Pooh-poohing the winter’s inconveniences

EAST MONTPELIER – Well, it’s happened. We could feel it coming on for a few weeks: long shadows across the forest paths by four o’clock, nippy air flooding in through the door when I let Kiki out early, fog in the river valleys, the night light in the hall turning on earlier every couple of days, and the realization during the middle hours of the night that I need to get up and put on a sweatshirt, turn up the thermostat or breathe under the covers for a few minutes to warm things up in there. A single fleece blanket does the job most nights, but the bedspread in the closet will be out shortly.

Because I will not turn up the thermostat until the first of November. Or until company comes; then I might, in the interest of polite conversation, grumpily inch it into life. It’s immoral and unrighteous to be comfortable all the time, you know. Besides, it costs money. I can’t say I miss the days when I heated my upstairs apartment with a gallon of kerosene a day in the living room space heater, and the bathroom was cold enough that the mist from the tub froze on the single-glazed window. Without knowing it, I was working on my sisu.

Sisu is originally a Finnish virtue. You can look it up. Naturally, it’s popular in Scandinavia and northern Russia, where the cold and darkness dominate a large part of the year. It’s also popular, coincidentally, in northern New England, where pooh-poohing the winter’s inconveniences is a regional sport.

I was due for breakfast Sunday morning in Lebanon. The day broke cold, sunny and frosty. Only a churl would make the hour’s drive down and back in a heated closed car. I decided to take the roadster, with the top down, of course. So I clad Kiki in her orange hunting vest, donned two layers of fleece myself, with a wool cap (what they call in Ireland a Great Gatsby cap) and fleece gloves, and off we went. The dashboard heater vents blasted us with warm air, and the outdoors with 37 degrees. With the windows up, it wasn’t all that bad, but the wind kept us doing isometrics for body heat, and I sang lustily Stan Rogers’ ballad with the refrain, “Thirty-eight miles up the Canol Road, in the Salmon Range at 48 below.” Kiki did not seem to find the song comforting. We had a lovely breakfast and good company, and returned home in the same duds, but much more comfortably. The roadster’s 28 years old now, so I don’t ask her to do what she no doubt used to do; I just set the cruise control on 70 (3200 rpm), sit back, and let the tourists’ SUVs roar by. The Vermont mountains in the morning sun in autumn are just lovely.

But the subject was cold and darkness, wasn’t it? If you read the novel “The Last Vikings,” describing the harrowing turn-of-the-twentieth-century tradition of Norwegian cod fishermen in sailing smacks on the Arctic Circle in the Norwegian Sea at Christmastime, you get a feel for operating in almost unremitting cold, storms and darkness with no alternatives. But it was income-necessary to augment whatever money their farms brought in during the summer. And it made extreme hardship seem like everyday discomfort, the source of the reticence of the northern soul.

Who of us scratching for a living back in the ’50s could forget loosening, in the dark with freezing fingers and an ice-cold wrench, his car’s battery terminals so he could carry the precious source of power indoors for the night? Or kneeling in the snow to put on the tire chains? I had a deer carcass hanging in my woodshed all winter. I remember my wife saying, “Go saw off enough hind quarter for the two of us tonight.” Never forget what the good old days of winter were like for millions of us.

Most of us (except for the folks in tents down behind our church) can nowadays romanticize the deepening cold and darkness of the next two months.

Robert Frost, as usual, describes best the realities of life here in late fall. I don’t have any idea how often during the aftermath of leaf-peeping season, these words have come to me: “Not yesterday I learned to know the love of bare November days before the coming of the snow.” They usually come to me during an afternoon walk with Kiki, especially after Halloween when the clocks fall back and we have to be out of the woods by four-thirty.

“After Apple-Picking” says it best: the rush of work to get everything sorted and in the barn before winter; the drudgery of thousands of apples to be cared for one by one; the impending darkness; the sleepiness induced and deepened by a sense of the year’s dark ending, and the return of life not yet suggested by lengthening days.

Willem Lange

Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.