The Winter That Wasn't
Apr. 3rd, 2024 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
denebalgedi777It is ironic to title this piece in such a way, since I am writing it at the tail end of a spring relapse into a winter that otherwise never really arrived. Since I pay close attention to signs and omens, I have the superstitious tendency to see rare weather patterns as a general warning of unusual currents in the tides of fate. I am rather like the ancient historians in that way, and not much akin to moderns who would dismiss all of that as so much humbug. We are mutual in our incomprehension. Anyway, the Upper Midwest’s pattern this past winter was not abnormal, it was unheard of, and that’s why I wanted to write a reflection on it while it was still clear in my memory. All across the interior of the North American continent I heard the same thing from its denizens. This was the mildest winter in living memory, and it was not even close.
The closest thing to it would be the winter of 2011-12, which also presaged a very wiltingly hot summer and dry conditions for the second year in a row. Looking back, I don’t think it would be unfair to say that the 2012 conditions seem as if they were a sinister portent as well. Many people in our circles, including the eminent John Michael Greer himself, have dismissed the Mayan Calendar Apocalypse of 2012 as a misunderstanding. I myself am no longer so sure. There has been a very strong impression of living in a cursed timeline ever since that time. The original meaning of Apocalypse is, after all, a revelation, the “taking off of the cover”, and not the abrupt end of all things. And no doubt, much has been revealed in the past dozen years or so, to the extent that I feel like I am living in a parallel dimension that has little in common with the way things were before. That feeling has only strengthened in recent years.
But back to this winter: We had very little snow, and a record number of days above 50 degrees fahrenheit. The whole winter seemed to be stuck in a pattern that would be normal for the time period between October and November. That is, it was a pattern typically observed much farther south in the USA, but as far as my reckoning goes, never once here. Consequently, there was little opportunity for the winter sports that usually draw so many people in from out of town. Farther north, I saw that they had some snowfall, as my contacts in the Brainerd Lakes area sent me pictures from time to time. Here, we had almost no such luck. There was about a tenday in January when the arctic frost descended and it felt almost like the winters of old in the Upper Midwest, after which time it rapidly reverted to the way it had been before. This was, we are told, because there was an extremely strong El Nino pattern in the Pacific, which kept both cold air and moisture on tracks well away from this region. Now, in Aries Season, this pattern is breaking down.
My friend, who spent all of January and part of February down in Florida, was sad to have missed the miniature polar vortex of January, and called me once because he wanted to keep in touch with people from home. He could scarcely believe it when, earlier on, I told him that grass was growing up green at the end of January, but I sent him pictures to prove it. His career track brought him to the Sunshine State for training, but he said he would’ve much rather been back home in Minnesota. James Howard Kunstler used to criticize the new type of urban development in neoliberalism that creates visually offensive concentrations of commercial properties – mostly franchise – in outskirts of cities and towns. According to my friend, such “Kunstlervilles” are the main form of development in Florida, and he found the experience bleak overall. However, there were some upsides to his time there, including some memorable contacts he forged during his time away. There’s usually some good to be had from journeys.
Speaking of which, we were unable so far to make one of our famous day trips, which we’ve been doing semi-regularly since one icy February morning in Aquarius Season in 2019. Last November it was canceled owing to a commitment that came up, and in February it had once again to be canceled owing to illness. No matter, it will happen one day; but the hiatus, along with the ongoing troubles in my own family, has meant that excitement has been rather lean around these parts of late. I have been relegated to doing as I have many times done before, mostly staying in and reading when I am not working, taking hikes in the neighborhood and the parks, and watching the procession of wild nature around me here in my redoubt in Western Wisconsin. There is no shortage of that and I will give a short elaboration of what I have seen around here of late, because one of the perennial topics of this blog is the natural world and how it provides a kind of eternal and archetypal counterpoint to the, in the grand scheme of things, insignificant happenings of our mortal and human affairs. Of course, wild nature is very precarious, all of its denizens always poised on the brink of disaster, but the pageant itself always goes onward.
Deer and turkeys made themselves scarce for a long time after the hunting season this year. They only came out in the dark of night. But now they are returning into the open with the coming of spring. The crows, always so independently motivated were regular visitors, as also were the ones who overwinter here – the chickadees and nuthatches and all the species of woodpeckers. We never had any pine siskins or redpolls this year, the conditions having been too mild for them to visit. Juncos however did appear whenever the weather was cold enough to warrant their appearance. I saw rather strange raven omens both here and during a visit with a friend in Minnesota back in February. Finches began to make a comeback some weeks ago, and now their song fills the forests, hundreds of them in the immediate area. In the next neighborhood over, there are now large collections of robins and grackles scavenging in the yards, just recently free of spring snows. At various points, I also saw cedar waxwings, a familiar but somewhat elusive small bird that travels in flocks around here. The bluebirds must not have fared far south this year, as late February saw their return.
Already the meadowlarks are singing in the nearby prairies, and though conditions still have a winter chill, the spring warming and rains cannot be long in coming, not in a year so singular as this one. The neighborhood is overrun with moles, and raccoons have been sighted for the first time since I moved here. Possums come to scrounge at night, and birds of prey of all kinds may be seen in the air. The ecosystem is healthy. The only creature that hasn’t yet put in an appearance – apart from the elusive red foxes that I know are around -- is the black bear, but I don’t doubt we may see one soon enough. At least on the natural front, there’s a feeling of “all is as it should be”. And this was no doubt helped by the extremely mild winter, as all the creatures around look unusually fat and healthy for this time of year. The squirrels around here are only the most obvious examples. In all, while living in the Western Suburbs of Minneapolis felt close enough to living in a wild forest, living here in the St. Croix Valley feels even more so. It wasn’t so long ago, a mere two decades perhaps, that these very neighborhoods were farms and pastures. The spirit of the wild isn’t yet fled from these parts.
Well, there is much more that could be said, no doubt, but I have to keep things within limits. However, to finish up I return briefly to the theme in the beginning. If this strange not-a-winter we have just had was a portent, then what if anything, does it portend? I am not sure, but I have a gravely uneasy feeling about all of it. The uneasy feeling, actually, has never really subsided from when I first felt it back around the time I moved in here. There are many already in esoteric circles who have noted the upcoming malefic conjunctions of the stars this month, so I won’t go into that here. But there is a very dangerous sense of the world order descending into chaos, and something new looming on the horizon. And as a man once said, chaos is a ladder, and I am not sure just what sorts of thing we can expect to climb out of it, but I know that the world we are facing in the near future is likely to look very little like the past we sometimes have found comfort in remembering.
The closest thing to it would be the winter of 2011-12, which also presaged a very wiltingly hot summer and dry conditions for the second year in a row. Looking back, I don’t think it would be unfair to say that the 2012 conditions seem as if they were a sinister portent as well. Many people in our circles, including the eminent John Michael Greer himself, have dismissed the Mayan Calendar Apocalypse of 2012 as a misunderstanding. I myself am no longer so sure. There has been a very strong impression of living in a cursed timeline ever since that time. The original meaning of Apocalypse is, after all, a revelation, the “taking off of the cover”, and not the abrupt end of all things. And no doubt, much has been revealed in the past dozen years or so, to the extent that I feel like I am living in a parallel dimension that has little in common with the way things were before. That feeling has only strengthened in recent years.
But back to this winter: We had very little snow, and a record number of days above 50 degrees fahrenheit. The whole winter seemed to be stuck in a pattern that would be normal for the time period between October and November. That is, it was a pattern typically observed much farther south in the USA, but as far as my reckoning goes, never once here. Consequently, there was little opportunity for the winter sports that usually draw so many people in from out of town. Farther north, I saw that they had some snowfall, as my contacts in the Brainerd Lakes area sent me pictures from time to time. Here, we had almost no such luck. There was about a tenday in January when the arctic frost descended and it felt almost like the winters of old in the Upper Midwest, after which time it rapidly reverted to the way it had been before. This was, we are told, because there was an extremely strong El Nino pattern in the Pacific, which kept both cold air and moisture on tracks well away from this region. Now, in Aries Season, this pattern is breaking down.
My friend, who spent all of January and part of February down in Florida, was sad to have missed the miniature polar vortex of January, and called me once because he wanted to keep in touch with people from home. He could scarcely believe it when, earlier on, I told him that grass was growing up green at the end of January, but I sent him pictures to prove it. His career track brought him to the Sunshine State for training, but he said he would’ve much rather been back home in Minnesota. James Howard Kunstler used to criticize the new type of urban development in neoliberalism that creates visually offensive concentrations of commercial properties – mostly franchise – in outskirts of cities and towns. According to my friend, such “Kunstlervilles” are the main form of development in Florida, and he found the experience bleak overall. However, there were some upsides to his time there, including some memorable contacts he forged during his time away. There’s usually some good to be had from journeys.
Speaking of which, we were unable so far to make one of our famous day trips, which we’ve been doing semi-regularly since one icy February morning in Aquarius Season in 2019. Last November it was canceled owing to a commitment that came up, and in February it had once again to be canceled owing to illness. No matter, it will happen one day; but the hiatus, along with the ongoing troubles in my own family, has meant that excitement has been rather lean around these parts of late. I have been relegated to doing as I have many times done before, mostly staying in and reading when I am not working, taking hikes in the neighborhood and the parks, and watching the procession of wild nature around me here in my redoubt in Western Wisconsin. There is no shortage of that and I will give a short elaboration of what I have seen around here of late, because one of the perennial topics of this blog is the natural world and how it provides a kind of eternal and archetypal counterpoint to the, in the grand scheme of things, insignificant happenings of our mortal and human affairs. Of course, wild nature is very precarious, all of its denizens always poised on the brink of disaster, but the pageant itself always goes onward.
Deer and turkeys made themselves scarce for a long time after the hunting season this year. They only came out in the dark of night. But now they are returning into the open with the coming of spring. The crows, always so independently motivated were regular visitors, as also were the ones who overwinter here – the chickadees and nuthatches and all the species of woodpeckers. We never had any pine siskins or redpolls this year, the conditions having been too mild for them to visit. Juncos however did appear whenever the weather was cold enough to warrant their appearance. I saw rather strange raven omens both here and during a visit with a friend in Minnesota back in February. Finches began to make a comeback some weeks ago, and now their song fills the forests, hundreds of them in the immediate area. In the next neighborhood over, there are now large collections of robins and grackles scavenging in the yards, just recently free of spring snows. At various points, I also saw cedar waxwings, a familiar but somewhat elusive small bird that travels in flocks around here. The bluebirds must not have fared far south this year, as late February saw their return.
Already the meadowlarks are singing in the nearby prairies, and though conditions still have a winter chill, the spring warming and rains cannot be long in coming, not in a year so singular as this one. The neighborhood is overrun with moles, and raccoons have been sighted for the first time since I moved here. Possums come to scrounge at night, and birds of prey of all kinds may be seen in the air. The ecosystem is healthy. The only creature that hasn’t yet put in an appearance – apart from the elusive red foxes that I know are around -- is the black bear, but I don’t doubt we may see one soon enough. At least on the natural front, there’s a feeling of “all is as it should be”. And this was no doubt helped by the extremely mild winter, as all the creatures around look unusually fat and healthy for this time of year. The squirrels around here are only the most obvious examples. In all, while living in the Western Suburbs of Minneapolis felt close enough to living in a wild forest, living here in the St. Croix Valley feels even more so. It wasn’t so long ago, a mere two decades perhaps, that these very neighborhoods were farms and pastures. The spirit of the wild isn’t yet fled from these parts.
Well, there is much more that could be said, no doubt, but I have to keep things within limits. However, to finish up I return briefly to the theme in the beginning. If this strange not-a-winter we have just had was a portent, then what if anything, does it portend? I am not sure, but I have a gravely uneasy feeling about all of it. The uneasy feeling, actually, has never really subsided from when I first felt it back around the time I moved in here. There are many already in esoteric circles who have noted the upcoming malefic conjunctions of the stars this month, so I won’t go into that here. But there is a very dangerous sense of the world order descending into chaos, and something new looming on the horizon. And as a man once said, chaos is a ladder, and I am not sure just what sorts of thing we can expect to climb out of it, but I know that the world we are facing in the near future is likely to look very little like the past we sometimes have found comfort in remembering.
