Fadeout

The pleasures of plenty are easy to appreciate: the roast pork, the apple pie a-la-mode, the symphony blazing forte, the lambent flower beds of June, the autumn leaves at their peak. But now we are moving into the fadeout of the year. The trees have dropped their "Joseph's coat" to trample underfoot and now stand stark in early twilight.

To make it through the long lean times of the North Country unshattered, it is necessary to learn the pleasures of paucity. If not the symphony, the lone flute. If not the pie, the first sip of hot green tea. If not the moan, the sigh. The last leaf to fall is the most precious.

The slim beech lets go
every leaf but this one.
What gold is in it?

Dodo

I've been thinking a lot about Darwin, leading up to the bicentennial of his birth next week. Though I was nominated for several Darwin Awards in my youth, I did in fact live to breed, and have now passed into that portion of the population largely irrelevant to the survival of the species. Anyone who has gone through a few North Country winters knows that humans did not evolve here, but in some more blessed clime. Had we always needed to fight the ice along with all the toothier types around us, human culture would now consist of nothing but flapping our furry arms for warmth and grunting. It's a measure of our ancestors' desperation that they would think to take on a snarling mountain of fur with nothing but a stone knife, just so they could cut off its skin and climb inside to get warm. Been there.

Last night I was watching a documentary on hip-hop in Cuba. Now that's a climate I could evolve in. Palms, sand, houses painted mango and lime and the color of the sea. Cool breezes, hot music and a 100% fleece-free wardrobe. Instead I look out onto this glaring moonscape of snow. What a dodo.

Coldsmobile

It's been a while since we've been this deep in the deep freeze. For the first time in years I had that quintessential North Country winter experience--the dead battery. Back when none of my motor vehicles cost more than $1000, keeping the wheels working was a full-time job. After refilling the stove in the morning, I would shake out the overnight coals and place them under the oil pan of whatever wreck I was pushing at the time, to warm up the sludge enough that the motor would turn over. This technique is not recommended for vehicles with oil or gas leaks; they tend to warm up a little too enthusiastically.

Then there's the Olympic Torch Relay Technique. Try any one of four or five vehicles, then use the one that goes to jump the next. Or there's the Pulp Fiction Technique--injecting starting ether directly into the heart of the cast-iron block. This can sometimes result in backfire, known as the Wile E. Coyote Variation. On mornings as cold as this, it was sometimes necessary to employ each of these methods in turn.

If none of them worked, the exercise at least got me warmed up for the hitchhike into town. (My boss would warm me up after that.) I would have invested in a better car, if I hadn't been canned for missing so many winter morning shifts trying to start my crummy car. Catch-22.

Winter on the wall

It's hard to say what makes a great photo. If it can hang on your bedroom wall for years without vanishing into the wallpaper, and without becoming an annoyance, that's a clue. The one on my wall is a close-up of a single pine spray, spiky below, but soft on top with new snow.

I've seen similar, but this has nothing but the essence--sprig, snow, nothing else. Deepest green, purest white. The focus is sharp, the way one can see the sharp edge of distant mountains though the clear lens of icy air. It looks cold, without making me feel cold--perhaps because I usually contemplate it from under the comforter, while sipping morning coffee. I can smell the clean pine scent above the springwater tang of winter wind, but I don't need to burden myself with a parka or clown-walk back toward the river on snowshoes.

And that's a blessing for one whose ageing bones prefer to have a good thaw shovel the walk, and likes best to watch the whipping wind through a double-glazed window. Looks picture perfect. Think I'll get some more coffee.

Hypernation

Animal wisdom tells us that this is the time of year to lay low, to snooze--round the clock if possible. The thermometer is regularly below zero, the once-mellow meadows resemble the surface of the moon. Frogs are frozen freaking solid within the stony mud. But human contrariness insists that this is the time to get everything done, despite the brevity of bleak winter days. A dozen different projects are ramping up to speed all around the station. Fortieth anniversary events, concert plans, next month's member drive, the website redesign, conferences and collaborations, construction work. It never stops.

It all makes me, I confess, a little sleepy. But it must be the same impulse that got Cro-Magnon man through the last Ice Age: Want to stay warm?--Keep running. Just one more day on the trail and it's mammoth blubber for everybody! Unfortunately, it always seems to be the trail today, and the blubber tomorrow. And so it will go until the lilacs bloom. Until then, keep moving, and drink lots of hot chocolate.

Speak of the devil

I was starting to feel a little nostalgic about disaster, listening to the retrospective coverage of Ice Storm '98--right up until everything started to fall apart again. The massive thaw of the last week presented its bill with hurricane force winds. The campus went dark, the network and phones went dead. The website was kerflooey (a technical term). The transmitter was running on generator. Power surges melted my computer. It was a classic case of "speak of the devil."

Fortunately Lucifer didn't hang around quite as long this time. And there were some lessons learned. When the land lines went down, the cell phones came out. When the campus lost power, parts of the network stayed up on generators, as did our transmitter shack. There were workarounds for almost everything, from getting audio to the station to getting cancellations and closings out to the community--laborious maybe, suboptimal, but workable. Without the example of 10 years ago we would have been down to tin cans and a string.

So thanks for sending in your recollections of Ice Storm '98. But maybe in the future, we should just remember in our hearts. Not that I'm superstitious.

Ready or not

It's been ten years since the Ice Storm (always capitalized) administered its mighty dope-slap to the North Country. If you can remember what healthy woods are supposed to look like, you can still make out the edges of the devastation when entering or leaving the region. It'll be another decade before all the debris has mulched back into duff. But good intentions decompose more quickly. Looking around the house now I see that we still have no heat source that doesn't require electricity, and that the battery stash has long been looted of anything containing an erg of oomph. The candles looked quite romantic burning down to nubs on the dinner table, and the canned goods supply is down to one portion of cream of asparagus soup and some ripe olives.

It may just be that constant vigilance is an oxymoron. Nervous fatigue sets in. How long can you look into every shoe and never find a bomb? How long before we rebuild on the floodplain or the coastline or the flank of the volcano? And if, somehow, we stayed prepared for disaster, would it be for the next one, or for the last one? I can remember when they decommissioned the public fallout shelters and disposed of all the stock. Half the North Country stored old baby clothes and sundry in sturdy brown barrels with a yellow Civil Defense logo on the side. Every science classroom was stocked with an almost-new Geiger counter. And I bet it's not that hard now to find a good price on a used power generator: "1998 Honda 2 KW, low hours, runs like new."

Share your received wisdom (if you have received any) from the Ice Storm of '98. Drop us a line at radio@ncpr.org.

Tough sledding

Radio Bob is on arctic safari today, hauling radio gear by snow machine up through the ice fields on Blue Mountain. If his mission to replace our damaged antenna is a success, we will be able to stop apologizing to everyone in the central and southern Adirondacks, who have had the insult of no radio added to the injury of a late spring storm. The Blue Mountain facility is a central distribution point for us, feeding our signal on to other transmitters in North Creek, Lake George, Glens Falls, Newcomb and Speculator. We hope to have good news soon. Thanks to everyone for their patience.

This has been a tough week for public broadcasting infrastructure in the North Country. Mountain Lake PBS suffered the collapse of its 400-foot broadcast tower during bad weather on Lyon Mountain. On the other hand, it looks like cell-phone service will soon be extended onto the currently uncovered stretches of the Northway, with the just-announced agreement between the Spitzer administration and Verizon.

It pays to be humble before the power of the weather, though as it turns out, the weather will humble us whether we agree or not. But this just in—the good news I hinted at above--Radio Bob reports the fix is done, and all the transmitters are on. Weather permitting, of course.

Disconnect

David just walked down the hall to announce, “the internet’s down—and it’s snowing.” Another practically perfect day in “the cruelest month.” There are still things I could do: whittle a banana, whittle a monkey to hold the banana, whittle a tree to hold the monkey. But as web manager, I’ve got nothing to manage—the Maytag repairman of cyberspace. I know that NCPR.org is still out there, but it’s like the train that runs by Folsom Prison, out of reach beyond the razor-wire of the University firewall. I can write these words, but it’s a message in a bottle—no one will ever see them until they have been mooted by the industrious geeks of IT. I could catch up with some old friends, but my contact list has nothing but email addresses. I could continue my research for tonight’s poetry show, but there’s nothing in my notes but website URLs. There’s a poem by a friend--on my website, there are things I could make reference to—in my blog. There are sound clips I could use—in the online archive. Twice now the connection has come back on, only to swoon again in less than a minute: “No! Wait!”—then nothing but my forlorn claw marks in the dust on the screen. How could something that didn’t even exist a little while ago become the center of the universe? Shall I burn incense? Try the Tinkerbell technique? I look out at the snow, but it gives me no information.

No picnic

Even with a late start, such as this winter got, by February the cold gets old. The brutality of northern February drives up depression rates, drinking, random acts of violence, self-slaughter. Clearly, a preternatural blowout holiday is called for. But the selection available to us is frankly depressing. Groundhog Day? Unpromising. We wish there were only six weeks left. There’s Lincoln’s birthday and Washington’s birthday, both now rolled together into something called Presidents Day, but where’s the party in that? Everyone has at least one president they wouldn’t celebrate at gunpoint; some have many. Discussing one’s views on the topic, particularly over strong drink, is not recommended. And then there’s Valentine’s Day, which is basically a bummer for anyone not deranged by the throes of new-found passion.

China and Tibet have the good sense to postpone their New Year into February. Dragons and fireworks—now there is something to work with. And Ottawa, on seeing nothing taller than a fencepost between them and the North Pole, wisely invented Winterlude. If you’re going to be hanging around outside chipping ice, you might as well eat some deep-fried dough. But if we’re going to borrow a celebration from foreign parts, I vote to borrow from the Buddhists. On their calendar, today is Nirvana Day. The possibilities are breathtaking.

Loss of tone

It is common custom in the North Country, when meeting folks from other northern climes, to have a--shall we say--writing-your-name-in-the-snow contest about who has it the worst. But this run of warm Decembers is eroding our credibility. What happened to those regular autumn blizzards that contributed so much to our imagined moral fiber? Why are the geese still hanging around? Winter is supposed to be endless and unendurable, brutal to the point of weeping. That's why we feel so deserving of our practice sessions in heaven, packing up head colds and rheumatism to flaunt cadaverous winter paunches on the beaches of the southlands. If winter is merely miserable, then this snowbirding is merely self-indulgent. If we could just have a few weeks where the temperature never rises above zero, and you need a purple tennis ball on the aerial to find your car, that would be all it would take to get us back into smug shape. "Ha--you call that winter? Let me tell you about winter..."

In the forecast

It may be 60 here today, but it's 17 in Minnesota, heading east, and you know what that means. It means you can finally relax. All those fall chores that have been piling up and hanging over your head—you've put them off just long enough. Now you don't have to sweat about the unraked leaves, the unpicked rock scattered around the bare new leach field, the last few months of blow-down. Touching up the house trim, edging the walk, digging under the squalor left in the flower beds—Fahgedabowdit! Snow hides all sins. Focus instead on the hot chocolate and the knit cozy on the sofa. Trade in the rabbit food for pasta and potatoes. Hunker down. Your spring may be insanely busy, but it probably would have been anyway. And besides—it's months from now. Wonder what's new on the Sci-Fi Channel?