I’m writing this during the afternoon of Feb. 2. The sun is flooding the yard, raising the temperature to a dizzying 23 degrees, the snow lies deep in the woods, and there’s never been a bluer sky. Twenty-five years ago I wouldn’t be here; I’d be outside on cross-country skis, probably with a Swix blue kicker and a happy heart.
Today those skis are still only a few feet away, below me in the cellar, standing abandoned in a corner, poignant reminders of some of the happiest days of my life.
Everywhere I turn around here, in fact, are similar reminders — canoes, a kayak, a guide boat, deer rifles, fly rods, an ice axe, a carbide lamp, and sleeping bags rated all the way down to thirty below zero. They’ve slipped slowly away, like a love affair growing imperceptibly older, till it’s likely none ever will be used again — by me.
But what a somber way to feel on such a day! The sun, if any reminder were needed, signals the beginning of the second half of winter. It’s Hinge Day.
The beginning of winter is officially Dec. 21, the shortest day, when the northern end of the earth’s axis is at its steepest angle away from the sun. Then, as the old-timers say, when the days lengthen, the cold will strengthen. We’ve just been going through an extreme example of that phenomenon.
The other end of winter is equally illusory. Just about the time we’re getting ready for mud season in March, the clocks are setting to daylight-saving time, and I’m hopefully recharging the battery of the summer top-down old roadster, here comes a foot or two of wet snow. So much for the so-called vernal equinox.
Therefore, nowadays I deal with the cold, dark months by focusing on February 2. It’s the middle of meteorological winter. From here on out, till spring really arrives, our days are longer and, on average, warmer.
If we’re still into winter sports, February is the ideal month: as much snow as there will be, and cold enough to preserve it. More sunlight and later stays outdoors in the afternoon. Maybe you’ve already noticed it. Back in 1985, when right around Valentine’s Day my buddy Dudley and I tackled the 207-mile Alaska Marathon, which for about half its length followed the Iditarod Trail, we actually could tell the difference in the moment of sunrise each day. Evenings, too, in spite of the looming threat of icy cold that gripped the woods as soon as the sun sank below the horizon.
Meanwhile, down in Punxsutawney, Pa., (a town I could never live in. Imagine having to write all that on forms and the return address space on envelopes), a band of top-hatted locals are celebrating Groundhog Day, when they rouse a poor, irritated, drowsy groundhog named Phil out of his winter’s hibernation, hold him up and wave him around for the photographers, and return him (I presume) to his slumbers.
The object is to predict, however unreliably, the immediate future of winter: if Phil can see his shadow, there’ll be six more weeks of it; if he can’t, the rest of the season will be warm and gentle. Today, it’s reported, Phil saw his shadow. He would not have seen it here. Bright as it is here today, there’s a foot or more of snow on top of his burrow, wherever it is. He’d never make it out.
The other folk tradition, a hangover from the days when almost everybody was a farmer or at least kept a horse (till Henry Ford changed everything), and heated with wood, is that half your wood and half your hay should still be left on Candlemas Day.
Which brings up another tradition. The liturgical churches (notably the Anglican), in what I’ve long assumed is an effort to pep up the doldrums between the twelve days of Christmas and Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, and the forty days of Lent, celebrate Candlemas Day on February, when they consecrate the candles to be used in the coming year. It’s also the beginning of the collection of last year’s palms from Palm Sunday, which are burnt to ashes, prayed over, and ground into powder to anoint the foreheads of worshipers on Ash Wednesday. Never a dull moment.
This weekend, on a trail stretching roughly one hundred miles up the Ottawa River valley, the Canadian Ski Marathon will celebrate its sixtieth birthday. As cold and snowy as its been this winter, it’ll likely be ideal conditions.
Thousands of enthusiasts of all ages — some teams, some tough cookies — will be hustling through the woods and farmyards. I did it for years, and just now am remembering a Frenchman at a checkpoint who handed me hot soup, his “own mudder’s receepy.” I asked him who his mother was. “Oh,” he said. “Madame Camp-bell.”