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The Varied God

~ On the Human Experience of the Seasons.

The Varied God

Monthly Archives: February 2012

Of Frost and Frozen Milk

22 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by Tom Cooper in climate, Little Ice Age, Pieter Bruegel, Pilgrims, Seasons, Uncategorized, William Shakespeare, Winter

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London in Winter

I was out scraping a light frost off my windshield yesterday, and I was once again thinking about what a mild winter we’ve had. Of course it’s all anyone is talking about these days, no snow, no freezing temperatures, crocus blooming and daffodils already poking up through the ground here in mid-February. I was wearing a wool blazer, it’s all I needed, and it occurred to me that I have hardly worn a coat this winter.

It called to mind something I read recently about English winters. It wasn’t until I started studying the seasons regularly that I learned that winter here in the United States and what passes for winter over in the UK are two different animals. Temperatures rarely drop below freezing in Great Britain, unlike the United States, where entire months in some parts of the country will hover well under 32 degrees. When the first English colonists settled here, that group we have come to know with proprietary naivete as The Pilgrims, they were shocked at how cold it was. Massachusetts is well south of the British Isles; shouldn’t it be, if anything, a little warmer? Ah, but climate is more complicated than that, and the flow of Atlantic Ocean currents made all the difference. Many Pilgrims nearly froze to death in those first few winters.

It kind of makes you wonder about all the British poetry that talks about freezing winters. There’s Shakespeare’s famous poem Winter:

When icicles hang by the wall,
and Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
and Tom bears logs into the hall,
and milk comes frozen home in pail . . .
 

Sounds terribly, bitter cold, but remember, it rarely gets below freezing there. Does that milk come frozen out of cow? But again, we have to consider that climate is more complicated than that.

From about 1550 to 1850, Northern Europe experienced something known as The Little Ice Age. It wasn’t really an ice age; there wasn’t significant expansion of glaciers or anything like that. But average temperatures during these few centuries ran unaccountably colder than normal. During these years, the Thames River froze over; there was even a Thames Frost Fair, featuring skating and sledding and all manner of activities on the ice. In the winter of 1683-84 the Thames remained frozen for two months. Rivers in the Netherlands experienced similar freezing, and the economies of whole villages in the Swiss Alps collapsed due to the unaccustomed cold.

So you may wonder, why then did the cold of Massachusetts take The Pilgrims so by surprise? After all, the Mayflower made land in 1620, well within the Little Ice Age. The answer is that North America experienced the effects of the Little Ice Age as well, and was also that much colder. In fact, if you think about it, much of the early history of our nation occurred in times that were colder than we now know. It gives you more respect for the pioneering achievements of our forebears to know that, among all the challenges they faced, winter was that much worse. Knowing more about historical climates can add a whole new dimension to our understanding of history.

This also explains much about a seeming preoccupation with frigid winters among British writers. When Shakespeare intimates that he saw milk coming home frozen, there’s no need to excuse it as poetic license. To have ‘. . . the winter of our discontent made glorious by this sun of York,’ the opening lines of his Richard III, was likely a more striking image in its time. Robert Burns wrote Winter: A Dirge in 1781, in which ‘the stormy North sends driving forth/the blinding sleet and snaw.’ Keats had his Drear-nighted December and Coleridge his Frost at Midnight. And all of those poor urchins inhabiting the streets of Charles Dickens’s London were not just shivering in their rags–they were freezing. Knowledge of the climate during these years gives us a new perspective on these works.

These day, I wouldn’t mind trading American winter for English winter, regardless of how its poets have reviled it. While I have enjoyed this mild winter, I know it’s leading into a hot, humid summer–another thing they don’t know much about in jolly old England.

Dressing for the Season

08 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by Tom Cooper in Uncategorized

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People of my generation have a lot of guilt about the environment, because we know that we and the several generations before us have done it some irreparable damage. In considering action to change our course, the phrase we use most, in one form or another, is ‘saving the environment for our children.’ Let’s recycle and reuse. Waste less. Buy and encourage the development of hybrid and electric cars and other green technologies.

But here’s an ugly truth. We can save the environment for our kids, but once they’ve got it, all bets are off. Nobody is more wasteful than an American adolescent. In sheer oceans of fresh water, mixed with industrial quantities of soap, shampoo and conditioner and washed down the shower drain, one adolescent is equal to ten or twelve careful adults. All food is suspicious (disgusting, weird) that does not come encased in cellophane, cardboard or plastic; none of this gets recycled, and much of it ends up on roadsides. All beverages must come in glass, aluminum or plastic bottles, all of which also end up in landfills and highway culverts. If asked to leave the house without five or six-hundred dollars’ worth of electronic gadgetry in hand, the average American teen is ready to report this abuse to the Division of Family Services; and it goes without saying that any piece of this equipment that breaks or malfunctions is immediately tossed out and the pleading for a replacement commences before its carcass has cooled. Repairs are pretty much unheard of. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that many are tossed out because the batteries died.

But the one practice that signifies the American adolescent’s rabid wastefulness more than any other is the immovable refusal to dress for the season. Actually they dress for one season, summer; forget any other. We’ve all seen this, I’m sure. A cold January day, frost on the ground, temperatures hovering in the mid-teens with little promise of warming throughout the day, and there at the bus stop stand three kids in shorts and T-shirts, pretending like they’re not shivering: trying to look cool instead of cold. Drive through the parking lot of any middle or high school just as classes are being dismissed, or visit any mall thronged with teens: it little matters if there are nine inches of snow on the ground, you will find neither coat, hat nor gloves on anyone.

Okay, granted, this is stupid. Why do I think it is also wasteful? Because it signifies that these young people fully expect to be moving from one blast-heated environment to another. The temperature at home, on the bus, in school, in the stores at the mall, indeed everywhere they go will be balmy and comfortable–and someone else is paying the bill. Why should I dress warmly?

Worse than this, you know there are always a number of adults who think they can preserve a portion of their own youth by emulating the style and habits of actual young people; so one rarely visits the grocery store or gas station in winter without seeing some grown man standing there in his shorts and T-shirt like an idiot. It’s that sense of self-entitlement. I’ll dress this way if I so choose; and when I’m home, I’ll crank the heat way up to simulate the season I’m dressed for. After all, I can afford it!

Anthony Smith, the British author who wrote The Seasons, a scientific study of the affects of the seasons on life on Earth, has noted that Americans have a funny habit of heating their winter homes to temperatures much warmer than they would tolerate in summer, and cooling their summer homes much cooler than they can stand in winter. And while we may see this irony and think that we should do something about it, our kids never will. Why do we even have heat if you’re not going to turn it up to a decent temperature? Why don’t you put on a sweater? Well, sweaters, it turns out, are gay. Coats are ugly and puffy . . . also gay.

Warm clothing was one of our first adaptations to cold weather. Thousands of years ago Cro-magnons–fully modern humans–triumphed over Neanderthals in the cold river valleys of Ice Age Europe. It’s not certain whether they did anything to drive out Neanderthals, anything that quickened their extinction. Neanderthals wrapped themselves in animal skins to keep warm; Cro-magnons knew how to make needles of bone or antler and sew their clothing, a much more effective adaptation in glacial times. They thrived because, among other things, they were smart enough to dress warmly. Are we traveling backwards?

I hate to get back to the chestnut of personal responsibility, but I think that’s what this is about, on a strangely intimate level. Dressing for the season is a matter of personal responsibility–I will take steps to keep myself warm. Young people (and their older imitators) who don’t, or won’t take those steps expect that the room will keep them warm, whatever space they’re in will keep them warm. It’s a variation on the world owes me a living, plain and simple. I can understand this kind of irresponsible behavior in children who have yet to learn better: it’s inexcusable in adults, or in any parent who’s not stopping the kid at the door and shouting ‘Put on a coat, ya nudnik!’

The Future

02 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Tom Cooper in Aging, Autumn, Future, Science Fiction, Space Travel, Spring, Uncategorized

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My birthday is coming in another month, which again reminds me that I am aging. Can’t seem to help it. It makes me wonder if I am in the great and dreadful metaphorical time, the Autumn of My Life. I also think about the future, how much of it is left for me, and how I’ve always had a bad relationship with the concept.

A while back this Scottish indie band with the great name We Were Promised Jetpacks came through town. I’ve read the Wikipedia article about them, checked the band’s Website, there’s no indication about the derivation or meaning of the name; so I am free to gloss it anyhow I choose.

I remember when I was a kid, growing up in the 1960s. This was a time of great progress in space, the time when Americans, fueled by post-war prosperity and Cold War paranoia, reached the moon. Back then, when we thought about the future, it was largely a Science Fiction and Fantasy future; there were colonies on the Moon, spaceships full of pioneers in suspended animation heading for distant galaxies; strangers landed in our strange land and spoke strange words, from ‘Gort klaatu barada nikto’ to ‘Grok.’ Our future was all about being selected by the Captain to beam down to the unknown planet ruled by an intelligent but endangered race, whose females were unaccountably beautiful and pliant and dressed in tight, shiny costumes, distinguishable from human actresses only by their oddly arched eyebrows or their ability to read minds. Our weapons would be lasers and rays, small enough to palm and point at threatening beings almost casually: if we chose we could only stun them, which meant to make them fall down painlessly and silently while we sorted things out with their leaders and made time with their females.

In short, we were promised jetpacks. I was never big on this stuff. My older brother was a huge fan of science fiction, moving from Tom Swift to Asimov to NASA with breathless fascination, boring me with details of the technologies yet to come, the worlds that needed exploring. But it’s nothing like what we got. Instead we got the Internet, we got cell phones, we got apps. Instead of celestial explorers, we have a race of people who are afraid to leave the house without a GPS or a soothing voice on their telephone telling them how to reach the Starbuck’s three blocks down the road. Instead of gazing skyward and dreaming of the vast spaces and the places we may someday reach, we spend our time staring at incessant messages on a two-inch screen, thumbing away at tiny keypads in an endless drive to send any thought worth receiving to anyone who cares. And this is our progress, we use these things to enrich our lives.

I don’t know about what kids these days imagine the future will be like. Newt Gingrich makes a campaign speech about that Moon colony, and Mitt Romney lambastes him for it and urges voters to send Newt to the Moon. Global warming is probably the most important and persistent threat to our future, but getting most Americans to believe it is harder than getting them to believe in The Big Bang. We don’t want a scientific future, we want a technology future. Technology doesn’t threaten our bedrock beliefs, and it gives us easier ways to talk to friends, quicker access to news about Angelina Jolie, more ways to entertain ourselves and to run up huge credit card debts in the process.

I’ve always been a fan of Earth. I think there’s a lot of it left to explore. I don’t want a gleaming, imaginary future, I want a happy present, here on the planet. As I age, I don’t think anything is served by focusing on things that might happen years down the line, especially since the things that really do happen are just huge disappointments. This is why I think so much about the seasons. For instance, we’ve been having a strangely warm winter. I don’t really miss the snow and ice, but in another five or six weeks, when spring sets in, will I feel I’ve been deprived of the charms of a real Midwestern winter? There is a rhythm in our cycles of seasons that comforts me and makes me appreciate today as today. Living this way I don’t feel like I age so much as I move along in the continuum of time, and anticipating a warm springtime is about as far in the future as I care to imagine.

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