A couple of years ago, I decided I was going to draw comics. It didn’t last long – but the ones I did before I quit are pretty fun. One is about a scuba practice session. Here you go.
It’s not snowy here, but it certainly feels like winter: we’ve had a winter cold circulating through the house since the holidays. The subnivium, which I first wrote about in 2013, sounds very appealing right now as a refuge from all that the season brings.
When I think about winter, I mostly think about all the fun things that take place on the snow’s surface. Or all the fun things that take place inside: hot chocolate, eating, reading by the fire. Once spring comes, when the world outside is buzzing (and boing-ing), there’s no excuse to stay inside with a good book.
I’m not the only one who needs a winter retreat. In snow-covered spots food can be scarce; the wind-chilled open air is brutal. But for creatures that aren’t able to curl up with cocoa, the snow itself forms the insulation for a shelter under the snow.
This below-snow retreat is such a wintertime ecological haven—for everything from freeze-resistant invertebrates that can supercool their own bodies to martens and weasels that stalk prey and snooze in this space–that a paper in this month’s Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment proposes that it should get its own designation: the subnivium. Jonathan Pauli and Benjamin Zuckerberg at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their colleagues have gotten interested in the dynamics of this sub-snow world—and what will happen to it as winters warm up.
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An opinion that I often share at social functions, usually without provocation, is that Snowpiercer is one of the best movies of the 21st century. Most people seem not to share that view. Most people are wrong.
If you’re among the benighted millions who’ve never experienced Bong Joon Ho’s masterpiece, I suggest you rectify that shortcoming immediately. (It’s on Netflix — no excuses!) In the meantime, here’s the wild premise. It’s 2031. A desperate stab at geoengineering has backfired catastrophically, entombing the world in ice. The few survivors — Chris Evans and Octavia Spencer among them — are trapped on a train, a “rattling ark” that, y’know, pierces the snow as it circles the earth. The dirt-smudged hoi polloi rot in steerage, locked down by armed guards, while the über-wealthy (led by Tilda Swinton, playing a creepy mashup of Hitler, Gaddafi, Thatcher, and, um, Silvio Berlusconi) frolic in opulence at the train’s head, waltzing through cars filled with orange orchards and saunas and party drugs.
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This morning, mid-January, sandwiched between the past few days of fog and rainy gloom and future days of cold and snowy mix, the sun did this. I’d been having the flu, not getting 5 feet away from the couch, and the sun was so stunning I walked out on the porch and stood in it. I swear it’s like, the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace. I’m not even religious.
Sunlight has beneficent effects on all kinds of diseases and hoo boy, on all kinds of depressions and disorders of mood. But we already knew all that, didn’t we, we just hadn’t done the science. When there’s a puddle of January sunlight in the corner of a room, even the dog knows to go lie down in it.
You can’t see in that picture a detail, a tiny glory, so here’s the closeup.
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It is crushing to see my dad in the nursing home. Life is so small there, the food so terrible, the residents so…out of sorts. One woman continually calls for help—a tiny voice in some faraway room, ignored for crying wolf; one man walks the halls with glazed eyes and drool dripping down his chin. Another guy slumps in a wheel chair, hand working himself under a blanket. It’s a hard place to make friends.
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Dateline: mid-January, 2020. Location: Baltimore, MD. Meterological conditions: first snow of the season, 1 inch max.
Early that evening, rumor apparently came of an imminent invasion. So the local militia began work on fortifications. They packed cold-certified plastic cubes with snow, then pushed the cubes of snow out and stacked them without reference to engineering principles. By now, most of the yard had been picked clean of snow. Fortifications were left unfinished because light was failing and the militia had to go home to bed.
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I found this ill-cared-for painting from 1976, when I was nine, of a spaceship either taking off or landing on a barren world.
This was before Star Wars, but I was well-steeped in forbidden worlds and Star Trek. I dreamed of alien planets, their skies red or green, their landscapes sere and wind-torn. I stared for long hours into books with artist representations of unknown moons or galaxies setting on the horizon. How could you not resist the night sky and what could be?
In 1976, my single mother, an artist who worked as a secretary on the side, took a summer with me to live in a cabin in eastern Arizona. She put up her easel in tall-grass fields and painted green mountains and aging barns, wood graying and peeling apart, as I sat on the ground dabbing brushes in oil paints, rendering other worlds on canvases she gave me. You’d think there’d be enough here on Earth for a budding naturalist who gathered rocks, pinecones, and bones all summer, but when I painted, my eyes turned upward, above the whispering canopies of ponderosa pines, over the rolling mountains.
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This post originally appeared Feb. 13, 2018
It starts quietly enough. At around 9:30 a.m., I strap snowshoes to my feet and part ways with some friends bound for a backcountry ski. While they skin over a nearby saddle, my dog Taiga and I shuff our way into the stream of snowshoers along the boundary of the Mt, Baker Ski Area, headed for Artist Point. It’s not a long hike, nor an extreme one, but the hordes jostle and slip like drunks. One guy slides on his side in slow motion down the steep hill, parallel to the trail, unsure how to get his snowshoes back under him.
“You could dig in your ski pole to self arrest,” I suggest gently. “I am!” he exclaims, continuing to slide past, his poles dragging unused across the slope.
Maybe he’s overwhelmed, I muse, continuing on.
“What happens all winter; the wind driving snow; clouds, wind, and mountains repeating—this is what always happens here,” the poet Gary Snyder wrote of this place one long-gone August, looking towards the edifice of Mount Shuksan from his post at the Crater Mountain Fire Lookout. Today, though, is the first truly sunny day of the year.
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