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The Varied God

~ On the Human Experience of the Seasons.

The Varied God

Category Archives: Ice Age

Lessons of the Seasons

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by Tom Cooper in Autumn, College, Education, Fall, History, Horses, Ice Age, Nature, Seasons, Spring, St. Louis, Summer, Weather, Winter

≈ 2 Comments

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Education, History, Horses, Seasons, Weather

My daughter hates living in the St. Louis area. It’s about the weather. Last week and up to two days ago, we had temperatures in the low seventies, even light jackets were barely required for comfort; today we will be lucky to see 32 degrees, there is a sharp wind and a threat of snow. It has been seesawing like this all winter long.

What my daughter says, echoing what you hear a lot of people say, is that she’d rather it just stay cold: at least that way you get used to it, you accept that you put on coat, hat and gloves before venturing out. It is winter, after all. Of course I believe most people are happy for the few days of warmth in the midst of the season. You get to turn off the heat for a day, wash the car, do a few outdoor chores without freezing your buns off. It’s just a drag when the cold returns so soon, and so completely.

My daughter’s problem is that she works outside, tending to the horses at a boarding stable. It’s always been a strange phenomenon to me, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours around stables and it seems that no matter how cold it is outside, it’s five degrees colder in the stable. It is her choice to be doing this work, and her choice to be doing it full time rather than attending college. She decided at the beginning of the fall semester that college was not part of the plan for her future, which includes riding in competitions on the A circuit (whatever that is), and owning her own top-ranked stable. How she will afford the investment in a top-ranked stable is a question she has perhaps not fully dealt with.

My wife was–and is still–distraught at our daughter’s plans, at her refusal to enter college. She was a straight A, honor roll, accelerated class student who finished high school in three years. A bright academic future clearly awaited her. But a man I know, an academic adviser of considerable experience, once told me that there is nothing more difficult than keeping a really bright student in school. I see this now, and I am willing to work within the parameters of reality, no matter how much it interferes with our plans.

There are many lessons to be learned that do not originate in the classroom. Working in a horse stable, shoveling manure and hauling hay bales and coaxing aged farm equipment to fire up on frigid mornings, will surely teach one in short order whether or not this is the best kind of life; or whether something more in keeping with your academic potential might clear a better path to the future. I understand the role of the seasons in this lesson.

Back in the glorious autumn, with moderate to cool temperatures and the beauty of fall trees all about, my daughter came home each evening full of spirit, jabbering endlessly about which horse owner did this, and which rider did that, and all the things she was learning from various seasoned horse people. Now, as winter grinds into its weary depths, she only complains. She is being taken advantage of by the stable managers, who are supposed to pitch in with the work, but increasingly let her do more and more of it. The horse owners are stupid and negligent. Nobody knows what they’re doing.

A long time ago, I tended a large vegetable garden with a good friend of mine and his father. One July afternoon, with temperatures hovering in the nineties and humidity near 100%, my friend’s father paused over a row he was weeding, and remarked that ‘the hoe doesn’t fit your hand in July like it does in April.’ Indeed. An activity that seems so gladsome and salubrious in the spring is only tiring in late summer. And an activity that seems to be teaching you all about equestrianism and stable management in autumn turns out to be only a rip-off in the cold, cold weeks of winter.

My daughter has begun to talk about signing up for classes, perhaps as early as this summer, just to get some general education requirements out of the way while she decides what she really wants to do. It may be horticulture. It may be architecture. I don’t care. I just want her to be happy. But I also know that this plan needs to be well along before the weather begins to break.  I have been around stables in the spring, when the hay is all fragrant, and the sunlight filters through the stalls, and the horses stamp and chuff, eager to be at pasture. It’s the sort of place and time that makes anyone think about quitting a desk job and going to work on the farm.

In anthropology and history, there is a debate about environmental determinism. This is the idea that humans living in more adverse environments, such as Ice Age Europe, advanced more quickly because climatic pressures necessitated the creation of technologies and methods for survival, like building warm shelters, sewing clothes, and drying and smoking meat to store against winter’s scarcity. This idea was long considered Eurocentric, if not downright racist, supporting an old fashioned view of history as largely the accomplishment of Western Civilization. But it has begun to reemerge, as researchers revisit the common sense of its basic tenets, and as it comes to be applied to areas aside from Ice Age Europe, such as China and the Andes Mountains.

I think you can call it what you like, I believe that climate and the seasons have always taught humans many lessons. Whether it’s culture writ large, or the things that one young woman needs to understand about life in general, they are still teaching us every day.

So Hush Little Baby, Don’t You Cry

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by Tom Cooper in 4th of July, Autumn, climate, Drought, DuBose Heyward, Fall, George Gershwin, Ice Age, Ira Gershwin, Meteorology, Mythology, Porgy & Bess, Seasons, Spring, Summer, The Byrds, Weather, Winter

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4th of July, Climate, Drought, George and Ira Gershwin, Summer

The scene is the annual 4th of July Celebration, coming to you live from the National Mall in Washington DC, or from Downtown St. Louis, or Chicago, or Los Angeles–it hardly matters where. The singer is introduced, and she takes the stage. She is white, or black, she is young, or old, she is a seasoned Broadway star, an acclaimed coloratura soprano, a newly-minted pop star–again, it hardly matters. She picks up the microphone, seems to grow misty; the orchestra strikes a somber A-minor chord, the singer draws a breath and sings:

Suuuuuummertiiiime . . . and the livin’ is easy . . .

Yes, again. Just like the singer at this event last year, and the year before, and the year before. As if there is only one song in the entire God-forsaken Great American Songbook with the word ‘summer’ in it. Oh sure, it’s a pretty song: it’s Gershwin, after all, music by George, lyrics by Ira, with supplemental lyrics by Dubose Heyward. That may explain why the lyrics to many of the songs in Porgy & Bess, the opera the song comes from, rise above the usual too-clever-by-half smarminess that characterizes so much of Ira Gershwin’s output. I can only imagine if Ira had written the words by himself. We’d get something more like:

It’s summer in this clime, and though I’m in my prime, I believe that I’m
hearing someone cry . . .

Summertime is a nice song, but couldn’t we just once in a while sing something different? I think singers perform it out of laziness; they want something classic and appropriate, and most human beings have heard this song often enough that they could sing it in their sleep. It’s like singing Amazing Grace at funerals: why bother learning a new hymn? I already know this one.

Yeah, I’ve been in a bad mood for much of this summer, and so have a lot of people around me. It has been a horrendously hot and rainless season. We will all be happy to see it gone. But here’s the thing: it’s still August.

I’ve been browsing other blogs related to nature and to the seasons. I find one person after another rhapsodizing about the coming autumn, about sitting by the fire, about autumn leaves, about donning the warm fuzzies and warming the spiced cider. Come on guys. Where I live, some of the worst dog days of summer come in the first half of September. I’ve seen temperatures in the nineties in October–especially lately, given the global warming that’s not happening.

This hurrying of the autumn season I account to a few factors. First, if you ask people to name a favorite season, autumn is the most popular. Spring runs a close second, but we humans, warm-blooded mammals who developed as a modern species in the Ice Age, feel most at home in the transition from hot to cool weather. Second, we want to see this summer gone. Some people are saying that the summer seems to have just flown by. Where did it go? The answer is nowhere, it’s still right here, still grilling your gardens and melting your sidewalks, and the observation that the summer has somehow magically passed in a trice is pure wishful thinking. Summer is the longest season, averaging over 93 days. Don’t count it out quite yet.

It’s also a bit of wishful thinking that ‘the livin’ is easy’ in summertime. Sure, food is abundant in summer, clothing is light, shelter is minimal. Recent studies have shown that we humans are even more amorously inclined in summer than at other times of the year. But for millions of householders, summer adds a whole new slate of lawn care activities, not the least of which is cutting the grass: an extremely unpleasant task when the temperature is in the nineties and the humidity is high. And when summer temperatures are regularly killing people in our major cities, you know that’s just too much summer. The weather front that has camped out over the entire midsection of the United States for the past eight weeks or so needs to move on.

But of course it’s the sentiment in those first lines that makes the song resonate with listeners. Like there’s some easy-going, not-too-hot season with a plate of catfish in front of us, a rich dad and a pretty mom, and all we have to do is kick back and enjoy it. Yeah, that’s nice, even if it’s not true. Even if it’s really part of the myth making that surrounds the seasons. Like the springtime of young love, or the not too cold winter covered in deep, not too slippery snow, the kind that doesn’t stop our gift-laden horse-drawn sleigh from pulling up in front of Grandma’s house, all redolent of cinnamon and peppermint and Frazer fir.

Maybe next summer won’t be as hot, as rainless. I’ll feel better about all of this nostalgia, readier to accept simple musings about the seasons, my mind uncluttered by realities, or at least more able to set them aside for a moment. I may enjoy simple things like the annual 4th of July Celebration on the National Mall, and no matter what rude beast currently slouches towards Washington–whether it’s Sondra Radvanovsky or Ke$ha–to offer one more rendition of Summertime, I’ll be ready to sit back and let the sentiment wash over me.

A Horse in Winter

06 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by Tom Cooper in Anthropomorphism, Evolution, Horses, Ice Age, Science, Seasons, Thoroughbreds, Weather

≈ 2 Comments

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Evolution, Horses, Seasons, Summer, Thoroughbreds, Weather, Winter

One December day a few years ago, a blistering cold day just after Christmas, I took my daughter to the stable to clean her horse’s stall. I thought it a terrible time to be there, doing that. For whatever reason, the inside of an unheated barn always feels ten degrees colder than it is outside–even outside in a strong wind. But when we got to the stable we found that Rachel, who owns the stables, was there with a woman we had not met before. She was a new boarder, bringing in three horses, here on this day in December.

It drove home to me a fact that of course I knew, though the instance was instructive: having horses is a lifestyle, not a hobby. When you are taking care of large animals, you can’t choose to take a few days off here and there; you don’t put them away for a while. They are, if not part of your family, at least a part of your life. Horse people worry more about the horses than themselves. They brave all kinds of elements to make sure their horses aren’t having to brave the elements–wrapping them in blankets, holding long debates with themselves about whether the horse needs one or two blankets tonight, or maybe just his light flysheet. Seriously, many of these horses have more and more varied foul weather gear than I have.

And here’s the irony of the whole thing: horses like cold weather. Horses are one of the last of the large Ice Age mammals, a species that would have courted extinction long ago except that for the past several thousand years, humans have found them useful. Horses thrive on open, frozen, windswept plains. They are one of the only grazing animals that will dig through snow to find the sparse grass beneath and continue grazing–other animals will stand there dumbly wondering where the grass went until starvation overtakes them. Horses are uniquely and excellently adapted to cold weather.

What horses don’t like is hot weather: summer’s heat, which brings flies, the bane of any horse’s life, and of the people who choose to be around them. A horse ridden for an hour in summer needs to be walked about for a bit to cool down, then bathed in cool water before going back to a shady stall to rest.

Horses evolved to live on the breezy savannahs and the icy plains of Ice Age Eurasia. But humans found them useful, and took them into every environment where human habitations developed. They bred different kinds of horses for different environments–the hardy Fjord and Icelandic breeds for way up north, the Arabian and Andalusian breeds with large nostrils and capacious lungs for hot desert environments. It’s these latter breeds which, due to their ability to breathe so well, were the basic stock for the racing Thoroughbred. So a horse type which was bred for the Arabian Peninsula was brought to England and Kentucky, USA, where their thin legs and short coats are not well-suited to damp, cold weather.

Like horses, humans evolved largely on the plains and river valleys of Ice Age Eurasia. Horses have been our companions and stock animals for so long that we think of them as being like ourselves, and thus we do things like decking them out in blankets when the weather gets a little nippy. It’s very likely that if asked, a horse would prefer to feel the cold weather. But I have never known a horse that seemed to mind the blanket. As long as there’s a salt lick, a pail of water and a heap of straw, a horse is happy, no matter the season.

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