The weather is far too warm.
Oh, yes, the forecast says that we can expect snow beginning overnight tomorrow night — a dusting. But it should not be reaching the mid-forties in early January here.
The image above, the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation, shows a more usual midwinter here. Wings shot it on film somewhere between January third and January fifth of 2013, exactly a decade ago, in the bitterly cold days following a Christmas-to-New-Year’s snowstorm that dropped snow measured not in inches, but in feet — between two and three feet, before it was done. He captured this image in the mid-morning hours, when the temperature was something like minus-ten. The mercury remained stubbornly below zero for the whole of that day, and several of the days on either side of it.
That is what “normal” is supposed to look like in January here.
The photo was, in fact, one of a series of shots he took mere moments apart, all from roughly the same vantage point. It was a capturing of the cold in primary shades: white, gold, and willow red beneath those deep midwinter blues.
Here, for us, any expression of the blues is one solely of color; there’s nothing remotely depressing about winter, unless you’re referring to our increasing lack thereof courtesy of a climate in mid-collapse. Give us a binary choice between hot weather and cold, and we’ll choose the latter; offer us the same sort of options for sun or snow, and we’ll take the snow every time. It’s partly our own personal proclivities, although they have — oddly, apparently, to most people — nothing to do with winter sports or activities. Wings was born in midsummer, I in the middle of fall, but we are both children of the storm, and we both find ourselves energized, our world enlivened, by wild weather.
But it’s more than that, especially in a place such as this.
The outside world has no trouble understanding the notion that this land needs rain; it is, after all, classified as alpine desert, and most folks focus on the “desert” part of that descriptor without even noticing, never mind internalizing, what the “alpine” part of it means. Here, we live somewhere in the neighborhood of eight thousand feet above sea level, and for us, that’s above at least a couple of local snow lines, even though there are many more than that above us. Historically, it has meant the great gift of four discrete season and plenty of lush green in the warmer months, fueled partly by the summer monsoon season but even more by the absorption of many feet of winter snow over some six months or more of the year.
Winter here is what keeps this land alive, and those deep midwinter blues play a significant part in it.
How? It’s in the patterns, the rhythms, and what they mean for the land. Our usual pattern here, with regard to a major snowstorm, is a few days of heavy precipitation, ultimately measured anywhere from one to three feet in accumulation before it’s done. The day the storm ends is accompanied by a rising wind, enough to blow the clouds apart and send them racing over the ridgeline to reform and gather force before blasting the plains to the east. Meanwhile, they deliver a precipitous drop in temperature here, or as we tend to refer to it, plunging us in the deep freeze again. That historically involves anyway from three days to a week or more of sub-zero lows, and sometimes sub-zero highs, as well, as was the case ten years ago.
And as miserable as that sort of cold can be if we’re forced to be out in it, to the land here, it is a gift.
I know most folks will find that hard to believe, but it’s true: Freezing three feet of snow into a solid, land-blanketing block of ice is actually good for the earth.
In an alpine desert, monsoonal rains are absolutely essential to the land’s survival, but they are nowhere near enough. More, much of their benefit is lost, especially now, in a twelve-hundred-year drought, when aridification has rendered so much of the soil unable to receive the storms’ gift. But snow, frozen solid . . . it melts slowly, a little at a time, just enough to soften the cold hard ground, allowing it to absorb the whole of the thaw.
And so these impossibly clear, cold days of abundant sun and the most intense and brilliant blue sky you’ve ever seen serve a purpose far beyond their clarity and chill.
Or at least they used to do so. We have not had many of them in the last half-decade or so. If the long-range forecast holds, neither the dusting of the next two days nor the small snow showers to follow in the weeks to come will bring us such weather. But we know what this season is capable of bringing; we have the recorded images, and they are locked in memory, too. And as long as we have the means to recall them, there is hope: for the return of those deep midwinter blues.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
