a warm November when it rained instead of snowed. We haven’t had much snow since. The backcountry skis that Julie and I usually use have stayed in the garage, unwaxed and unsharpened.
We have been able to ski, on narrow cross-country skis with fish-scale bottoms. These allow you to go forward, and the fish-scale imprints on their plastic bases keep your skis from sliding back. We’ve been skiing on roads near our house, winter-closed because of the half foot of crusted snow that survived our rainy days. It’s faster than walking.
We go for a couple of hours, covering 4 or 5 miles. We don’t get the thrill of fast downhill skiing, but that’s a good thing. Soft powder snow cushions you when you fall into it. Rocks and trees don’t move a bit and will hurt you if you hit them at speed.
An inch of snow is in the forecast, but that won’t change the skis we’re wearing. We’ll still get out in the fog-weakened sunlight, but more for the exercise than for the walks through the trees, the occasional glimpses of the Sawtooth peaks through the fog, the silence of a mostly motorless valley, the warmth of the woodstove after a cold last sprint to the car.
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It’s Christmas time, and with it, vacations from school and decorated Christmas trees and evening get-togethers. Usually, Julie and I have a solstice party involving a lot of wine and a lot of good friends talking to each other.
When you live in a tourist destination, you wait until the dark of winter to see friends. In the warmer seasons, people are too busy with summer jobs. Even when not working, most of us are preparing for winter by cutting and stacking firewood, sealing roofs and windows, maintaining vehicles, making sure pantries are well-stocked. Winter forces a pragmatic survivalism.
Community is part of survival too, and solstice parties are part of community.
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No solstice party this year. On the two days previous to the shortest day of the year, I’m getting my teeth worked on. I had hoped my teeth would outlast me, but over the past few years they’ve begun to wear out and break. A random bit of tooth crunching around in your sandwich is an instant morale problem.
Julie was kind enough to introduce me to her very fine long-term dentist, who doesn’t normally take new patients. I’m the dental equivalent of a nepo baby.
The dentist told me I had two choices: fix each tooth as it breaks or undergo what she called “a complete mouth rebuild.” I made the mistake of asking what she would recommend.
Starting tomorrow, I’m sitting in a dentist chair for two dark days, having my teeth ground down for crowns (uppers the first day, lowers the next). If I survive, by the solstice I’ll have temporary teeth while the permanent ones are being baked in a dental lab kiln. I won’t feel like a party.
I’ll have to wait some weeks before I’m ready to smile, which is also a morale problem, and an ethical problem, as the amount of money we’re paying for my new teeth could fund a micro-loan program for a small country. It’s an object lesson made for Peter Singer’s philosophy of the greatest good for the greatest number, where the choice becomes sending poor children into a classroom or having a big white smile for the last few years of your miserable, selfish life.
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Also, I seem to have gotten terribly allergic to wine. A single glass gives me a headache and wakes me at 3 a.m. in the morning. Possibly because of Covid, it has stopped tasting good to me. And my reading of the Medical Express section of the Phys.org website has convinced me that whatever health benefits alcohol offers young people do not accrue to 73-year-olds. My body seems to have recognized that before my mind has.
It's like having a good, warm, long-term friend betray you. I quit alcohol for a year starting in October, as part of a comprehensive bargain with God over my status as a melanoma patient. Lately I’ve been trying to renegotiate the abstinence period down to three months—no wine, just hypoallergenic Tanqueray martinis—and we’ll see how that works out.
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A lack of snow is reason enough for a winter of discontent. We’re hoping for a big change in the weather around the end of the month. It’s happened in past dry Decembers, so we know that it’s possible. We need three feet of snow. We could make do with two. We could make do with eighteen inches, if we had to.
Nothing is guaranteed. In the winter of 1977-78, it didn’t snow at all in the valley. By March, an early skiff of snow had melted off the valley floors. Drifts still hung on the north sides of the high Sawtooth peaks and, seeking just one day of skiing, I carried my skis into Hell Roaring Lake and far above it to the Arrowhead, the horizon-defining monolith that was fated to topple in the 2020 earthquake.
I didn’t worry about earthquakes, just a lack of snow. I camped on bare slickrock, and even though I slept in a sleeping bag within another sleeping bag, I woke up freezing at first light.
I had a frozen ham and cheese sandwich for breakfast, stuffed the sleeping bags, put on my skis, and eased out on the nearest long snowdrift. It extended down the slope below me, half covering a talus slope composed of house-sized rocks.
Between two of those rocks was a delicate snow bridge, which unfortunately looked skiable. As soon as I skied out onto it, it collapsed. I fell ten feet into a jumble of granite boulders, banging my knees and elbows and destroying the bases of my skis. It took me a while to collect everything, but when I did, I climbed out of the hole I had made, gathered up my camp, and headed for my car, six miles away and three thousand vertical feet below. It was a long way to walk in ski boots.
On the way, I passed creeks that had gone through the winter uninsulated by snow. They had frozen into rivers of ice that filled canyons. Where small seep springs had dampened hillsides, great bubbles of clear ice rose up, twenty feet above the ground. You could stand on them and look down on bushes, rocks, and trees. All it needed down there was a frozen Santa Claus, a sleigh, and some reindeer, and you’d be standing on the world’s biggest snow globe, or at least the world’s biggest snow globe without snow.
That summer, where the forest understory had been green, it was black and dead and, until unexpected summer rains came, dry. The valley’s lodgepole and fir trees came back to life, but it was only a year later, after a snowy winter, that they looked healthy. The summer rains saved us from a big fire season.
We’re hoping the weather doesn’t repeat itself, which seems reasonable in this era of climate chaos. If it snows, we can start backcountry skiing. If we get out in the hills on cold, clear days with plenty of sunshine (and plenty of sunscreen, I feel compelled to add), I’ll start feeling like I’ve survived into another year.
With luck, we’ll have a spring equinox party. With luck, it won’t be raining. With luck, my snow globe won’t be a metaphor for the globe.
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Yesterday, we skied out toward the river and cut the top out of a young lodgepole, high enough for it to heal and sustain its traumatized tree-spirit. The part we brought home is festooned with lights, strings of golden beads, home-made ornaments, and the golden metal silhouettes of angels and Santa and Christmas trees that Julie’s paternal grandparents sent her every Christmas while she was growing up. Julie cherishes them for the memories they give her of people who are no longer with us. I cherish them because they remind me that Julie grew up in a safe and loving world, full of kind people, and it’s up to me to keep her in it.
We’re listening to a lot of music these days, mostly jazz, but we get judgmental about tricked-out versions of Christmas carols.
Julie was in a choir in high school and college and sang with her family at the local Methodist church. All she sang around Christmas was carols, and we all know you can reach a point of oversaturation with carols. Julie says The Little Drummer Boy should have a trigger warning.
Julie plays the music of Prince and Madonna much more than that of their precursors.
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The world doesn’t look all that safe or loving this December. If you want to hang out with kind people you have to put them through a vetting process, starting with yourself. During these long nights, we’re trying to reconcile the real with the ideal. It’s not going well.
The war between Israelis and Palestinians is a big part of our discontent. We can’t do anything about it, just like we can’t do anything about Russia invading Ukraine, North Korea launching ICBMs, new Covid variants, and an American government increasingly at odds with itself.
This is a completely incomplete list of things we can’t do anything about.
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I’m slowly getting over my melanoma experience this fall. I have no complaints about the people at the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, who were uniformly kind and protective of my dignity as a human being. But like the workers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, they were moving parts of a giant machine, and so was I.
I was processed, sorted, stripped of clothing and consciousness, operated on, cured, and deposited back into the world. The experience represented an almost complete loss of agency, and an overwhelming awareness that my fate was in the hands of surgeons, anesthesiologists, lab techs, and the insurance gods.
Julie was with me every step of the way. I don’t think I could have gone through it without her. I received a quick lesson in empathy for those working paycheck to paycheck, the alone, the uninsured. It became obvious why many of them don’t make it to Medicare. Rather than deplete whatever they had hoped to leave their children, rather than further mortgage their homes, rather than stop paying a loved one’s tuition or medical bills, plenty of people choose death.
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We hope the solstice will be a reset for the world, for our sense of efficacy, for people fighting and dying at the behest of mad leaders, for the biosphere, for those working in inhuman systems, for the wounded and the maimed, for all those with scars on bodies and psyches.
Let the solstice be what it has been in the past, a moment of renewal and hope and healing, a time when it’s possible to imagine that morale problems won’t last forever. Entropy might be our era’s Golden Rule, but it has workarounds, at least in the small moments of our lives. They’re worth celebrating, however quietly.